Nearly £14,000 raised for Houghton Regis family after mum-of-six dies a week after brain tumour diagnosis

Thousands of pounds has been raised for a grieving family from Houghton Regis after a mum-of-six died just a week after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Just a week before her death, Kerry Griffiths, a carer, had been to the Luton and Dunstable hospital’s A&E department complaining of tiredness and sickness. A CT scan confirmed that there was a mass on her brain.

Her brother-in-law’s partner, Cara Edwards, said: “Obviously, there was a lot of upset, but at the same time, we were quite hopeful that she was going to get treatment. Straight away they referred her to Queen Square Hospital in London.”

The 37-year-old was rushed to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where she stayed for a few days. Surgeons performed emergency surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain and a second operation to remove the tumour from her brain.

But doctors told her family that there were signs that Kerry was brain dead, and she died days later on November 25. She leaves behind her six children and husband, Carl.

Surgeons from Newcastle came to the specialist centre where organ donor Kerry had three different organs harvested for ill patients. Cara said: “It was overwhelming that three people, and potentially more are going to be saved. She just would have loved that.”

Family and friends described Kerry as caring – something shown to a wider community through her charity work with the homeless, having created Streetlife, a project which gave food and drinks to people sleeping rough.

A GoFundMe page was set up to support her husband, Carl, and their children. So far, nearly £14,000 has been raised for her family – with the money going towards funeral costs, daily living expenses and Christmas for her children. Cara explained: “We just feel so helpless. There's nothing anyone can do. Any loss is completely tragic, especially when children lose a parent. But it’s the shock factor to this as well.

“It's going to take so long for them to process and get over, so we don't want them having any additional stress of having to go back to work.”