A little girl from Trenton, Ohio, with a huge heart has set a lofty goal to raise money that will ultimately help patients battling stage four breast cancer.
For the past four years, 11-year-old Lilian Moore has set up a popsicle stand to support the cause, WLWT reported on Sunday, noting that all of the donations go to the cancer research institute METAvivor.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the METAvivor website said Lilian raised $5,636 of her $3,000 goal.
Lilian’s mission is close to her heart because when she was a baby, her mother, Tiffani Moore, was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Although she was not at risk, there was a large lump in her breast.
Because of this, Lilian has been working hard to be there for others facing that struggle.
“I feel really happy that I can be there for her and help her, but, sometimes, it makes me feel sad that, you know, that she’ll never be fully cured, but I want to help the best I can,” she explained.
According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc., when people have stage four breast cancer, it means the cancer has been found in other parts of their bodies.
“This is so important to me because my mom, she has stage four breast cancer, and I want people like her and her to have better medications so that it could actually, maybe go away. She means the world to me,” Lilian said while sitting behind her popsicle stand.
Per the METAvivor website, every year, doctors diagnose 200,000 Americans with breast cancer, and six to ten percent of them are stage four cases.
“Science has very few answers to the reason why cancer metastasizes and we don’t yet have an effective treatment to arrest metastatic growth,” the site reads. “What we do know is that a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer is not considered survivable and that almost 40,000 men and women die of it each year. This is what METAvivor is fighting to change.”