Help Ella Come Home

In June 2020, Ella was a bright, happy and healthy 7 year old who loved school, friends, swimming and cheerleading. Then out of nowhere, she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

Without warning, the Manypeney family had to relocate to Melbourne for life saving treatment. After 12 months of intensive treatment and another 6 months of maintenance therapy, the leukaemia returned in February 2022. This devastating news meant more intense chemotherapy and then a bone marrow transplant in July 2022.

The plan for the bone marrow transplant was a 30-60 day hospital admission and then a stay of 100 days close to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. Both parents, Rachel and Jeff, had this time off work during Ella's intense frontline treatment and then her bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, Ella developed life threatening sepsis post transplant which put her into the ICU and this led to her developing severe graft vs host disease in her gut.

8 months after her transplant, Ella is still in hospital. The 30-60 day stay has ballooneed out to 240+ days. Ella's surgical team have said that they had never seen this degree of damage before.

Both parents are needing to be in Melbourne to support Ella and be trained in home parental nutrition. This means Ella needs to have all of her nutrition intravenously indefinitely. She'll be hooked up to an IV pole for 12 hours a day when she eventually gets home.

During this training period and after 2 months of steady improvement and planning to get home, Ella rapidly deteriorated last week. A closed loop obstruction was found in her diseased bowel. This was removed and she has been in the ICU ever since.

For those who don't know Ella and her family, she lives with her mum Rachel, dad Jeff and two older brothers, one of which has Down's Syndrome and has his own medical issues.

While Rachel and Jeff have been unable to work, REDKITE charity have been supporting to pay bills although the threshold has now been reached, and MY ROOM has been supporting the family with accommodation support and have funded a hospital bed, which is needed for Ella to have procedures performed at home. CHALLENGE Foundation have been generous with helping with Christmas presents, KOALA KIDS have provided Christmas lunch and craft packs, coffee vouchers and groceries. The ABBEY SOLO foundation have generously supported with car parking, petrol vouchers and accommodation while in ICU.

With such a huge stay, the generosity of the charities has been incredible but the family are at the limit with many and have exhausted most options for support.

Many people have asked if there is anything that they can do and at this point a small contribution would be incredibly helpful. This will be used to pay the household bills and living expenses including basic things like groceries (as 3 households exist: hospital, accommodation in Melbourne, and the family home in Bendigo). Ella will also need some additional medical equipment to make the move home viable.

With this recent setback and ICU admission, all plans for coming home are now on hold and the Manypeney family need all the help they can get.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.