About Larissa
"One Life, Live It"
Larissa Gem Fellows
On Saturday 18th January 2014, Larissa Gem was born and completed the Fellows family.
Larissa loved life, always seeking the next adventure and always bringing a smile to everyone she met.
Once in a lifetime you meet a girl like Larissa, she was sassy, a social butterfly with a happy go lucky approach to life, she was up for anything and always said what was on her mind.
She was fierce, sometimes feral but one of a kind and loved by everyone that met her.
Larissa was enjoying a trip of a lifetime in the summer of 2024, travelling around America. She had braved the roller-coasters at Six Flags in Los Angeles, zip-lined down Fremont Street in Las Vegas, enjoyed a Padres baseball game, faced the beam at the top of the Rockefeller, swam in the sea at St. Thomas and partied at a beach club in the Dominican Republic until she started feeling unwell on the 25th August.
The next morning, she was taken to the medical centre on the cruise ship, where she had a seizure and was put into an induced coma. Two days later, on the 28th August Larissa’s family were informed that there was nothing they could do as Larissa had no brain activity and they had to make the painstaking decision to switch off the life support machines. She died at 10.37am (US time) on the 28th August in Belle Vue Hospital, New York.
Following a postmortem, Larissa’s family were informed that unbeknown to them, Larissa had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) and this was the cause of her tragic death.
During their time away, Larissa had a headache, on another day she complained of ‘growing pains’ in her legs and just the day before she had a temperature- all common childhood illnesses that her family weren’t worried about and never imagined that they were symptoms of this horrendous disease.
Larissa’s favourite saying was ‘One Life, Live it’ so in her name, her family created ‘The Larissa Foundation’ with the intention of raising money for a range of charities, whilst also raising awareness and keeping Larissa’s memory alive.
