This is my niece Olivia who is vibrant cheeky 2 year old and a little pocket rocket, however her first 18 months were incredibly tough.

Olivia was born in January 2017 with an exomphalos, requiring surgery day one of her life.  She spent her first few weeks in the Neonatal intensive care unit at Southampton and received incredible medical, surgical and nursing care by the team looking after her and made a fantastic recovery.  During the first 3 months of her life it was becoming clear that things weren't quite right with Olivia, she wasn’t gaining weight and was having frequent urine infections resulting in multiple hospital admissions including the high dependency unit.  After numerous investigations it was discovered that Olivia had bilateral ectopic ureters (her ureters draining her kidneys, joined her urethra, bypassing her bladder) which was why Olivia had been so unwell as any small urine infection went straight to her kidneys making her incredibly sick.  At 10 months old, Olivia had a big operation lasting 7 hours at Southampton hospital to plumb her ureters into her bladder.  She was in a lot of pain after the operation but again, the team worked hard to make her as comfortable as possible and after a week long stay she went home.  We thought and hoped this would be the last operation Olivia would need, but Olivia started to become increasingly unwell from the beginning of January 2018 and in March 2018 Olivia was  blue lighted to Southampton Childrens Hospital as she was beginning to go into renal failure, the team once again were incredible and with their expertise she was stabilised before being transferred to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital for emergency surgery and another long admission. 

We know Olivia isn’t out of the woods yet and will need more operations, but she is currently well and thriving!  The urology ward at Southampton has and will continue to provide fantastic care to Olivia and all other children and their families. We all know the NHS does amazing this and this is just one example of what Southampton Children's Hospital do on a daily basis. I therefore, have decided to climb Mt Elbrus for G4, the ward where Olivia has received most of her excellent NHS care.

The Challenge

Mount Elbrus is a dormant volcano in the Caucasus Mountains in Southern Russia, near the border with Georgia and is generally accepted as the highest mountain on the European continent. At 5,642 m above sea level, Elbrus forms one of the Seven Summits and is the 10th most prominent mountain in the world. On 14th August 2019 I will be heading to Russia for a 9 day climb to the top of Elbrus via the North Route - the physically more challenging of the two. With pretty limited mountaineering experience this will be a serious challenge for me involving use of crampons, ropes and an ice axe. No doubt I’m going to be in all sorts of pain at the top, but hopefully it will all be worth it for a great cause. 

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