Three young boys from Co. Roscommon had their dreams come true earlier this week when they got the opportunity to meet Simon Cowell at the X Factor studios.
Archie (9) and five-year-old twins George and Isaac Naughton, met the music mogul and Cheryl Fernandez-Versini backstage at the show.
The three brothers were diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) in 2012 – an untreatable neuromuscular disease that destroys muscle tissue and is currently fatal – and were invited to the UK to meet everyone behind the scenes at the show.
Their parents, Paula and Padraic, have set up a charity, Join Our Boys, in a bid to try and help to fund the boys’ treatment and find a cure, and have to date raised a whopping €850,000.
Speaking to Her.ie previously, mum Paula tried to put words on the pain that her beautiful young family are going through.
“To be told in a matter of minutes that your three children are going to be paralyzed and they are going to die is something I can’t describe. Padraic will tell you that it was like being hit by a train. For me, I am incapable of putting words on it.”
“I remember the day I set up the Facebook page and I just sat there and wrote ‘No treatment. No cure. No words.’ Because there are no words. I’m not able to put into language the depths of sorrow that I feel. I just can’t.
“We put all our efforts into setting up the Join Our Boys Trust. I wanted to be armed with all of the information I needed so I contacted everybody around the world – researchers, clinicians, doctors – everybody in the vain hope that somebody, somewhere would have an answer. But nobody did.
“The support that we’ve had here in Roscommon is amazing. Everyone has got behind us. We are a family living in extraordinary circumstances – but we are extremely lucky as we are surrounded by extraordinary people and the words ‘Thank you’ just don’t express how we feel enough.”
“I’m speaking out, I want to tell the world about our three, beautiful little boys in the hope that maybe it will reach the right person who will contact us and say ‘I know what to do’. In the meantime, the people of Roscommon are behind us every step of the way – not just us, but all the little children with this disease.”
“For now? We live in hope of new research. Of an answer. Of a way to save our three little boys. Between now and then we will not give up, we will never stop searching no matter what.”
You can read our full interview with Paula here.
If you wish to know more about Join Our Boys head to their website or Facebook page.
