Aoife's Bubbles

Despite Aoife being so strong and brave and rarely complaining, Aoife's mummy began to notice Aoife's sinister symptoms and took Aoife to her GP countless times, being told Aoife had common childhood ailments on each occasion. The doctors told Eilish that Aoife's issues were down to a poor diet and lack of exercise. However, despite Aoife's parents protests that Aoife had a healthy balanced diet, very active life and spent more hours outside with her pony than she spent dong anything else, their concerns dismissed. 

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In the weeks leading up to Aoife being formally diagnosed at Great Ormond Street, Eilish had taken Aoife to her GP, an emergency GP, minor injuries and A&E in excess of 10 times. Every time the doctors/ consultants told Eilish that Aoife was fine and just had constipation/ other common childhood ailments. 

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On the 2nd July 2019, Aoife was diagnosed with Germ Cell Cancer. This is a uncommon sub type of cancer, but very real, commonly seen type of solid tumour in children. The thing with Germ Cell Cancer is that if it is caught early, it is extremely reactive to chemotherapy and the prognosis is relatively good. Even when caught slightly later, there is still a good chance of a happy ending, but by Aoife's mummy's concerns being ignored, her family and oncology team were never given this chance. On the 7th July 2019, just 5 days after her diagnosis, Aoife passed away aged 3 as a direct result of her delayed diagnosis.

 

When a blood test was finally taken Aoife's AFP tumour marker reading was 37,000, it is supposed to be between 1-10. A simple blood test would have diagnosed Aoife's cancer and would have given her a fighting chance, in the fight for her life.

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Aoife's death is a direct consequence of her misdiagnosis.

 

It breaks our hearts that Aoife isn't here to grow up and to have a normal childhood and to have her first day of school, to have her first school trip, become the successful horse rider that we just know she would have been, make memories, become a teenager and undoubtedly worry her mummy daily with her antics, watch her three little brothers Jaxon, Cody and RJ grow up. Aoife was robbed off all of these moments, as were her family. 

 

This is why Aoife's Bubbles was founded. To try and stop other families from being robbed of all of the chances that Aoife and her family have been robbed off. Aoife's death is life changing for her family and things will never be the same, but we wanted Aoife to be remembered for the strong little warrior that she was. For something positive to come out of all of this heartbreak and despair.

 

As such, Aoife's Bubbles Charity was born.