Hope for Laura Fund

Ben, Laura's fiancee started this appeal to give Laura the option of life saving treatment in America, which financially is way out of their reach.

When Ben first met Laura three years ago he knew instantly that this beautiful, bright and energetic girl was the one he wanted to spend his life with. In 2009 she gave birth to Jacob and the family was complete.

However...

Laura's health slowly declined over the past year, she never fully recovered after having Jacob and was mis-diagnosed with a range of things including exhaustion. Then in later November 2010 she started to lose the feeling and co-ordination in her right arm which prompted an MRI scan at the hospital...

On Christmas Eve 2010 the news came that. Laura has been diagnosed with a rare Brain Cancer which is the most agressive kind. There are no available therapies in the UK other than those that slow down growth at best. Past cases have resulted in less than 4 in 100 living longer than 5 years and there is less than 50 cases per year of this particular type of Cancer in the UK. Laura is currently receiving Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy at the Royal Marsden Hospital to slow down the cancer growth.

However a clinic in America has a pioneering treatment that has been proven to be very effective against this type of cancer without harming the body. The clinic has been running for over 25 years and has been able to not only stabilise, but cure this awful disease.

Unfortunately this treatment is not available via the NHS, the cost is £75,000 for a full cycle of 12 months treatment. I think you will agree that a price cannot be placed on the life of a young mother. So please follow the link to the website which Ben with the help of Surfmarketing have created, click to donate all you can to help this amazing young lady.

As weeks have gone on donations have been coming in and the fund has been growing at a steady rate. Various tweets, facebook posts and blogs have been written to support Laura and bring attention to her story. Yesterday, the 19th May, something truly amazing happened. Rufus Hound, stand up comedian and one of the stars of Celebrity Juice heard about the story and decided he would do something amazing.

He created this video and Using his following of over 230,000 people, he put out message after message in support of Hope for Laura. This created an incredible amount of activity on Twitter and the donations started to flood in. He didn't stop there however and continued to thank in person pretty much everyone who donated via Twitter.

Behind the scene's

With all the activity erupting in such a short space of time, it was all hands on deck at the office, with great pleasure we had to get involved in communicating any issue's along the way with the thousands of people who were landing on the site at the same time. At one point the site was attracting so much attention that the server thought it was being attacked! we had to quickly act and get the site back up and running so as not to disrupt any of the donations. It really was a fantastic day that really made me proud of people's generosity and as Rufus said, it really shows the power of social media, One influential person tweets about a story and can save someone's life! what would have happened 10 years ago?

I think Rufus said it all in the video. I would just like to add that anyone reading this blog who has donated or made a pledge to the fund, you are a great person and you have made a difference to a young family's lives. The updated amount after yesterday's surge is not yet confirmed as the transfer of the funds take's a few days to show in the account but I will keep everyone updated as soon as we hear. Finger's crossed, this may put Laura close to the amount needed to start the treatment.

Keep donating and keep spreading the word!