Fund-raising In George's Memory

Once your child is diagnosed with cancer your world changes forever. Aside from the immediate shock, you find yourself and your child immersed in a nightmarish environment of hospitals, treatments, stress and worry. Even the nature of time changes once you enter into treatment - days blur into each other in hospital, respites at home seem to fly by, and there's the endless waiting - for appointments, for drugs, for scans and for results (which is the worst of the waiting). After a while you learn to navigate through the ins and outs of the medical system, working out what you can and can't do, what services exist and where you can find them and so on.

Like a lot of families in that situation we found that there was one organisation that helped us found our way and that was the children's cancer charity CLIC Sargent. The help they offered was purely practical - finding out what we could do about schooling will George was having chemo, helping to sort out the endless paperwork that comes with the territory (and believe me, some of the forms we had to deal with would have been horrendous at the best of times, let alone when dealing with cancer), offering a shoulder to cry or helping us find the best person to deal with specific questions.

Maureen and the rest of the CLIC Sargent team at the Royal Marsden is Sutton were just fantastic. So when asked to nominate a charity for some fund-raising in George's name they were the first name to come to mind. If we had been further along in organising the George Pantziarka TP53 Trust the fund-raising by my colleagues at work would have been for that. But given where we are, there's no doubt that CLIC Sargent deserve your support.

So, please take a look at the ISG Clarendon Relay Marathon Team Challenge here: http://www.justgiving.com/Clarendon-for-George-Pantziarka and help raise some funds for a very worthy cause.