Fundraising & Donors Archives - Addenbrooke's Charitable Trust

Jack Sibbons remembers the worst night of his life in painful detail. His twin sister, Amy De Silva, had gone into early labour. Having battled leukaemia throughout her pregnancy, she had just finished her fourth round of chemotherapy and was in the throes of a sepsis infection when her waters broke.

“Don’t get me wrong: Amy’s appearance had changed massively – she was bald, she’d lost weight – but the day she gave birth was the first day I thought ‘My sister looks like a cancer patient’. She looked horrendous, so washed out and weak,” he says. “I thought we were going to lose her.”

The worst night was, miraculously, followed by the best day: delivered by C-section under general anaesthetic, Amy gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She and husband Greg named him Chester, meaning ‘warrior’, second name Jack, after his uncle.

Nine months on and both mum and baby are happy and healthy; Amy is officially in remission and Chester, along with older brothers Hugo, 6, and Dawson, 4, is thriving. Having been cared for at Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie Hospitals, they are the reason Jack is running the TCS London Marathon in aid of Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust (ACT).

“For me, it’s a thank you – a big thank you. If someone else’s family is ill, I want them to get the care we did. Despite not being able to help Amy personally, I knew when I went to bed at night that she was being looked after,” says 39-year-old Jack, Operations Manager at his family’s plant hire business, Sibbons in Colchester.

“Do I want to run for four hours? Not really. But I know I’ve got a reason; when I’m struggling, my sister and Chester will be the reason I finish.”

Initially setting a fundraising target of £3,500, support has “snowballed”: at time of writing, with more than two weeks to go until Marathon day, Jack, his family and friends have raised a staggering £37,000, placing him at number 12, out of all the runners using the platform, on the JustGiving fundraising leaderboard.

Amy, who works as a Cancer Specialist Nurse at Colchester Hospital, had no idea she was ill when, at 10 weeks pregnant, a blood test threw up some worrying anomalies. “I just felt really sick and tired, which I thought was normal [for early pregnancy],” she remembers.

Adds Jack: “I’m not into all this twin nonsense – about how you feel the other one’s feelings and all that – but, having never felt depressed in my life, I felt awful that whole weekend. I had no interest in leaving the sofa. It was dread.”

Within 24 hours Amy was having a bone marrow biopsy; 24 hours later she got confirmation – it was leukaemia, she needed to start chemo at Addenbrooke’s immediately, and doctors didn’t know if she could keep her baby.

“If there was a chance, I wanted to take it,” Amy says. “They said the chemo shouldn’t cross the placenta membrane, we will monitor every week. So I thought: let’s give him a shot then.”

Because the treatment knocked her immunity completely – by decimating white cells, which fight infection – Amy had to have her first month-long round of chemo as an inpatient. Having never left her boys before, “for a night, never mind a month” she “wrote a 10-page manual, running through their routine and how to make their favourite pancakes, I recorded my voice on their Tony boxes, they had cuddle cushions with my face on. . .”

Adds Amy: “I cried when I left the house, I was so frightened – as a Cancer Specialist Nurse I did know what was going to go down, that was half the problem.”

Jack was by his twin’s side for the first day of chemo – and the first day of every round after that. He witnessed midwives checking for the baby’s heartbeat, bought Amy endless pots of M&S overnight oats from the concourse shop when a throat infection left her struggling to eat, and had endless “10-hour talks, trying to fill the time so she wasn’t too bored”.

Thanks to Greg and her parents, the boys visited every couple of days and stayed nearby in a Travelodge at weekends. The hospital team assigned her a side room where the boys were welcome to come and go, donning their masks before “jumping all over my bed,” laughs Amy.

“Jack was terrified because, obviously, they’re germ magnets, aren’t they? But I said ‘They’re my medicine, they are why I’m fighting so hard, so you have to let them come and see me’.”

Determined to be at home as much as possible, Amy did her second cycle of chemotherapy as an outpatient: “I’m a bit of a loon: I was desperate not to miss anything with the boys – school pick-up, school plays.” The third cycle started the same way, then sepsis struck again; by the time the fourth round was coming to a close, Amy was once again fighting the infection.

“I could hardly get off the bed, was on antibiotics for the sepsis, my platelets were down to nothing. . . and then my waters broke. I sat and just cried on the toilet: I thought ‘I can’t have him, I’m too poorly’. The obstetrics team were like: ‘You have to! You’ve got no immunity, no platelets – we have to take you to theatre tonight.’”

