AN ELLESMERE Port schoolboy who battled an aggressive brain tumour is ‘recovering well’ after undergoing pioneering treatment in the USA earlier this year.
After four unsuccessful attempts last year to treat Finn Kinsella’s craniopharyngioma, a brain cancer prevalent in children, seven-year-old Finn travelled to Jacksonville, Florida, with his parents and sister in January to begin proton therapy.
Finn’s classmates at Our Lady’s Star of the Sea Catholic Primary School raised £8,000 to help support his family throughout the gruelling treatment.
The treatment is a form of radiotherapy only available in America, which was hoped to give Finn an 80% survival chance.
Now, although the tumour in Finn’s brain is still there, seven months later, Finn parents Anna Daly and Eddie Kinsella, of Stoke Gardens, Ellesmere Port, say Finn has been doing ‘really well’ since their return from America, and was even able to go back to school for a while before term ended.
Anna said: “Finn’s been doing so well and has really picked up a lot since we got back.
“He still has to have regular scans every three months but he was back at school and as far as things go it’s all been positive.
“The tumour is still there in his brain but it isn’t cancerous, and the treatment has so far stopped it from getting any bigger so that’s great news.”
It can often be more successful than X-ray therapy, in that it can be shaped to a patient’s tumour better, and delivers radiation doses high enough to prevent regrowth with the added benefit of potentially fewer side effects.
Anna added: “Finn wants to go back to America every year, it’s likely that we will have to return there in the future.
“But he really is such a little hero – a superstar who just gets on with everything. He’s so brave.”
