For Tiny Tickers Heart Week, Freddie and I will be walking 50k over one week, starting on 13th February when Freddie turns 9 months old. I will be walking with Freddie on my back - to put this into context he weighs over 11kg and is very wriggly! 

Freddie was born on 13th May 2020 and at 3 days old was found to have a serious heart condition, which caused him to be in heart failure by the time he was 6 weeks old. Over the summer we spent much of our time in and out of hospital, until he had life saving open heart surgery at just 3 months old, to repair the large holes in his heart. 

After a very difficult first month of Freddie's life, I found Tiny Tickers. Their parents group and support page were a lifeline, it meant that I could speak with other parents going through the same thing as us. This was more important than ever as covid meant that during all hospital stays we were alone, only seeing Dan when we swapped over outside of the ward once a day. 

Tiny Tickers are a very small charity, whose main goal is to better diagnose and detect congenital heart disease. By training up Sonographers to detect CHD at the 20 week scan and putting special machines in hospitals across the country to measure oxygen levels in newborns. At present, only around half are being detected at prenatal scanning and around 1000 babies leave hospital each year with their heart defect undetected.