Too weak to go through labour and, due to the lack of blood-clotting platelets, at risk of spinal haemorrhage with an epidural, Amy had to have a Caesarean under general anaesthetic. While they were prepping her for theatre, the team asked Amy about her wedding day; as she thought, a distraction. In fact, Midwife Shannan Bell was planning a video of the birth – playing Etta James’ At Last, Amy and Greg’s first-dance song, as Chester came into the world.

Adds Amy: “I know this sounds really mental, but it’s like Chester knew how poorly I was, that my body was saying ‘I can’t do this anymore’, so he said, ‘It’s okay Mum, I’m ready’, and out he came. I say he saved my life twice: once with that blood test, and again on the day he arrived.”

Born five weeks early, on June 29 2025, Chester weighed 4lbs 13oz, “incredible for a chemo baby, and didn’t need any help with his breathing, bless his heart”. Expressing every two hours so he could be fed on breast milk from day one, Amy visited him “all day and all night” in the Rosie’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit until discharge, initially to Colchester Hospital as Chester was still being tube fed.

Knowing she was struggling mentally as well as physically, desperate to get back to her older boys, the team there allowed Amy, as a nurse, to continue the tube feeding at home. Within a week, he was being breastfed.

“Having chemo’s hard, being pregnant’s hard, having chemo whilst being pregnant? Trying to cuddle the children while saying ‘Don’t pull mummy’s line out’ – all that’s hard. But the mental load – and making sure I don’t mess my children up because I’m poorly – is probably the heaviest,” she explains.

“We explained that Mummy’s got poorly blood, she needs to take medicine to make her better but it’s going to make her hair fall out. So they knew what was going on. But when I was poorly I had to pretend I wasn’t; I didn’t want to miss out on a minute with them. It’s just such a gift to have them and to be well. I don’t take a single second for granted. I didn’t before, but I definitely don’t now.”

Along with sponsorship, Jack’s Marathon fundraising has been boosted by a children’s Hallowe’en party and colour run, and a gala dinner and auction for 235 at Suffolk’s Kesgrave Hall. Taking place in March, the gala culminated with the screening of a video recounting Amy’s story in her own words; when it finished, with Hugo and Dawson saying ‘Addenbrooke’s, you’re real-life superheroes: you saved our mummy and our baby brother and brought them home to us’, there was barely a dry eye.

Adds Jack: “Hugo was talking to my wife. He said: ‘I’m crying happy tears, Auntie Orli, because my mummy’s here and she’s okay.’” The charity auction followed and, in total, £21,000 was raised in a single night.

When Jack crosses the finish line on April 26, he’ll be greeted by all the family – including Hugo, Dawson and Chester wearing slogan T-shirts. The older boys’ shirts say ‘Addenbrooke’s saved my mummy’; Chester’s reads ‘Addenbrooke’s saved my mummy and me’. Jack has already asked Amy to hand him Chester as he approaches the finish: “I think there will be a teary little ending, quite honestly. I’m emotional and we’re not there yet.”

Adds Amy: “We have been really lucky: I’m okay, I’ve got a happy, healthy baby; three beautiful children. And I’ve got my amazing family around me. So I am one of the really lucky ones – and I’m very lucky they sent me to Addenbrooke’s.”

Support Jack at: Jack Sibbons is fundraising for Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust

To read the stories for our fabulous runners, please see our London Marathon 2026 news release.

To see Oscar Sharland today, dance battling with his friends or running around with little brother Alfie, it’s hard to believe that, less than two years ago, he was fighting for his life.

Diagnosed with medulloblastoma just after his 5^th birthday, he had a tumour the size of a computer mouse at the nape of his neck – and the cancer had spread to three sites in his spine.

“There’s no words to explain what goes through your mind; instantly you think the worst; you think you’ve lost your child, even though he’s still sitting there,” says dad Greg.

“Without this hospital’s support, their reaction, their experts, we wouldn’t be where we are today, simple as. Addenbrooke’s has proved it goes above and beyond. Running the Marathon for Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust (ACT) is my opportunity to give back.”

Greg, a Continuous Improvement Manager from Steeple Bumpstead, near Haverhill, is one of 18 runners in this year’s TCS London Marathon raising money for ACT and has already doubled his sponsorship target of £1,000.

