I am running the 2025 London Marathon on behalf of Group B Strep Support and to raise awareness of Strep B and the devastating effects it can have on newborns.

In December 2023 we welcomed in to the world our beautiful baby boy, Bowen Jax Heritage. We were in our perfect baby bubble and couldn’t have been more in love with our new addition.

However, at just three weeks old my wife had an overwhelming feeling that something wasn’t right - there were absolutely no signs other than being a bit more unsettled than he had been typically.

My wife insisted that evening that we got Bowen checked out in A&E and thank goodness we did as even though he was peacefully sleeping on arrival at the hospital, his heart rate had spiked to 230BPM and he took a serious turn for the worse.

Straight away we were rushed in to urgent care where they started checking Bowen for heart conditions which thankfully came back fine.

Within the hour of arriving in A&E, Bowen stopped breathing four times and lost all colour in his face and body - we were rushed in to resus where we were surrounded by doctors.

We were transferred to intensive care after Bowen had stabilised and whilst being transferred we were followed by medical staff carrying oxygen and a defibrillator just in case he took a turn on the short journey to ICU.

We will never forget the words after asking “Is he going to die?” No parent wants to hear “Your son is critically ill, but he’s in the right place”.

At that moment my mother in law reminded us that my wife had tested positive for Strep B in pregnancy, this was found coincidently during a UTI test which was present during pregnancy.

She was told not to worry about Strep as the chance of it affecting a newborn is unheard of especially as she was having a c-section. She was given no information during pregnancy of what to look out for so we just put it out of our minds and never considered it could be something that our newborn son would contract after birth.

Bowen was initially being treated for RSV and they were talking about ventilating him however once they started treating him for Strep B as a precaution, his condition improved.

He was in hospital for a week, he had no veins left due to them collapsing, he was covered in tubes, we couldn’t feed him, he had multiple lumbar punctures and there were an endless amount of tests.

Once we got the diagnosis of Strep B, Sepsis and potential Meningitis we realised just how poorly he was.

Thankfully it hadn’t spread to Meningitis, however we started to research in to Strep B as even a lot of the doctors that Bowen was seen by didn’t know a lot about the illness.

We found devastating facts that 1 in 10 babies will die after being diagnosed, 25% will be disabled and so many more terrifying statistics.

We are extremely grateful that our baby boy was a little fighter, he’s gone from being on the 9th percentile and underweight to being our 6 month happy and healthy little chunk. He was lucky that he improved and we are so thankful that we took him that day as if he wasn’t seen, the outcome could’ve been very different.

We are incredibly grateful to the staff that dealt with Bowen throughout; to the doctors, practitioners, nurses, consultants, night staff - the care and compassion each person showed our family helped us through a terrible time. It makes you think how lucky we are to have the NHS and the incredible individuals within it.

More awareness needs to be raised about Strep B, it is awful that 1 in 4 women carry it in pregnancy however there is no information given at all during this time.

Running this marathon means that we can give something back and hopefully support other families who aren’t as lucky as we were and to raise awareness to stop it taking too many precious newborns too soon. We may have been lucky, however it stole our newborn days with Bowen and instead filled us with dread as there is a chance of reoccurrence of Strep B up to 3 months old.

Please help us by donating anything at all and/or sharing - Nothing is too small to help us to support this cause.

Thank you in advance 💙

Bowen - Now