50th birthday challenge.  Mid-life crisis I hear you say? Maybe ☺, but there is more to the story as you will see below and I hope you will dig deep and support my cause to raise money for Renal Unit support.  I will be funding the trip and climb entirely so every penny you donate will be going to the charity to help support the great work that they do.

Why Renal Patient Support?

1985 - I was 13 years old, living in Malawi and at boarding school in Blantyre when I got the phone call from my Mom to tell me that my Dad was being medically evacuated to South Africa. Various tests and investigations resulted in the removal of one of his kidneys, which the Doctor’s thought had likely been under developed from birth and had finally given up.   

Fast forward to 2000, another phone call and another medivac, this time from Uganda to Kenya and this time it was kidney failure - the prognosis dialysis.  Dad’s only option to return to the UK, get the treatment he needed to keep him alive and have the chance to be on the transplant list (sadly my Mom, sister and I were not suitable matches).  The Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital’s renal centre supported Dad throughout his time on dialysis.  The Norfolk Renal Fund is strongly linked to this Renal centre and was established to supplement the NHS. Sadly, Dad never got a transplant and died in 2005. 

Why Kilimanjaro?

Dad took a job in Malawi in 1979 and we emigrated from the UK; I was 7 years old.  For the next 23 years on each flight I took back to the UK I would be haunted by the beauty of Kilimanjaro (and the pilot’s reminder that it on the left ☺) and vowed one day to climb it and embrace the beauty that taunted me most of my life.

It seems fitting to do it on my 50th birthday (I plan to summit on the actual day), in memory of my Dad, raising money for a unit  that will help to support, protect and treat those that are susceptible to kidney disease.