Thank You Gabby!

Gabby Devine is a lovely patient of ours battling Ewing Sarcoma.

Despite having a tough battle on her hands, Gabby has been a ray of sunshine into many other peoples lives. Gabby started "Starlit HOPE", which fundraises to provide random acts of kindness to the children and the staff at Taranaki Base Hospital and Starship Childrens Hospital. Among many other things, Gabby and her family have donated a HEAP of christmas presents for us to give to the patients in hospital over Christmas, surprised everyone with christmas brunch treats, nominated our ward staff to recieve a morning tea shout from More FM, dropped around some amazing chocolate dipped shortbread for Valentines day and the list goes on!

We now want to given something BACK to Gabby and the Devine Family.

Four of us doctors from the children's ward are going to do the Mountain to Surf Relay on March 7th, and thought it would be a fun event to raise awareness and pull together a gift for this amazing family as a way to say a big thank you. We have named our group 'Gabby's Angels' with our lead angel Dr Raimond Jacquemard going to look fabulous in his tutu and angel wings. Rounding out the team are some of the paediatric registrars Emma Dudman, Unre Rapley and Hannah Osborn, who are looking forward to showing Gabby how much she has inspired us.

Sometimes it can feel hard to make a difference, and that what we do as individuals can feel insignificant, but any little bit will be much appreciated and it's an opportunity to do something big together :)

Roland (Gabbys dad) shared some wisdom with a friend of ours - "people always ask what can we do to help, just do something - it doesn't matter if it's the 'right' thing to do, at least they've done something" - Challenge accepted Roland!

We will let you know how we get on with this run! Time to start training!