A nine-year-old boy who spent years of his life battling recurring brain tumors is now climbing to the top of Mount Everest to raise money for charity.

Arthur Middleton, from Lincolnshire, had a difficult start to life when he was born prematurely at 26 weeks in 2014.

Just before his third birthday, Arthur’s parents, Claire and Henry, noticed that he was having seizures, feeling nauseous, slurring his words and losing the use of his right hand.

After an MRI scan, the couple was then told that their son had a brain tumor the size of a golf ball.

‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. You just go into overdrive and think about what it means,” Claire, 41, told MailOnline.

They were then blue-lit to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, in 2017, where he underwent a successful operation and the family would move to North Carolina in January that year.

After learning to walk again, Arthur had a scan in December and the family were told the tumor had returned to the size of a ping-pong ball.

Ex-lawyer Claire said this was ‘quite unusual’ for a low-grade tumor as it was quite ‘aggressive’. Arthur then underwent another operation to remove this tumor as they crossed the pond.

The parents were then told that despite two operations to remove the tumor, it continued to grow back and that the next step was to try chemotherapy.

But after five months it stopped working.

Claire and Henry, who work in finance, then found a clinical trial in America and managed to get Arthur enrolled in it.

“We put him on medication that is actually like a targeted therapy because his tumor cells have a certain genetic mutation and we were fortunate that they were testing different genetic mutations,” the stay-at-home mom said. .

‘Luckily he has one of the genetic mutations that one of the drugs targets, so we confronted him about that in America.’

Arthur remained in the trial for two years and within the first few months the size of the tumor had reduced by 80 percent.

Over the next few years on this drug, Arthur was completely stable.

But after the trial was completed, he had to stop taking the medication and the tumor started growing again.

Claire said the family were able to access this drug after a difficult time when they returned to Britain in early 2022.

“He continues to take that and it’s kept everything stable for five years now and he takes it every day,” Claire said.

“He goes to school and his immune system isn’t compromised or anything. We are fortunate that we are currently in a stable situation.

‘Now that we’ve learned more about it, we feel like we’re one of the lucky ones to have been diagnosed with low grade.

‘Even though it was very large when they found it and it had long-term health consequences for him, we’re lucky it’s low quality.’

‘His journey to the brain tumor has been very difficult and it is still a bit ongoing. I don’t think we have any illusions that we are one of the lucky ones.’

Now Arthur is raising money for The Brain Tumor Charity by climbing Mount Everest – a whopping 8,849 metres.

Although he has a weakness on the side of his body, it hasn’t stopped him from achieving his goal of raising awareness about brain tumors.

‘[I’m] honestly so proud. He had been talking about doing this for a while and we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to do it physically as it is still a challenge.

‘But we were talking about New Year’s resolutions with the family and he said, ‘I’m going to climb the mountain to raise money.’

‘It’s great as a mother to see how proud and how successful he is in what he does. He struggles academically at school and with sports.

“He’s not going to be team captain, but this is his thing and he’s very proud of himself.

‘He’s finding it difficult because we’re climbing in some pretty challenging weather conditions at the moment, but he’s determined and won’t give up.’

Arthur has spent his spare time climbing several mountains including Whernside, Buckden Pike and Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales and Thorpe Cloud in the Peak District.

Claire said her son also went outside and climbed when Storm Isha hit Britain.

‘I think that was quite a challenge for him and he was talking about the wind and the rain at the top.

‘I think he found it quite frightening. But when he reached the bottom he was very proud of himself for doing it and now he is proud to tell everyone that he climbed that. [during] Storm Isha.’

He has currently reached 2,500 million with around 6,349 million to go and has raised almost £6,000 for charity so far.

Claire says he likes to update his regularly Instagram page on his progress.

Arthur usually walks up mountains with members of his family, but since then he has had peers from his school willing to join him on his journey.

His school also held a fundraising day where students and teachers wore hats and donated to his cause.

Claire and Henry are going on a climb in April with some of Arthur’s teachers and friends.

To donate to Arthur’s page, click here.

I was on top of the world. Literally. The summit of Everest, 8,848-metres high. It had taken six gruelling days and nights to get there after leaving base camp and the final hours along the summit ridge had been terrifying – the rocky track as thin as thread with a vertical drop either side. Dead bodies littered the way.

When I finally reached the prayer flags fluttering in the wind at the top, I sat down exhausted.

The view was unarguably magnificent – blue sky against white snow, surrounded by the most glorious mountains in the world. I hadn’t expected to feel triumphant. But I thought there would be a sense of relief that I’d finally made it.

