Dean is now 11 years old and 3 years clear of cancer. Dean is doing amazing! He started secondary school in September 2024 and he loves going. He has MRI scans are now every year. This is what happened:

'In August 2020, my son dean was lovely little a 8 year old boy: caring, kind hearted, loving, would do anything for anyone.

Dean's health started to change. I noticed he was going through puberty which is very young so I asked the doctors to refer him. I would phone up every month to see what was going on they said they have referred him and during the time he was getting headaches which i would give calpol and it worked. We didn't think it was anything bad.

In November 2020 Dean had a eye operation and it when great the doctors at the hospital as deans eye was perfect. But in about December the headache came back and we just thought it was because he was not wearing his glasses, so we told him to wear them all the time and he said that helped a bit.

However, on the Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd January 2021, Dean was very sick and on the Sunday morning I took him to our local hospital told them Dean's symptoms. They admitted him and the doctors told me they wanted to do an MRI on Dean's head to see if there was anything going on because of the headache and being sick so on the Monday morning they did the MRI and I waited for the doctors to tell me the results.

It felt like forever, but by about 2pm the doctors said to me 'can we go somewhere quiet and talk', I said to him 'it’s bad isn’t it'. They told me that there was a mass on Dean's brain. As you can imagine it was a big big shock to hear that they have found a mass on my son's brain. They then told me that the treatment that would be done at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

By 10pm that Monday night, we got there and one of the doctors said they are going to do a biopsy to see what type of mass it was and to remove the fluid on his brain. On the 26th January 2021 my son went down for his biopsy and to remove the fluid, on the 27th January the doctors took me in a room and told me sorry to say that your son had a rare brain tumour. It is located on the pineal gland so dean diagnosis is intracranial non-germinomatous germ cell tumour, pineal tumour, parinaud’s ophthalmoplegia and central precocious puberty.

Dean had 4 rounds of chemotherapy one of them was high dose chemotherapy which he had to stay in hospital for 6 week them he had a 18 hour surgery to remove the tumour then 6 weeks of radiotherapy. He got covid a week after and he got sepsis, and kept getting fluid on the brain so now he has a vp shunt which that has had 4 replacements so far.'