I get a lot of e-mails about entirely worthy causes that are seeking coverage on my blog and I have to be pretty brutal when selecting what to feature as, at the end of the day, my blog is supposed to be a place where you can look at pretty things, read about what they do and hopefully take your mind off everything else for a moment or few. With that in mind, I very rarely feature appeals of any kind, but the obvious need of Charlie Gard – a 7 month old baby boy who’s currently in the intensive care unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital – has really got to me, so I’m hoping to do what I can to aid the appeal, and I really hope that you guys will help too.
I won’t go into lots of detail regarding Charlie’s sickness as you can read about it all on his Go Fund Me page, but to give you a very quick overview, little Charlie is a sufferer of a very rare and very serious disease that has taken away his ability to do pretty much anything at all – he has to rely on a ventilator to breath and literally has no energy to function without medical intervention. The doctors at GOSH feel that it is in Charlie’s best interest for them to withdraw care and let him pass away. This may well be the case if nothing can be done, but there is a treatment in America that Charlie’s parents believe to be their last remaining hope for their baby. However, as he is in need of so much care and medical help, it would cost an absolute fortune for them to get the treatment as he would need a private plane and medical staff to help him travel and keep doing everything for him whilst the treatment (hopefully) starts to work. With this in mind, Charlie’s parents are trying to get 1.2 million pounds together which is a huge amount and they’re only at just over 100K. I will say that last night it was only at 50K, so it’s great that it’s doubled in less than 24 hours, but it’s also pretty far off what they need and time is definitely of the essence.
At this stage, opinion isn’t important. It doesn’t matter whether you think the treatment will work, or if you feel that it’s money poorly spent on a child who might still sadly pass even after receiving such expensive care and radical treatment. The main incentive for me is that we will be removing the “what if?” from the rest of his parent’s lives; parents who are already experiencing one of the worst things that can ever happen to a parent: to watch their poorly child suffer and know there’s so little they can do. In this situation, a parent would want to do absolutely anything and everything they could, even if it just came with a glimmer of hope, to try and take away the sickness from their helpless child. With that in mind, raising enough money to fly little Charlie to America and have the treatment will mean that, in the worst case scenario, his parents will be able to say that they did everything they could, a comfort I don’t think you can put a price on. If they don’t raise the money, they’ll always wonder if they could’ve done more, and that, alongside losing their child, is just too traumatic to think about – if it were me, I would struggle to ever recover.
Time is a dominant factor right now as they are currently fighting a legal battle to be given the right to keep Charlie alive, so anything you can do to help this family would be amazing. If you can’t afford to donate to their cause then how about sharing this post or their Go Fund Me page on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? We have such power thanks to our social profiles and we can get the word out about what’s important so quickly and easily, so I hope that Charlie gets the right to try and fight for his life and I hope his parents get a little bit of peace from the knowledge that there are people who really do care. Actually, what I really hope is that someone really rich sees their plight and just plonks the whole lot on their Go Fund Me Page, but either way, I feel better for knowing I’ve done something to help.
I have everything crossed for you, Little Charlie.
*Pictures taken from the Go Fund Me page for Charlie Gard.
