Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

I've had this idea for a while now and thought it would be a good idea to help others in the process.

I will be kayaking the 25 miles from the River Mole in Esher to the Millennium Bridge with 3 of my colleagues, starting at 4am on 4th June (which is a Monday morning).

As many people who may be reading this know, our son Dylan was born 13 weeks premature at Kingston Hospital, the day after my birthday in 2017.

He didn't have the easiest start in life - 

• Born at 27 weeks, weighing 2.5lbs
• Received CPR at birth and didn't take his own first breath for 8 minutes
• Lungs collapsed and it took a lot of work from a team of 14 doctors and midwives in delivery to stabilize him.
• He headed off to his incubator, which was home for the next 10 weeks
• Kerry and I weren't able to hold him until he was 5 days old, and only then with the help of one of the nurses
• He continued to feed through his umbilical line few a few days until they could get a feeding tube in. He couldn't breast feed and didn't drink from a bottle until 7 weeks old
• He had multiple intravenous lines for his many drugs and supplements 
• He continually stopped breathing throughout his stay in hospital and the team, and us at times, had to get him breathing again.
• His resting heart rate varied from over 200 to his crashes in the 50's, when his oxygen saturation's would fall to 40-50% (they should be 95%+)
• He had four blood transfusions, due to the amount blood taken for tests in hospital, which was a daily occurrence

Ironically Dylan was one of the stronger babies during his stay in the Neonatal Unit and we had to watch every day as other babies on the unit struggled through their early lives.

Kerry spend the first 3 months of her maternity leave in hospital, averaging 12 hours a day with our son, but leaving him every night never got easier for her.

Eventually he was well enough to come home weighing just 4lbs, even though he looked huge to us, but needed oxygen at home for another 6 weeks.

The little man has been back to hospital many times in his first year but continues to get stronger all the time. 

We can't thank the Neonatal teams enough for all the work they did to get Dylan to where he is today.

I hope by raising some money for the Born Too Soon team at Kingston Hospital, they can help to make other babies and parents lives better through the work they do. As well as providing phenomenal care to Dylan, Pauline and the neonatal nurses were a huge support to Kerry during a very tough period of our lives.

Your donations will help to fund :

Various Breathing Machines - £5-10k each
Incubator - £32k
Parents' room in the NICU

More information on the charity at https://borntoosoon.info/

Thanks.