Put Your Money Where Your Feet Are...

August 29th 2011

When Louise was 10 days old she went into heart failure, that is, she started dying. By having been blessed to have been born into the First World, she was admitted immediately to hospital and operated on a few days later. If she had been born into the Developing World I would now be placing flowers on a small grave instead of making funny Facebook photo albums chronicling her misdemeanours. 

Instead of being admitted into a world class cardiac unit, she may have been brought to a facility bereft of supplies, personnel or facilities for her surgery and would have died of heart failure shortly afterwards. This world isn’t fair and probably never will be but each person can only do what they can do. I can’t become a billionaire benefactor to all these children, I can’t donate my medical expertise because I don’t have any, but I do have two legs and though I cannot at this moment run 10 kilometres, if I start now, I will be able to by next year.

There is an international organisation based in America International Children's Heart Foundation (www.babyheart.org) who bring doctors, surgeons, equipment and everything else required on missions to developing countries and perform life-saving heart surgery on children who would otherwise die. In the process they also provide training for doctors in these countries to leave a legacy where less and less of these precious children will die and hopefully they will go on to leave a trail of mischief in their wake just like my beautiful Louise. All of the doctors do this completely free of charge, often during their only holiday.

I am going to do the mini-marathon for them next year and I really hope to raise as much money as is humanly possible. While fundraising I will hopefully be able to raise awareness of Dandy-Walker Malformation and PHACE Syndrome as I intend in using my very talkative personality to grab every opportunity to talk about it as I can.

So I’m warning my family and friends…start saving now. I will be looking for LARGE donations. Nobody ever knows what is around the next corner and everyone reading this well knows, if it’s illness, you are among the world’s privileged minority.

Thank You,

Jennifer xx