“You’ve got to help that little boy, Philip.”

Thirteen years after his mum died of a brain tumour, and four years after starting his role with OSCAR’s, our Charity Manager, Phil Martinez, shares why the charity has been so important to him since before it even existed.

I have had thirteen years without a mum. Patricia Martinez-Williams, died in 2013 on my son’s 6th birthday, aged just 66, of a brain tumour, in the same week that Oscar was diagnosed and went into surgery.

She was everything you want a mum to be: kind, strong, loving, funny – and mine. Well, I say mine, but she was everyone’s because she gave of herself to the whole community, whether it be working for charity or in schools or as a local councillor or just as someone who was there for others no matter who they were. She was a local legend, and of course I would say that as her son, but the crowds that couldn’t fit into the sizeable church where her funeral was held tell the tale also.

Like Oscar and so many others with brain tumours -children in particular- her diagnosis was missed. It was put down to stress by her GP. And I missed it as well. I was on the other side of the country and saw her occasionally, but I remember -with pain ever since- that I dismissed what seemed like anxiety and unusual behaviour on one occasion she visited to babysit my young children. Jack, aged four, had said she had been acting strangely, but I thought she was just being a fun Grandma to entertain them. Her text messages were starting to have more typos in, but we all do a typo every now and again, don’t we? No-one put it all together and why would we – the awareness of the symptoms of brain tumours was dreadful back then and still is now. This is one thing we at OSCAR’s strive to change. We see awareness as key to the battle against brain tumours – being left with the feeling of ‘If only I had realised’ only compounds the hurt you feel.

We booked a holiday to Benidorm for the five of us, back to where mine and my mum’s story began, to help ‘alleviate the stress’. Two days later, after my sister Rebecca was shocked by Mum’s strange behaviour while out shopping, our lives changed. Rebecca took her to hospital and soon after Mum was diagnosed with a brain tumour. We had been worried it was Alzheimer’s or dementia and irreversible, but this was cancer and survival rates for cancer were a lot higher than when I was young, weren’t they? So, that would be ok, maybe?

Well, I know now they are criminally low for brain tumours – only 12% of people diagnosed with one survive after five years. Thankfully the 74% survival rates are higher for children, but still way lower than other cancers. You often only realise how devastating brain tumours are when you unwillingly become part of the brain tumour community.

We never really got her back. There were flashes -such as a little Christmas dance with her 2-year-old granddaughter- but this beautiful, powerful, caring, funny woman was turned to a shell of her former self before passing from our lives forever. We never got our holiday together.

As mentioned earlier, while she was ill, Oscar also got ill. I knew his mum Marie from the PTA and his older brother Seb was in my football club and Oscar, well he had been on my radar ever since he blasted five goals past me in the School Summer Fair penalty shoot-out when he was in Reception. None of this diving out of the way to let one in nonsense – I was diving out of the way to avoid his thunderbolts. And he kept coming back to do it again! I have a picture on my desk of him taking a penalty and it still brings those memories back! I told him that day he would be my football captain when he got to Year 6. He got ill one month before he would have represented school for the first time in a tournament. He was not to be my captain, but I gave Ian the captain’s armband Oscar deserved but never got to wear. It was only right.

My mum was in the last days of her life when she heard about Oscar and asked what she could do. She could do nothing for herself but she wanted to do something for him. “We have got to help that little boy, Philip,” she said to me. She was selfless to the last. And she was right – we had to help. I didn’t want to lose someone else I knew to a brain tumour, and I felt a bond to the Hughes Family -albeit a bond neither of us wanted- so I was involved in the fundraising drive to get Oscar better treatment in America. But, in parallels to my mum, Oscar relapsed and was taken from us too soon. It is always too soon, no matter what your age. But, nine is way too soon. Devastatingly too soon.

When Marie, Ian and their friends set up the charity, I had to be involved. Like them I wanted to channel the sorrow for good. For Oscar but also for my mum. I wear an OSCAR’s wristband every day in their memory, and in the memory now of Ian and Milo and others I have learnt the stories of over the past four years. I have another wristband on my bedside table with the necklace that my mum always wore circled inside of it, showing how closely linked my mum and Oscar are in my heart and my thoughts.

I have scrambled through mud, run marathon relay legs despite struggling to walk, worn a stupid chicken hat, collected for hours on end in supermarkets, climbed a few mountains, selflessly won a few charity quizzes for OSCAR’s. I have laughed and I have cried and I have met some of the most important people in my life and had some of the most memorable moments in my life. I have been given the honour of the role of Charity Manager and taken it with pride and gratitude and will strive to do even more.

This anniversary, as with all of them, I say thank you to my mum. Everything I do for the charity is in your memory and the memory of Oscar, Ian and Milo. Every day I get to help children affected by brain tumours working for this beautiful charity that means so much to so many people. And we will make things better, just like my mum said we should.