In February this year, my amazing mum suddenly fell ill and ended up in hospital.  It turned out to be a brain tumour and unfortunately we lost her 10 weeks later at the age of 63.  As you can imagine, these 10 weeks were the worst of my life as Dad and I came to terms with the fact we didn't have much time left with Mum.  But the staff at Strathcarron Hospice made sure that, as a family, we had some special memories in the last 3 weeks of Mum's life.  As well as making her as comfortable and pain-free as possible, they went out of their way to make sure she looked her best to receive her many visitors, including painting her nails and doing her hair. In my eyes, they went above and beyond the call of duty to make whatever time she had left as special as it could be.  In addition, the staff treated Dad and I like family - they fed us, kept our spirits up with their great chat and even made up beds for us so we could stay over with Mum and be close to her in the final days.

Whilst I never expected something like this to happen to my family, I feel privileged to have experienced the special place that Strathcarron is.  But these places don't run on air.  They need a lot of money to offer this amazing palliative care to families; to be specific, it takes £65,000 a week to keep the place running.

I know that there are a lot of worthwhile charities but if you can give a little to support my friend Katy and I doing our run for Strathcarron Hospice, we would be extremely grateful.  This 10k is a labour of love for us as we are not accomplished runners; however we have set ourselves the challenge of finishing within one hour, inspired by such a great cause. To help us, we will have our PT instructors/other halves Stuart and Chris to keep us going!

So please dig deep and donate whatever you can - every little helps.

Thanks a million,

Jude