Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page. If you’d be willing and able to donate whatever you can, no matter how small, I’d be very grateful. This is my first half marathon and I’m both excited and nervous to be running it. If you’re not keen on medical details, please accept my thanks for your sponsorship and click on the purple/pink Donate button over there on the right. If you’re curious as to why someone living in London is running a Nottingham race for a Nottingham charity and you aren’t squeamish, go ahead and read on. Fair warning....

In the summer of 2009, I became a mother for the first time, by Caesarean section. Nothing dramatic, just one of those things. I had some complications and ended up back in my local hospital three weeks later with a secondary post partum haemorrhage. It’s relatively unusual, affecting only around 1% of women. However, what happened next was even more rare and life-threatening, and is why I have this fundraising page.

When my son was about one month old, we went to visit my family near Nottingham. I felt much better and everything seemed to be healing normally. It should have been a weekend visit, one night, to spend time with my parents and to introduce the little one to his great-grandparents. But just a few hours after we arrived, I had to visit A&E at the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham with further postpartum complications. That visit became an emergency admission, and emergency surgery at midnight. An internal infection had caused the incision in my uterus to re-open and I was haemorrhaging again. After a night in an operating theatre, a transfusion of several units of blood and of plasma, I woke up the next morning in intensive care in QMC with tubes in both arms, and my neck. A senior surgeon had been called over from Nottingham City hospital in the middle of the night to assist. I spent a further day in a High Dependency Unit, and then another five days on a ward on IV antibiotics before being allowed home. If it wasn’t for the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, healthcare assistants and other staff of both Nottingham hospitals, I wouldn’t be here today to tell the story. 

Growing up near Nottingham, I had heard of the Robin Hood marathon events but until this year it never crossed my mind to take part. However, having run my first 10K last year and looking for a new challenge this year, if I was going to run a half marathon this one was high on the list. When I saw that the Nottingham Hospital Charity was one of the affiliates, my mind was made up. Robin Hood Half it is!

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you can now click that Donate button and give something to the charity for the hospitals that were there for me when I needed them that night.

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving - they'll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they'll send your money directly to the charity. So it's the most efficient way to donate - saving time and cutting costs for the charity.