Rebekah Dalrymple and friends to run marathon in honour of The Christie
In 2024, five-year-old Hector started feeling poorly. He was waking in the night with headaches and needed medicine but he wasn't dehydrated. Sometimes he would also vomit.
During the day, his mum, Rebekah Dalrymple, says he seemed 'fairly well'. He had an appetite and was hungry, but his food started to taste 'strange'.
Rebekah quickly spotted the warning signs: "Hector's a good sleeper and he always has been. And so when he started waking up and sort of needing our support, needing medicine and saying that he had a headache, it felt like to me it was a red flag almost straight away."
In November of that year, Hector was air-ambulanced from the Isle of Man to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with a brain tumour, later diagnosed as a rare craniopharyngioma.
Although non-cancerous, it's a form of slow-growing benign tumour that develops near the pituitary gland and hypothalamus. If left untreated it can often lead to vision loss and life-threatening complications.
Rebekah says: "Initially, we were air ambulanced over to Alder Hey and he had a week of care there whilst we got a diagnosis and he had a small procedure to alleviate some of the pressure in his brain. But the tumour itself is tethered to his pituitary gland and so it wasn't operable because it would have done more harm than good."
After that initial procedure and "numerous tests and scans", Hector and family were relocated to Manchester whilst he went through a six-week course of proton beam therapy at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, one of only two centres in the UK to offer such treatment.
In total, Hector received 28 doses and Rebekah says every day he had to have a general anaesthetic.
"When we got the diagnosis of the craniopharyngioma and we knew it wasn't cancerous, so we knew he wasn't going to have to have chemotherapy and that we were never really looking at it from that point onwards as a terminal illness, then I was hit with a real wave of emotion.
"Then we were home for a couple of months and knowing that we then had to take him away for this proton beam therapy, that was actually a really hard time for me." - Rebekah Dalrymple, Hector's mum
"We're running the Manchester Marathon to say thank you to The Christie"
Hector was undergoing his treatment during the time of the 2025 Manchester Marathon, and Rebekah took him and the family to cheer on the runners from the sidelines. Hector even designed and brought along his own poster, to cheer on those taking part to raise funds for The Christie.
It was there and then that Rebekah decided she would take on the challenge herself and, upon her return to the Isle of Man, found out that her friends had had the same idea.
With little running experience but plenty of determination, Rebekah says: "We got in touch with The Christie and asked them to put us all together into one sort of fundraising group."
Joining Rebekah in 'Team Hector' to run and show support are: Emma, Suzanne, Susie, Christina, and Ashlea.
On their fundraising page, they describe themselves as a 'wider group of friends and soul sisters', who 'all feel in debt to The Christie, and NHS as a whole'.
The Manchester Marathon returns on Sunday, 19 April and more than 42,000 participants are expected to take part.
Team Hector is hoping to raise £10,000 - you can find a link to their JustGiving page HERE.
You can listen to the full interview with Rebekah via the Manx Radio Newscast below:
Former DOI minister expecting new CRHS to be 'over the £70 million mark'
"Rapid review" into bed capacity at Noble's Hospital
Still 'very low risk' of meningitis outbreak on Island
MHK 'disappointed but not surprised' over secondary school delay
FoI statistics to be published quarterly to improve transparency