I was lucky enough to get a place in the London Marathon 2020 and hopefully after two postponements, I will eventually be running it on Sunday 3rd October 2021 and thought it would be a good opportunity to try & raise some money for BeatSCAD, as it is a charity close to my heart & literally too close to my wife Zoe’s. 

It will be almost 3 years to the day, since my wonderful wife suffered a heart attack on 8th October 2018. It was a regular day and she had gone to bed as normal when she complained of pains in her left arm & chest. I tried to dismiss it as she was too young & thought she’d just over done it at hockey at the weekend. As the pain worsened we called for an ambulance & after doing an ECG she was blue lighted into hospital, where she underwent an angiogram & was diagnosed as having had SCAD causing the heart attack. Until this point I, like a lot of people, had never heard of SCAD. It’s not your ‘normal’ heart attack & it mainly affects healthy women between ages of 30-50 but it can happen to anyone. They don’t know why it happens or how to fix it, in fact there is no real medical procedure to repair the damage other than life long medication & hope.

Once Zoe was released from hospital after 5 days, one of the biggest things that stuck out was the lack of knowledge within the medical profession and subsequently lack of support. Zoe really had to do a lot of research herself as well as educate her GP, physios and others in the medical profession, of SCAD.  Even within the specialist Bristol Heart Institute, there were consultants who had never heard of or seen a SCAD patient.  In a strange way, Zoe was actually quite lucky, that when she was taken in, they diagnosed SCAD straight away, as since then we have come across cases where people have been sent away having been told it was angina & then end up going into cardiac arrest and not surviving. 

Fortunately for me, Zoe dealt with it amazingly and took this set back in her stride. Whilst it has been far from easy for her and there have been a lot of low points (and there is still is),  she has tried to remain positive and determined to get back to as normal a life as possible. Whilst she has managed to get on with her life, she will always have the reminder of her SCAD from the daily medications & constant worry as to whether it will happen again (1 in 5 who have a SCAD have a re-occurrence) and it has had an impact on her physically as she has to try & control her heart rate whilst exercising and she gets tired a lot more quickly & nauseous but with her determined attitude she never gives up and doesn't use the heart attack as an excuse to not get on with her life to the full.

I am not expecting the London Marathon to be easy. Being competitive, I am not one who would just be happy to finish it but would also want to run a time to do me justice and I imagine it will be painful for a few hours of running & I will ache a lot afterwards. However, I will quickly recover and the few months of training & then running the 26 miles will be nothing compared to what Zoe went through and had to recover from, but I thought I should at least try & do something positive from it and raise some money for BeatSCAD as well as trying to raise awareness. 

BeatSCAD's mission is to increase awareness, provide support to patients and to raise money to further research into the causes and treatment of SCAD. As I mentioned earlier, there is very little knowledge as to what causes SCADs and how to treat it. 

If you would like to sponsor me it would be appreciated to help motivate me during the training & the race .However, raising awareness is just as important so please take time to visit BeatSCAD http://beatscad.org.uk/ as you never know it could happen to someone close to you (or even you) when you least expect it. When I went to bed on the 8th October 2018, the last thing I expected was for Zoe to have a heart attack! 

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