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As most of you know, during the 20 week anomaly scan our son was diagnosed with the CHD (congenital heart disease) HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome). We were given our options and after 4 weeks of soul-searching and heart-breaking research we made our decision to go down the route of giving Alfred every chance we could to enable him to have his life. This would have meant a series of open-heart operations (the first planned at around 4 days old) and an eventual need for a heart transplant. Despite the awfulness of putting our son through this, we knew we had to give him the chance of having a happy life; he would have been so loved by everyone who knew him.

However, as every child is different, every person with HLHS is different. When he was born, Alf could never be stabilised. He had blood clots (something that could not have been predicted) which were quickly cutting off the circulation to vital parts of his body - the experienced doctors at Southampton had never encountered this before and weren't sure of the exact cause. They eventually attributed it to extremely sluggish circulation, which was slow even by HLHS standards. This clotting issue meant that Alfred would not have survived the operations he needed on his heart in order to let him live, let alone the operations needed to remove the parts of his body the clots had damaged. So we let him go. This was not a case of letting him die - we knew it was right even though it went against everything we wanted to do. When I saw him on the morning of his last day, he looked at me (which was rare due to him being sedated for most of the time) and I just knew that he'd had enough. He'd fought for a week, we'd fought for a week (which doesn't sound like a long time, but believe me, it felt it) not to mention the last few months of pregnancy. In the end he died in my arms having us sing to him, recite The Gruffalo to him and tell him how much we loved him. It was a peaceful death.

That was three and a half years ago - those have not been peaceful. The pain of the death of a child is indescribable and does not get better. You just get better at dealing with it - sometimes. However, I don't want Alf's life and death to not have meant something, so here I am. As people who know me well know, I am not sporty. I spent most of my secondary school life avoiding games lessons and hiding somewhere rather than be made to do sport. But things change and I am fed up of feeling so utterly bereft and totally miserable so I decided to do this - for myself, for Dave and Jonny and, ultimately, for Alfred. I need something to look forward to, a challenge and something good to come out of all of this. So please wish me luck as I will need as much support as possible to get through this - the run is the day after Alfred's 4th birthday! Above all, please donate what you can to help fund research into heart defects and to help the people and their families living with them.

Thank you for reading this. X