Instead, I just felt numb. And I knew I still had to get down. Descending high mountains is just as difficult and dangerous as climbing up them. As it turns out, I was right to be anxious, something terrible was yet to happen.

I wondered how I got there. A 51-year-old woman from north London who is the most unlikely athlete.

At school, I was the arty one, not the sporty one. I never wanted to be a mountaineer. But somehow I had become a record-breaking adventurer. The first woman in the world to achieve ‘The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’ – which is to swim the English Channel, run a road marathon and summit Mount Everest.

However, this wasn’t what I had always wanted. What I always wanted was to be a mother.

My long, hard journey to the summit of Everest started when I was 34. The day my partner, Peter, and I looked at each other and said: ‘Let’s make a family.’ We had been together for several years. We both had successful careers in the arts world. I had recently become Chief Executive of a London theatre – the Lyric Hammersmith – and I mistakenly thought I was one of the women who could ‘have it all’.

So we threw away the contraception and started trying. It was fun at first – making love for a purpose as well as for pleasure. Like so many couples we thought that soon we’d see a double line on a pregnancy test.

But after a year nothing had happened. We went to our first fertility clinic and were diagnosed with ‘unexplained infertility’. Around a third of all couples who struggle to conceive receive this frustrating diagnosis. We started on IVF. We got pregnant first time. But lost the baby early on. We went through another round. The same thing happened.

IVF was the first gruelling physical and mental endurance journey I undertook. It was a rollercoaster I rode for ten years, mostly in secret. Infertility is shrouded in shame. I didn’t tell family, friends or colleagues.

My job was often glamorous, mixing with famous directors and actors. But at first night theatre parties, behind my smiles for the camera, I was going through the saddest years of my life.

Miscarrying my babies in public toilets, sometimes tying a jumper around my waist to hide the blood and carrying on as if nothing had happened.

The façade cracked when a pregnancy was discovered as ectopic at three months. A perfect baby but not in my womb: in my stomach. An emergency operation saved my life. But pregnancy loss and infertility is barely recognised as an injury, illness or bereavement. As soon as I was discharged from hospital I went back to work.

The worst part of all was what it did to my mental health. I felt like a failure as a woman. I grew distant from my friends as they had their own families. The pain of their happiness too much to bear. I thought I would never be happy.

In total we spent over £70,000 in our pursuit of parenthood and got into debt to pay for it. But in the end the closest I ever came to becoming a biological mother was a cluster of cells. The only evidence the scars across my tummy from my ectopic emergency.

Aged 43, I instinctively knew it was time to give up on my own eggs. Around the same time my relationship with my partner, Peter, started to break down. Perhaps if we had stayed together we could have explored an alternative route to parenthood – adoption, egg or sperm donation, surrogacy. But we separated. It broke me: I fell into the abyss.

I was in my forties. Childless, single and alone. I didn’t know what I wanted from life anymore.

I had a fabulous career, but it wasn’t making me happy. So I gave up my job. I moved back to my childhood home to live, and care for my elderly mum. That’s when I started to exercise my way out of heartbreak.

I’d never swum in open water before so swimming the 21 miles that separated England from France was an odd choice. I couldn’t even swim very well. But I had enjoyed going to our local pool as a child – and it was a memory from then that sparked the idea.

Back in the 1970s and 80s swimming the English Channel made headline news. When I failed to get a place in my school swimming gala I told my disappointed dad that it didn’t matter because one day I was going to swim the Channel instead.

I loved my dad so much and I wanted to make him proud. He would have made a wonderful grandfather but after suffering a series of strokes he died in 2012 on the day I received the negative result of one of my final rounds of IVF.

I trained for two years – hours and hours doing drills in the pool throughout the winter, and then in the summer in Dover Harbour. When I achieved my qualifying swim of six hours in water below 16 degrees – I was ready to make an attempt.

I began my swim out of sadness on 2 September 2015 at 1.30am. It became my own version of giving birth – 17 hours 44 minutes and 30 seconds of labour in the sea. I suffered with violent vomiting, jellyfish stings all over my body and face. But when my feet finally touched the sand in France, all the pain was eclipsed by euphoria.

The adrenalin buzz of achieving something so big had got me, so I then set out to run the London Marathon. It had been on my bucket list but I had never seriously considered it because I am a rubbish runner.

When I started training a stranger shouted out at me that I must get exhausted running so slowly. On 23 April 2017, every step of the 26.2 miles from Greenwich to the Mall was a slog and I eventually finished in 5 hours and 27 minutes. There will never be a sub four in me.

