Sibling love shines through

Today Ellie did something awesome for her little sister Molly. She pushed herself out of her comfort zone in doing a sponsored run to raise awareness and funds for Juvenile Arthritis Research.

Her sister Molly is now 5 and was diagnosed with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) when she was just 18 months old. “We were fortunate that Molly was diagnosed quickly,” mum Rebecca told us.

She added, "Molly has had a number of different treatments over the years and currently receives her medication by intravenous therapy every 4 weeks. The doctors and nurses are amazing and always take good care of Molly.”

8 year old Ellie wanted to make a difference to the lives of other children with JIA by doing a sponsored run. She set herself a target of running 3km on 28th March 2021. When she saw how many people had donated and that she’d managed to raise over £400, she decided to go even further and run 4km. Amazing!!!

Whilst treatments for JIA can help to reduce the pain and inflammation, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes to enable children with JIA to lead “normal” lives including injections, blood tests, scans, x-rays and regular physiotherapy treatment. It can all be physically and emotionally draining.

Siblings are often impacted too with parents/carers needing to spend extra time at hospital appointments so JIA is very much something that can affect the whole family with the additional burden it places on a family.

With these amazing smiles on their faces, we are so incredibly proud of what Ellie has done for her sister and we can see that her whole family are very proud of her too.

As well as raising vital funds for the support, awareness and research work that we do, Ellie and her family have also helped raise awareness amongst their friends, family and in their community that children get arthritis too.

A massive well done to Ellie, Molly and mum and dad.

If you have an idea for raising awareness or fundraising, please get in touch and we’ll do our best in supporting you to make it happen.