1 in every 125 babies is born in the UK with a serious heart condition. Please help me raise some money for the life saving work Tiny Tickers achieves.

As many of you are aware, our Ellie had a rocky journey in her 1st year when her many heart defects were not detected pre- and post-natally. It was the biggest shock a mum could receive when I was sat by myself in an assessment room being told the light of my whole world was extremely unwell. Her little heart had been severely struggling from birth and her SATS (oxygen levels) were never higher than 70% - to the point new nurses on shift kept thinking the machine was broken.

It was when she was 9 months old when a trainee GP doing standard checks during an appointment for something completely unrelated, who noticed something was concerning. We were sent straight to hospital and within 2 weeks of this her SATS were dropping to 30% and 40% oxygen which became life-threatening and an emergency that needed urgent Gt Ormond St intervention and surgery. We were lucky it was caught JUST in time and we are aware that's not always the case for some seriously ill children. We arrived at GOSH in early December and were finally discharged with an NG tube early March, and then had months of tube feeding and home administered medications to get used to.

I will never lose the painful memories we went through before and after surgery. Watching my baby girl fight for her life on several occasions and being told to prepare for the worst, was the most unimaginably difficult thing to experience and I would not wish that upon any other parent. The 100,000 to 1 complications she suffered were contributed by the late diagnosis and therefore late treatment, and Tiny Tickers is aiming to stop this!

Tiny Tickers strives to stop defects being missed! Training sonographers to better detect heart defects and putting SATs machines into neonatal wards in order to check newborns are some of the key things they do! If they'd simply put a SATs probe on her foot before we were discharged from the labour ward the alarms would have sounded, and 9 months later she wouldn’t have been at GOSH awaiting immediate surgery.

I was blown away by your generosity last year and I am now back again, asking for your help to raise some money.

Sweepstake:

£5 donation = 1 number between 1 and 125. (Numbers can be requested if they have not already been assigned. Any of the 125 numbers not assigned before the draw will be entered as Tiny Tickers, and if they are picked, the prize money will be added to the donation pot)

Winner of the sweepstake will receive £25 and chocolates!