‘Reaching Ollie's £1.5m heart op target is surreal’
BBCA mother who is taking her toddler to the United States for life-saving heart surgery has said reaching a £1.5m fundraising target felt "surreal".
After months of crowdfunding, Jasmin, from Gobowen in Shropshire, said she was "so grateful" to her son Ollie's supporters, who include Hollywood star and Wrexham AFC co-owner Ryan Reynolds.
"I am still very nervous, as it's still open heart surgery on my baby in a foreign country, away from my family and support," she said. "It's sort of dawning on me that this is actually happening now."
The 14-month-old will be operated on at Stanford Children's Hospital on 23 January and then spend three months with his mum in the country recuperating.
Additional money Jasmin has raised through the sale of her home in Gobowen will go towards travel costs, she said. She has moved in with family in Wrexham to help shoulder the financial burden.
Ollie, who has a rare congenital heart defect called pulmonary atresia, a hole in his heart and defects in his arteries, faces a second operation six to nine months later on the NHS.
Jasmin said she turned to the US after UK hospitals told her they could not perform the initial complex procedure and discussed palliative treatment.
"Stanford Children's Hospital in America, they can fix Ollie's heart," she said.
"Having this money, I cannot put it into words what this means to me. He's my son, he's my best friend and I'm getting him the help he needs now and it's thanks to everyone's kindness."
She said she kept checking her online crowdfunding page to make sure the money was still there. "It's just surreal."
Any further donations would now be diverted to help another little girl from Sunderland, she added, who needs £70,000 to travel to Boston in the United States for treatment.
"We're just hoping we can get her there as well," she said.
Jasmin admitted nerves about a long plane journey with a toddler but said she "would do anything" for her son.
Once the second operation was completed, "he'll just have a full normal life, like he should have", she said.
"What I want is to see him on his first day of school, in his school uniform, which a lot of parents might take for granted but we've been told here that Ollie will be lucky to live until he's two.
"That's something I've been really looking forward to.
"Now it's something that I think about and I can smile about it."
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