But on the positive side, I had started using my challenges to raise awareness for fertility causes – writing books and touring to schools across the country to tell my story.

I want young people today to learn more than ‘how not to get pregnant’. They need to know the warning signs of fertility problems; the impact of age on pregnancy success; the limits, costs and ethics of reproductive science.

And then, finally, I embarked on the biggest journey of my life: to the top of the world. I had heard that very few people had swum the Channel and summitted Everest and that no woman had achieved the ‘Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’ – running a marathon as well. I wanted to give it a go.

I was under no illusion about the dangers. Every year a few hundred people attempt to climb the mountain and several die.

It was going to be especially hard for a middle-aged woman who knew nothing about mountaineering. I had never put on a harness, or tied myself to a rope. I started training – climbing all the highest mountains in the UK, and around the world.

I spent hours going up hills with a pack on my back. This inspired me to take on another endurance challenge far more suited to an arty girl – listening to every single episode of my favourite radio programme – Desert Island Discs.

The show’s castaways became my companions – their wisdom and music fuelling me. They inspired me to start creating playlists for every aspect of life. For the mountains; for the mornings; for the sun, wind and rain. Music to cheer me up when I was feeling down. To push me through a final mile.

I also start creating playlists for my family – my parents, grandparents, Peter. And I created a playlist for ‘Molly’ our longed for, imagined child. For her I chose Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ because all every mother wants is for their child to be happy. Creating these playlists brought me joy and has enabled me to cherish my family – including those I’ve lost and never had at all.

It took me six years of training and three attempts to summit Everest – whom I now call Chomolungma which is her original Tibetan Sherpa name and means ‘Mother Goddess of the World’.

The first try was a non attempt – in 2020 two weeks before I was due to fly to Nepal the mountain was closed due to Covid. I went back in 2021 but was unable to summit. I got sick but also wasn’t fit enough.

I returned for a final time in 2022. My six-day climb began with crossing the Khumbu Icefall. A tumbling cascade of giant blocks of ice, which at any moment can crash down and obliterate you. You have to cross cavernous crevasses with hundreds of metres of blackness below you on lightweight wobbly metal ladders wearing crampons. It’s like treading a tightrope in stilettos. I projectile vomited for 11 hours until we reached Camp 1.

The sickness weakened me and when we reached Camp 2, I had to rest and recover for two days. And from there we still had to reach Camp 3 up the legendary Lhotse Face, a near verticle ice wall, and to Camp 4 on the South Col from where you commence the final ascent – which for me was another 13 long hours upwards through the night.

At 7.30am on the 14 May 2022, I finally made it. But reaching the top of a mountain is only half of the journey. My descent was to become the biggest test of all. Several hours later, at 8,000 metres in the Death Zone – so called because it is too high for helicopter rescue and there isn’t enough air to survive for more than a few hours – I was involved in a freak accident.

Somebody’s oxygen cylinder came hurtling down the mountain, knocking me over and breaking my left leg. Most climbers need at least two bottles of oxygen to reach the summit. The extra bottles are carried on the back of your bag or, sometimes, shamefully thrown away when finished.

I’ll never know whether the bottle was dislodged or discarded. But the result was the darkest two days of my life in which I looked death in the face.

Everyone who climbs Everest is attached in single file to the same safety rope (without it the blow would have knocked me off the mountain). There was someone from my team in front of me and someone behind, and for a while they did what they could to help.

They took off my pack and carried it for me. But the situation was highly stressful for all of us as the injury had made me a life-threatening liability and everyone’s oxygen was running out. I could hardly move and at one point told them to leave me there to die and save themselves.

I crawled to Camp 4 where I passed out and when I woke up I discovered I had lost my sight due to snow and altitude blindness. This added an extra layer of terror.

Thankfully it returned after a couple of hours but even then the ordeal was far from over. I still had get down to Camp 2 where I could be rescued by helicopter. A descent that might usually take a few hours took a whole day – every slow painful step a game of Russian Roulette, my only support in that time Ibuprofen.

When I finally got to the relative safety of Camp 2, I collapsed and all I remember after that is lying in a tent vomiting.

The next day the weather was terrible and it was touch and go whether a helicopter would be able to land but suddenly I heard its thrum. I was carried to it in a frantic blur of sherpa, ice and pain and flown to hospital in Kathmandu.

My accident is not something I’d ever wish on anyone. But nor would I change it. Facing death has made me want to live. And one of the greatest gifts of my adventure from sea to summit is the renewed and profound relationship it has given me with Nature.

