Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

I am doing The Gower Peninsula Ultra Challenge 2026 - Ultra March 1st (~50km 1 Day Challenge)

I will be doing this for a fantastic Charity called The Daisy Garland who have helped my family since my son Callum was diagnosed with Drug resistant epilepsy.

Our Story

At the age of 2 My son had his first major seizure in August 2022 in October 2022 he was diagnosed with epilepsy, after a genetic test he was diagnosed with a rare genetic mutation syndrome known only as KCNa2. One of the conditions this causes is a form of early onset epilepsy that doesn't respond well to medication. And so it was for our son — nothing worked, and Great Ormond Street Hospital prescribed the ketogenic diet, a medically supervised high fat diet that is low in carbohydrate and has enough protein for growth. The diet is something that we had hoped could be avoided because it meant a little boy who loved his food would have his diet massively restricted. It would also mean a significant increase in the cost of the weekly shop and hours of meticulous food preparation each day for his parents. But it was an easy decision for them - it might mean a reduction in seizures and the damage they

Parenting a child with developmental, behavioural, and movement conditions is hard. Add intractable epilepsy and the ketogenic diet and it feels almost impossible. For our family, the one shining light in the past few years has been The Daisy Garland. Not only does this tiny charity fund NHS dieticians around the UK, they supply as many night-time breathing monitors as they can afford to those most in need, offer specialist cooking lessons and recipes, fund training in epilepsy, send welcome packs and food samples, manage support groups,

The reason that The Daisy Garland cares is that it is a charity set up by Daisy's mum. The ketogenic diet had transformed Daisy's epilepsy until an unrelated medical error triggered

an escalation in seizures. She died from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) when she was six years old.

Has the diet helped our son? Yes, it has. It's not been easy and it's not going to cure his epilepsy, but he's having significantly fewer seizures than he had on medication alone.

And The Daisy Garland has held our hand through it all. We will be eternally grateful to them.