Jacob's Story
Jacob's family visited Ben's Retreat in April 2026.
Jacob was a very outgoing lad always climbing and running everywhere. When he was at senior school he would always walk to school with his friends.
Three years ago he started complaining about leg pain which wasn’t hurting him all the time so we just put it down to growing pain.
As time went by the pain started to get more regular and we took him to the doctor which assessed him and he said that it was normal and it was just his pelvis.
A month later when Jacob went on holiday with his mother and while he was swimming he got accidentally kicked in his hip and was in extreme pain. When arriving back in the uk his mum took him to hospital where they took scans of his hip and it showed a tumour which was growing on his bone which they called a chrondrosarcoma. It was the size of a plum.
I asked them to move his treatment to Birmingham children’s hospital as he lives with me (Dad Andrew).
It took a while but they said they would try chemotherapy and had a plan to stop it after a couple of courses if it wasn’t working.
It didn’t work instead it just seemed to grow more and we were then told that it was highly unlikely that they could save his leg. So they recommended that they would remove it to save his life. It was a 7 hour long operation.
Next we was advised to have radiotherapy on to bone area and we had to go to Manchester for two and half months which was 38 treatments. It made Jacob really sore and tired.
He was always being regularly checked on for the cancer spreading and he was alright for a good period of time but then we were told the news that nobody wanted to hear and that was the cancer had spread to his lungs.
It started with two and seemed to double every time we went. The consultant was concerned as Jacobs cancer was very rare so everything is experimental.
He is now on a chemo pill which stops the tumours from growing but he has been told it won’t last and eventually the cancer will over power the medication.
We are all looking forward to this mini break thanks to Ben Saunders Foundation 💕