For a long time, I felt like she (Nature) didn’t love me because she wouldn’t give me a baby. Now I believe she does and saved my life – because all my injuries were man-made and if the weather hadn’t remained clement I would have surely died.

My adventures have turned the negative experiences of my life into positive. They have given me something else to focus on and the hardness of them has given me more strength to face everyday ups and downs.

I have become an activist for the power of adventure to improve your mental and physical health (including micro adventures closer to home and less dangerous).

The key is doing something new that requires effort. It makes you feel energised and ‘alive’. So I may never be a mother. I think I will always be carrying the grief of my personal life in my rucksack.

But in the words of Louis Armstrong, in one of the most selected Desert Island Discs songs of all time, I truly believe that it is (mostly) a ‘Wonderful World’.

• Save Me from the Waves: An Adventure from Sea to Summit by Jessica Hepburn (£17.99, Aurum) is published this Thursday 7 March

At a dizzying height of 29,029 feet (8,848 metres), climbing Mount Everest is one of the greatest challenges on Earth. 

But climbers are now creating an even bigger challenge for those who have to clean up after them as Mount Everest risks becoming the world’s highest garbage dump.   

Experts estimate that there could be as much as 50 tonnes of rubbish left on the mountain, while Everest Base Camp churns out 75 tonnes of garbage every season.

The waste problem is now so bad that climbers will be forced to carry their own poo back down the mountain.

To understand the sheer scale of the issue, this shocking map reveals the true amount of waste on Mount Everest. 

Mount Everest itself sits within the Sagamartha National Park in the Khumbu region of Nepal. 

This 124,400-hectare UNESCO World Heritage Site contains some of the world’s highest mountains as well as some 200 Sherpa villages.

The number of tourists visiting the park has been steadily increasing for years but has recently begun to grow extremely fast, doubling in the three years between 2014 and 2017.

While the park itself is home to a permanent population of only 7,000, some 60,000 foreign tourists now visit each year along with thousands more Nepalese guides. 

But while these tourists bring in millions for the Nepalese Government and the local economy, they also bring in vast amounts of waste. 

And, as the number of tourists visiting the park has increased over the years, so has the amount of waste generated. 

It is now estimated that each year, between 900 and 1,000 tonnes of solid waste is brought into the park – the vast majority of which never leaves. 

The problem became so bad that in 1991, The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) was founded to try and bring the levels of waste back under control. 

The SPCC now manages waste collection from Everest Base Camp and the trails in the national park. 

And, since 2014, climbers who go beyond Base Camp must bring back 18 lbs (8kg) of rubbish or risk losing their $4,000 (£2,600) deposit. 

Dr Alton Byers, a mountain geologist from the University of Colorado Boulder, has been studying the problem of waste on Mount Everest for decades.

He told MailOnline that the trek up to Everest Base Camp used to be nicknamed the ‘toilet paper trail’ due to how much litter and human waste was left. 

But, in the 20 years since its founding, Dr Byers says that the SPCC has been able to all but eliminate the problem of litter on the trails leading to base camp.

However, despite the SPCC’s efforts, it appears that the issue has not been entirely resolved. 

Every year shocking images show camps littered with tattered tents, abandoned gear, and human waste. 

The SPCC only records how much waste is collected each year and so there are no official estimates for the amount of waste currently on the mountain. 

But, a 2020 paper estimated that there may be 50 tonnes of solid waste left on Everest in the last 60 years.

Additionally, in 2022 the Nepalese Army reported that it had removed around 34 tonnes of waste from Everest and the surrounding mountains, up from 27.6 tonnes in 2021. 

However, any attempts to clean-up Everest only improve the lower camps where Sherpas can be hired to carry waste back down to Base Camp. 

Frédéric Kauffmann, CEO & founder of The NeverRest Project, told MailOnline that the most polluted part of the mountain is Camp Four, the last stop for climbers before the summit. 

Mr Kauffmann says that it is ‘practically impossible’ to collect any of the waste from this site.

‘Camp 4 is located at about 7,900 metres altitude, in the so-called death zone, where climbers spend only a few hours before heading to the summit,’ explains Mr Kauffmann. 

He adds: ‘When descending, they do so very quickly, leaving their accessories behind because of the risk it poses to their lives.’

Recently, Tenzi Sherpa, a Sherpa guide who was climbing the mountain, shared a video of Camp Four saying that it was ‘the dirtiest camp I have ever seen.’

In his post, Tenzi Sherpa wrote: ‘We can see the lots of tents, empty oxygen bottles, steel bowls, spoons, sanitation pad.’

