7-year-old runs to beat clock in mom’s cancer battle

A seven-year-old British girl has completed a multi-day marathon challenge in a desperate bid to pay for a brain biopsy that could help save her mother’s life.

The U.S. Sun reports that Lolita Oakes of North London and her friend Juliet Deilinger, also seven years old, recently ran the 42.2-km marathon distance to help fund Oakes’s mother’s fight against brain cancer.

In 2018, at age 36, Cordelia Taylor was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that has an average survival time of 12 to 18 months. Only five per cent of patients live more than five years.

Following aggressive treatment—including surgery that involved removing a quarter of Taylor’s brain without any resulting neurological impairment—Taylor was declared cancer-free this past April. The results of a scan just two months later, however, showed that the cancer had returned and was inoperable.

She told the Sun she is hoping to self-fund a private biopsy and potential targeted treatment of the malignant tumour. The need for timely funding is what inspired daughter Lolita to take up the weeklong marathon challenge.

The run not only succeeded in raising awareness of, and financial support for, her mother’s treatment—nearly three-quarters of the campaign’s $170,000 goal has been raised—but also encouraged others to join in. Lolita and Juliet were joined during the multi-day challenge—which involved running at least 5 km before school every day (and additional kilometres after school) for seven days—by an ever-growing group of friends, schoolmates and teachers.

“It was quite hard, how much I had to run, and the not stopping,” Lolita told the Sun. “The hardest part was when I fell over. It was tiring, but I’m proud of me and Juliet for running the marathon, and doing it for my mum.”

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Although seeing the challenge through wasn’t easy for Lolita, her mother said she had every confidence her daughter would finish what she started.

“Loli is joyful and spirited, full of happiness and confidence,” said Taylor. “She’s a very determined girl and unbelievably good at saying to herself, ‘I can do this.’”