The world champion boxer who has backed a brave girl's battle with a brain tumour

Billy Joe Saunders, the WBO super-middleweight champion, sent a video to Lyla O’Donovan, aged seven, who is awaiting her tenth operation on her brain.

In it, he said: “God bless you my darling. Keep it up, keep fighting. You’re the one, keep going.” He told Lyla: “You have got my backing all the way.”

Billy Joe also said he would send some signed boxing gloves to her.

Lyla’s dad Paul, who comes from Hartlepool, praised the message and said Billy Joe had ‘seen Lyla sad and having a hard time and then sends her a message like this. It is amazing.”

Billy Joe’s message comes at a time when Lyla’s family say her seizures have increased during the lockdown. She was due to have hear 10th operation in March but it was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Her dad Paul said she is wiped out and can’t remember a thing after each seizure she has at home.

Paul described one of them where Lyla ‘dropped to the floor while she was getting ready’.

“She was biting down hard on her teeth as if they were ready to snap. It is horrible and when she wakes up, her mouth is hurting because she has been biting so hard.”

Lyla has undergone life-threatening surgery, battled meningitis, been treated for hydrocephalus and had a shunt put into her head and that’s just in the last four years.

She was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2016 when she was just three.

She was recently due to undergo her 10th operation on her brain at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle but it had to be cancelled. Paul said the coronavirus would kill his daughter if she were to contract it.

Despite everything she has gone through, Lyla has always thought of others.

Just recently, she organised 500 stress balls to be sent to other poorly children. She also sent out hundreds of certificates to other people who had been brave in their own health battles.

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