Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

Not everyone I know may be aware, but I, along with my younger brother and other members of my family, suffer from a rare and incurable genetic disorder called Retinitus Pigmentosa that slowly robs people of their sight. I was diagnosed 10 years ago after a lengthy investigation and today, somehow I go about my day to day life having already lost about 70% of the healthy cells in my retina. For me, this means managing things like night blindness, colour blindness, tunnel vision and a bizarre inability to recognize people by face at times (though I must say, this sometimes works to my advantage :) ). Rather than slowing me down, sight loss is encouraging me to live more of my life, I'm doing things specialists have said I shouldn't be able to do at this stage, I lead a relatively normal life, work a normal job, I travel solo, I climb, I even manage to ski, though just walking down the street at night can be as terrifying as anything I've done.

But others with the condition are not so lucky and live, at any age, with an unpredictable decline and more profound blindness.

I've always wanted to run a marathon, but for the past couple of years my lofty dream has given way to chronic knee ligament inflammation which meant at one point it was painful to walk 5k let alone run 10! But through months of ongoing physio, ice packs, pain and patience, I'm up and running (pun gleefully intended! :) ), and almost ready to embark on my first ever 10k race next month (I completed the distance in practice for the first time last week with the knee intact... so far so good).

Now, in an effort to put myself to some good use, I'd like to raise money for RP Fighting Blindness as one of the few charities which exist that do outreach work and support research into finding a cure for RP, if not in time for me, then perhaps in time for my teenage brother. This kind of research gives us and some 20,000 suffers of RP, and the hundreds of thousands with related disorders across the UK genuine hope for the future.

I'd really appreciate your support, and I promise I won't bug you again until I'm up to at least half marathon level!... just tell me I can't do it ;)

Thanks,

Colm

 

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