Boy’s clumsy behaviour turns out to be inoperable brain tumour

A family in the UK have spoken of their heartbreak at learning their young son has an incurable brain tumour.

Atticus Feduchin-Pate, 4, had started to behave a little more clumsily than usual earlier this summer but his parents put it down to him being an ordinary, boisterous little boy. "On the week leading up to his diagnosis we noticed that Atticus was being really clumsy, but we just thought he was being a four-year-old!," his dad Blaize, from Hampshire in England, told Metro. "He would fall off of his bike and not pay attention when people spoke to him, and even when we saw the bump on his head we initially thought he’d just banged it – we didn’t realise he fell as a result of the tumour." Blaize and wife Emily did come to realise there was something wrong and went to their GP with their son. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong but as Atticus's condition worsened he was hospitalised and given an MRI. That's when his parents learned that he had diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas, a rare type of brain tumour. The tumour is in his brain stem and so can't be operated on. Atticus is now in a clinical trial to help prolong his life but doctors have given him just nine months to live. "When we were told it was a tumour, it broke our heart, but when we found out it was going to kill him, we couldn’t believe it," said Blaize. The couple, who are also parents to a one-year-old girl, say that they now want to give their son the best life possible while he still has time. "He is such a happy, well-spoken little boy and still doesn’t know the extent of what he’s going through – one day he can walk and the next he can’t, but he just thinks that’s how everyone’s life is." The family are now fundraising to help give Atticus the best experiences for the rest of his life and to raise funds for The Brain Tumour Charity.