Westmeath teenager 'given a second chance' after receiving life-saving transplant

A 19-year-old girl has told how a donation from a stranger she will never meet saved her life.

Ellie Mai Murphy was finishing her Leaving Cert when she received a shocking cancer diagnosis. The teenager was undergoing routine blood tests ahead of a separate operation when doctors discovered the cancer.

Ellie Mai shared that it was completely unexpected, as she had no obvious symptoms before.

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Before being diagnosed with cancer, 17-year-old Ellie Mai was just a normal teenager preparing to take her A-levels. She had no tell-tale symptoms that anything was wrong.

She said: “I had a few bruises on my legs but I still had them. I would have bruised easily so nothing to bother me going to hospital, I wasn't in pain anywhere. I felt a little different, maybe more tired and tired – but I wouldn't have put it down to cancer or anything like that.”

Ellie Mai was on her way to an appointment for another operation when she received a shocking diagnosis of leukemia.

She said: “I was diagnosed on May 5, 2023. My diagnosis is T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

“When I first got my diagnosis, I was just in shock because I had no idea I was sick. The reason I got my diagnosis was because I was on a waiting list for two years to get an endoscope because I had some pretty serious IBS issues.”

The young woman suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, but when doctors performed standard blood tests before her operation, they discovered something more worrying.

Ellie Mai shared: “The time finally came to remove the telescope, but they said they would give you my blood first. [It was] just to like take a few things off to make sure I wasn't allergic to anything, or to see what happened.

“They just saw that I had cancer while they were doing the blood test. So I couldn't even get the scope in the end.”

Doctors then broke the news to Ellie Mai's mother, and the 17-year-old was rushed to hospital the next morning.

“The day after the blood test, they told me I had leukemia because they could only see it through the blood test,” she said, continuing: “Then they started doing bone marrow biopsies.”

Explaining what exactly happened with the bone marrow biopsy, Ellie Mai said: “They pierced your hip to see where the leukemia was in your bone marrow, and it was also there so they could determine what type of leukemia I had then.

Ellie Mai had to undergo several rounds of chemotherapy to treat her leukemia, as well as a bone marrow transplant.

“I had a lot of chemo, like rounds of chemo. So each round of chemo was about six weeks. So in total, I think I had eight or nine rounds of chemo, and then I had six sessions of radiation therapy all over my body before my bone marrow was removed,” she said.

She continued: “I needed a bone marrow transplant [because the type of leukemia] My illness was growing so quickly that they knew it would never be completely cured without a bone marrow transplant. So I had my bone marrow transplant on November 30 [2023]”.

Ellie Mai had a period of 9 months before going into remission. The young woman received support during this time from many people: hospital nurses, a social worker and the Little Princess Trust, who gave Ellie Mai a wig when she started losing her hair due to chemotherapy.

The Little Princess Trust is a charity which provides free real hair wigs to children and young people under the age of 24 who have lost their hair due to cancer treatment or other conditions.

Ellie Mai said: “The Little Princess Trust gave me a wig because I lost my hair quite quickly due to the intensive chemo I was having.

“The hospital was amazing – all the nurses, the staff, everyone – they would always come and chat with you whenever you needed. They were always there to talk about anything you wanted to know.

“There was [also] social workers also got involved with me during my treatment because I was young.

Ellie Mai shared that she has now been declared cancer-free. She said: “They did a bone marrow biopsy on me about a month or two ago and found out I was 100 per cent cancer free. That the transplant worked, but like anything that can come back .”

Although she is currently undergoing a few rounds of preventative chemotherapy, Ellie Mai is on the road to recovery. She couldn't be more grateful to the donor who saved her life.

She said: “I have [the bone marrow] from a donor that I will never know because you can't know who your donor is in Ireland. It's like a random person gave it to me.

“My life was saved by a stranger I will never know. Without my transplant, I wouldn't be here right now. And I didn't have any siblings to give me the transplant, so it had to be I was a giver, and it was just that there was someone there who gave me another chance at life.”

Ellie Mai is now looking forward to her future, after sharing that she felt inspired by the nurses who helped her at the hospital and hopes to continue her studies in nursing in September this year.

She said: “I'm going to do PLC in September and my PLC is going to breastfeed because [my experience] It just made me want to give it a go.

“I had a nurse myself who also had a bone marrow transplant, and I really connected with her, I wanted to talk to her more than anyone else. So I would like to do that at the future., to be able to have relationships with another child who is going through the same thing as me.”

The young woman is also raising funds to help other people who are going through the same experience as her.

Ellie Mai said: “I just want to give back to the fund and thank them for everything they have done.

“This money will go towards more research into different chemos to save other people – because there have been lots of different chemos that didn't work for me – what if there weren't the ones that are currently available, I wouldn't be here today. So I just wanted to give back and hopefully save more lives like mine.”

You can donate to Ellie Mai's fundraiser at You can also find out more about the Little Princess Trust at