Oscar started having occasional bouts of sickness in early 2023, with doctors putting them down either to a bug or abdominal migraine. But the frequency and intensity increased, culminating in him vomiting eight times in a single day. Mum Lucy took him to their local hospital; again, a bug or migraine was thought to be the cause. But that same night, Oscar was sick yet again – so Greg took him back.

An MRI two days later revealed the cancer; and within the hour, Oscar and his parents were in an ambulance to Addenbrooke’s.

Because of the fast-moving nature of the cancer, that same night, Greg and Lucy were told their little boy would need immediate brain surgery followed by both chemo and radiotherapy, “that he might not be able to speak, that he wouldn’t be able to have children – all this information was laid out – and that we needed to sign consent forms straight away”.

“The operation was a success: they got 95% of the tumour,” continues Greg. “But the left side of his body was affected, he had a tremor in his arm, lost the fine motor skills in his hand and he’s left-handed, he struggled to walk, and the sight in his left eye was pretty much gone. His arm and leg have recovered about 95%: he retaught himself to write again, in fact he can write with both hands now!”

A first round of chemotherapy followed. “We didn’t use the ‘cancer’ word until later; I drew him a picture and said ‘You’ve got this lump in your head that’s making you sick and we need to get rid of that to make you feel better. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but it’s going to make you better’,” says Greg. “Because he was so little, he took our lead. You know it’s a hard road he’s going on, but you’ve got to lead him along that road.”

Opting into a trial for medulloblastoma, the Sharlands were then referred to University College London Hospitals (UCLH) for intense proton-beam radiotherapy – twice daily for six weeks, which became seven because of a bout of pneumonia. Due to the precision required for the treatment, Oscar had to have a general anaesthetic for every single session; every single morning and every single afternoon, more than 100 anaesthetics in total.

Nil by mouth in between, he could only eat in the evening and was tube-fed overnight to help keep his weight stable. “I couldn’t believe how brave he was, from start to finish; he has never winged, not once,” says Greg.

“I can name probably five occasions on which he’s cried. He’s 7, turning 8 in June. He was a soldier through it all. I said to him: if I can make you laugh every day, then I’m doing my job.”

Back at Addenbrooke’s, chemotherapy was the final phase. A reaction to one of the drugs caused Oscar disabling side-effects – slackening his vocal cords so he couldn’t talk, weakening his legs so he couldn’t walk – so it had to be halted.

Along with the treatment and expertise provided by the medics, Greg says the hospital’s support staff, including cooks, teachers, play workers and laughter experts, “were incredible. It’s those things that make a real difference; breaking up the day and distracting from that constant beeping noise”.

He also pays tribute to the nursing teams: “Yes, they’re busy, but nothing was ever too much. Sometimes I’d nip to the toilet, come back and Oscar was missing – he’d gone to the nurses’ station for a hug.”

Finally, in the October of 2024, “they sat us down and said: ‘He is remission, there’s nothing there, he can ring the bell.’ So far – he’s got an MRI next in May – all has been good.”

Because chemo kills duplicating cells, Oscar’s blood count had to be constantly buoyed by transfusions, 37 in total. As a result, he was left with a sky-high iron count, managed by having half-pints withdrawn at intervals.

The treatment also stalled Oscar’s hormones and therefore his growth; since starting hormone treatment last September, he’s now grown 4cm.

The family experienced enormous loss during Oscar’s treatment: first Greg’s brother took his life, then his father died from a heart attack.

“It sounds cheesy, but you look at your children and think: if they can do it, I should be able to too,” Greg reflects. “You just keep going, focus on what you can change and, with the things you can’t, on what you can do to make them a little bit better.”

With brother Alfie, who was only 1 when Oscar was diagnosed, his constant playmate, Oscar is, says Greg “just a brilliant little boy”.

Getting a ballot place in the Marathon, running it has been a long-held ambition for Greg, who’s run halves but never the full 26.2 miles. Doing it for ACT is the ultimate motivation: “There are so many words I could say. . . Addenbrooke’s is one of the leading hospitals and the only way it’s going to stay a leading hospital is if we support it. They can save people’s lives, or make them bearable.

“Never in this world would I have expected this to happen to us – the truth is you never know when you might need Addenbrooke’s too.”

Support Greg at: Greg Sharland is fundraising for Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust

To read the stories for our fabulous runners, please see our London Marathon 2026 news release.

Stories Categories: Fundraising & Donors

Jack and Amy’s Story

Greg and Oscar’s Story