Six-year-old Ruby Pringle was a happy, kind, and vibrant child who loved going to the beach, riding bikes with her dad and spending time with her best friend, Charlie.
“She was the happiest kid, so easy-going and kind;” her mother Hannah told us. “She loved going to school. Everyone knew Rubes because she was just so happy.”
But then Ruby started showing worrying symptoms. She woke up with headaches, felt dizzy, became clumsy, and tired quickly. Desperately concerned, Hannah took Ruby to doctor after doctor, but her symptoms were dismissed as being related to a pre-existing lung condition.
Just 11 days after her sixth birthday, while visiting family on the Sunshine Coast, Ruby’s parents noticed she could not keep her balance walking along the beach and frequently fell, unable to walk in a straight line. An urgent trip to the hospital revealed the devastating truth – Ruby had a brain tumour.
Ruby’s parents were told their daughter’s tumour was unsafe to operate on and it was DIPG/DMG, an aggressive tumour of the brain stem. The prognosis was bleak.
"DIPG is very different from other cancers. The day your child is diagnosed, you have a ticking time bomb in their brain. They’re going to die, no matter what – you just don’t know when."
Hannah, mum to Ruby
They literally just said, “This is the worst type of cancer, we can’t do anything”; Hannah recalls. “And his exact words were, ‘Go home, make memories.”
Reeling from the horrific news, Hannah and her husband Andrew now had to face the unimaginable reality that their precious daughter likely had only months to live. They vowed to make every remaining moment with Ruby count.
“I thought about it every second of the day,” Hannah shared. “It’s torture to look at your child and, when something is going wrong, wonder if they’re going to die in the next minute.”
Ruby underwent the standard palliative radiation therapy for DIPG, undergoing through 30 sessions with incredible bravery. While this treatment usually extends survival by two to three months in children with DIPG/DMG, it tragically failed in Ruby’s case.
Through it all, she never stopped smiling. But with cruel speed, the cancer progressed.
Ruby passed away only 26 short weeks after diagnosis.
In the aftermath of their unfathomable loss, Ruby’s family have emerged as fierce advocates for DIPG/DMG research, determined that her death will not be in vain. They are committed to ensuring that Ruby is a catalyst for the cure that has remained frustratingly elusive for decades.
Ruby’s kindness, energy, and unforgettable spirit live on in the quest for breakthroughs that could finally give families hope in the face of a DIPG/DMG diagnosis.
