George and the Giant Pledge

On 3 January 2017 Vicki and James Woodall (Woody) received the news that’s every parent’s worst nightmare. They were told by doctors at The Royal Marsden Hospital that a lump they’d found on their then four-year-old son’s back was in fact cancer, a rare PNET soft tissue Ewing’s Sarcoma.

From being a perfectly healthy and happy little boy George and the Woodall family’s lives changed overnight. Over the course of 2017 he endured 14 rounds of chemo, had part of his spine removed during 10 hours of complex surgery and received proton therapy in the USA thanks to the NHS.

Vicki and Woody are trying to make the best of their bad situation and, despite navigating George’s difficult cancer journey, supporting his older brother and trying to maintain some semblance of family life, they pledged to raise £1,000,000 to help beat childhood cancer.

“Seeing all those young children with no hair and tubes coming out of them on our first visit to The Royal Marsden was truly heartbreaking. Yet the thing that struck us the most was how many of those kids had a smile on their face. It was then that we decided to set up ‘George and the Giant Pledge’, because no child should ever have to have their childhood taken from them in this terrible way.”