Waking up one morning to be told your child has cancer. Seeing your child with a tube hanging out of their chest and out of their nose. Not being able to take your child to the cinema, bath them and take them swimming.

Signing forms to allow toxic drugs to be pumped into their bodies, for weeks, months, even years. Blood transfusion after blood transfusion, infection after infection because they have no immune system. Having all this for up to three years. Being told that because of the treatment needed your child will be sterile, your child will have brain damage and your child will have lung, kidney, heart and liver damage, together with stunted growth. Being told that your child may need treatment for the rest of their life.

That’s what happened to me in 2007 two weeks before Reece’s second birthday. Over the next year I spent over 260 days in hospital, watching many children visit the brink of death and recover, some did not. I realised I had to do something, not for research, or for the hospital but something for these kids, today and now. I knew I could make them smile; children love presents and toys, so I decided to set up Little Heroes to give these kids presents whilst they undergo aggressive cancer treatments.

When I say his treatment has been tortuous, I mean it wholeheartedly.

To watch him lie in his bed for 4 days not moving due to chemotherapy drugs, with him on monitors to make sure he stays alive, to move back and watch as doctors and nurses struggle to keep him breathing. Watching him lose his hair twice, the result of the poisonous drugs which keep him alive but give him side effects too terrible to comprehend. To watch him recover from an infection, then fall victim to another one in a matter of days, but worst of all, to know that he may have to go through it all again over the next 3 years. Normal activities, such as playing football, playing in the sea, are now defined by the necessary hospital visits for blood tests, transfusions, chemotherapy and radiation. This is what I and parents of children with cancer go through every day.