Another serious issue is the human waste that climbers must inevitably leave on the mountain. 

At base camp, where climbers spend most of their time, the SPCC provides toilets where excrement is collected in barrels and carried off the mountain by porters to be dumped in pits.

One of the biggest pits is located between the villages of Gorakshep and Lobuche where an estimated 20,000kg of human waste are dumped each year.

This alone creates a risk that the water supply may become contaminated, but, above Everest Base Camp there is no such system. 

No official data exists for how much excrement is on the mountain but the SPCC estimates that there might be between one and three tonnes between Camp One and Camp Four.

With temperatures known to drop to -60°C (-76°F), excrement does not fully degrade, leaving human stools visible on rocks.

Half of that waste is believed to be at Camp Four where the terrain is so windswept that there is not even snow and ice to hide the tonne of human excrement. 

That is in addition to the 240,000 litres of urine which Mr Kaufmann estimates are deposited directly onto the Khumbu Glacier each year during the 60 days of peak season. 

He says: ‘With the spring melt, the urine filters into rivers that feed nearby villages, people, animals, and crops, posing a health risk due to its bacteriological content.’

However, the waste left on the mountain itself may not even be the biggest problem. 

Dr Byers says: ‘The bulk of the attention has been on garbage on Everest because, as the Sherpas say, there is only one Everest. 

‘But I have always felt that the garbage on Everest is cosmetic; you pick it up and you take it out.’

He says that the bigger issue is how to handle the hundreds of tonnes of waste generated by a tourist industry serving 60,000 foreigners each year.

In the Spring climbing season of 2023, the SPCC collected 75 tonnes of waste from Everest Base Camp alone.

This included almost 26 tonnes of burnable waste, 12 tonnes of non-burnable waste, nine tonnes of kitchen waste, and 21.5 tonnes of human waste. 

In theory, this waste is supposed to be transported to Kathmandu for recycling, but Dr Byers doesn’t believe that this is necessarily the case.

He says: ‘Now what we’re learning is that there really are no recycling facilities.

‘Every year tonnes and tonnes of sometimes toxic waste is being buried in landfills throughout the Mount Everest National Park.’

Dr Byers estimates that there are between 100 and 120 open landfill pits within the national park along with an unknown number of other pits that have been filled and buried. 

And whatever waste is not buried is simply burned, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and contaminating the groundwater.

So, while the SPCC might be able to keep Everest itself clean, the thriving tourism industry drawn in by the Mountain may be slowly poisoning the surrounding area. 

‘You have to distinguish between the problem of litter and the problem of contamination,’ Dr Kaufmann added.

‘Litter you can just collect and burn it, but contamination is the unseen problem.

‘We can put men on the moon, but we have still not been able to solve the problem of thousands of tonnes of garbage going into one of the most beautiful areas in the world and never coming out.’ 

• People who climb Mount Everest will have to take their poop back to base camp
• The rules stem from concerns that the feces left on Everest are not completely broken down

By Shivali Best for Mailonline

Published: 05:24 EST, February 9, 2024 | Updated: 06:41 EST, February 9, 2024

This 4-year-old has etched her name in history and overcome all trials to reach great heights, truly!

Reaching great heights is all we strive for. To achieve something great and be satisfied with it. It looks like Zara has literally reached great heights at the age of 4! Zara Šifra made history when she climbed Mount Everest base camp, becoming the youngest person to do so. She climbed the highest mountain peak together with her father David Šifra and her seven-year-old brother.

Achieving this feat is not easy. This is a tough task that requires a lot of physical and emotional investment. Mountain climbing itself requires strength. Facing such challenges, David Sifra reportedly kept a close eye on his children's oxygen levels.

According to a post shared by Sasa Jede on Instagram: “Zara climbed several five thousand peaks as part of the event. There was no problem during the march, the acclimatization went well above average, little Zara, thanks to her very good physical condition, even surpassed hundreds of other trekkers, who also started the vast majority of the climb from Lukla airport. It is necessary to emphasize that the conditions in hostels, in the so-called lodges, are very limited and they do not burn there, the bedrooms were sometimes below -10 °C.”

The climb to Everest base camp is not for the faint of heart, regardless of age. The treacherous journey, characterized by severe altitude sickness and the risk of fatalities, requires extraordinary physical and mental strength. Symptoms usually manifest between six and 24 hours after reaching an altitude of more than 3,000 meters above sea level.

Mount Everest is the highest peak in the world, reaching an astonishing height of 29,030 feet. The altitude poses significant challenges, making it imperative for climbers to acclimatize gradually to avoid altitude-related health problems.