Everyone may already know Ryan's story, but here is a summary of his short life so far. Not long after he was born on 30 of September 2013, Ryan had contracted a virus called Enterovirus that attacked his heart leaving the left side of his heart practically frozen and the right side pumping fiercely, but we didn’t find this out until he had been readmitted back into hospital while we was in Leicester Glenfield for two weeks. They had tried many medicines to try and get his heart to function work again, but failed to show any improvement. They did fantastic work there and Gary raised £480.00 for Movember for Glenfield Heart Unit.

When there was not a lot more they could offer we was then transferred to be closer to home  and see if Birmingham Children’s Hospital could offer any more support and after a couple of weeks of more medications, with still no more improvement they offered surgery to put a band on the artery and having failed to make any difference of the function of the heart we were then put in touch with Newcastle.

Freeman Hospital in Newcastle were offering a treatment called the Berlin Heart, they were the first hospital in the UK to have the Berlin heart and still have the best success rate outside of Berlin . Ryan had a lengthy surgery to have a pump fitted to the left side of the heart and a day later found out the right side isn’t so strong as first thought and needed to have the pump on the other side to make the pumps something called Bi-vad.

Ryan was on the Berlin Heart fro around 5 months then got really poorly due to clots going to his brain and gut causing him to have some gut removed. He was put on ECMO as his lungs had also collapsed, they did absolutely everything they could for Ryan. The staff also supported us all as a family. Ryan lost his fight on the 17th May 2014, we just want to give something back to the unit to say a big thank you to everyone at the Freeman and show our appreciation!