A MOTHER is appealing for funds to help find a treatment for a rare and lethal cancer threatening the life of her four-year-old son.

Julie and Darren Thompson's son Declan was diagnosed last July with neuroblastoma, one of the rarest and most aggressive forms of childhood cancer.

Only 120 children are affected by it in the UK; the survival rate over the first two years is about 25 per cent.

Declan, who has just started a year late at Pennington CE School, has suffered a tumour in his chest, behind both his eyes, his hips, knees and one shoulder.

Attempts to halt it have have involved surgery, blood transfusions, lumbar punctures, chemotherapy, blood washing and a bone-marrow transplant.

He is now in remission.

Today he might look well but at each of his three-monthly scans there is a 75 per cent chance the cancer could have come back.

Then there is no further treatment that could be offered.

Julie and Darren, a manufacturing technician at Kimberly Clark, who live at Trinkeld Park, Swarthmoor, have thrown themselves into fund-raising for the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital in Pendlebury and The Neuroblastoma Society, a charity which raises funds to improve diagnosis and treatment of the disease and provides support for parents.

Julie organised a line dance at Ulverston's Coronation Hall which raised more than £2,000 and another is planned for Friday, October 27.

Meanwhile, on October 30, next-door neighbour Kay Wilson, wife of Ulverston GP Andrew Wilson, will run the Dublin marathon in aid of the Neuroblastoma Society.

"Declan can be quite shy but I talk to him through the garden fence and we wave to each other every day," she said.

"I will probably only run one marathon in my life so I thought it should be for something worthwhile."

Declan's illness started last summer when he was admitted to Furness General Hospital with query meningitis.

"We thought it was a virus that was going around," said Julie.

"We thought he'd got his stiff neck because he had this habit of tearing into the sitting-room and standing on his head and we thought he had got his black eye when he banged his cheek playing outside."

Later a blood test revealed that not only was he very anaemic but he had a tumour in his stomach.

A consultant at FGH, who had come across neuroblastoma before, referred him to the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital where he was given blood and brain scans and within days his stomach tumour had been removed.

Although he was allowed home for the weekend, by Sunday he was screaming in pain.

"I went round to Kay's husband to say I could not stop him crying and he said I had to take him straight back to hospital," said Julie.

It was then she received the devastating news that the cancer had spread into his chest, behind both his eyes, his hips, knees and one shoulder.

The diagnosis was confirmed - neuroblastoma - with a one-in-four chance of survival.

Over the next few months, Declan underwent seven courses of intensive chemotherapy, lost his hair and the weight dropped off him.

But the tumours did shrink and, after an adrenal gland was removed from his kidney, he spent Christmas Day at home.

In January, he underwent a bone-marrow transplant, using his own bone marrow which was extracted and surgically washed.

He and his mother spent four weeks in an isolation ward and he returned home with a line into his chest to deliver drugs and a gastrostomy - a stomach tube through which he was fed overnight.

Declan, who has a sister Laura, three, has been in remission since April and for the past six months has been on a form of vitamin A called retinoic acid.

"He's so brave, he never complained, he's such a special little boy," said Julie.

"When he was in intensive care he got out of bed and sat on his pushbike."

But, she admitted, his illness has changed family life.

"Some days I cope very well and my husband doesn't and vice versa.

I say 'if' he gets better, Darren says 'when'.

"Also, friends do not know how to take us.

They don't want to upset you so they ask how you are then they change the subject.

"One day I came home from Manchester howling my eyes out in the bathroom and Kay turned up with some raspberries, which Laura had been trying to pick through the fence for weeks.

It meant everything."

"We have to cope - what's the alternative? But it's given time a meaning - we live each day to the full."

Kay, a member of Glaxo Hoad Hill Harriers, added: "If I hit the pain barrier at 25 miles I will crawl across that finish line.

This is something I feel I can do.

If anyone else feels they want to do something, they can sponsor me."

To sponsor Kay Wilson, send cheques made payable to The Neuroblastoma Society to: Julie Thompson, 20 Fell View, Trinkeld Park, Swarthmoor.