X-Men star and Hollywood A-lister James McAvoy gives £50,000 to Dover girl Kelly Turner who has rare cancer
Published: 10:00, 03 February 2017
Updated: 10:31, 03 February 2017
Cancer girl Kelly Turner has met a Hollywood star who has given her a £50,000 boost for her fundraising.
Her total is now more than enough to pay for specialist surgery in New York.
James McAvoy, from the superhero film series X-Men, visited the teenager on Tuesday when she was undergoing another round of chemotherapy at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton.
His donation this week pushed the amount raised up to £458,000, which is close to the half of the total £1 million needed for specialist treatment in America.
The actor later sent an online message saying “Great to meet you the other day Kelly. I hope this helps you achieve your goal sooner rather than later. Good luck luv James.”
The figure raised is now way beyond the initial £408,000 for the surgery.
But in a recent change of events the latest rounds of chemotherapy have shrunk and stabilised the tumours, which now gives Kelly the chance to study for her GCSEs in June before surgery.
If her condition does worsen in the coming months she will give up her studies to fly straight to America.
The rest of the £1 million needs to be raised for follow-up immunotherapy, which will also be done at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York.
Kelly, 16, of Dover, was given two years to live in October 2015 due to having desmoplastic round cell tumours, a type of sarcoma suffered by only 30 teenagers a year worldwide.
The treatment is not available on the NHS, which is why it has to be done in the United States.
James McAvoy has been in three X-Men films and also in movies such as the thriller Wanted and The Chronicles of Narnia.
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