In April 2025, I will be taking on the huge challenge of running the London Landmarks Half Marathon for the British Heart Foundation - along with my two wonderful cousins (who came up with the idea!). Thank you so much in advance for donating whatever you can, it really will make a massive difference.

On February 1st 2024, my Father, Adam Stuart, died totally unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 65. He had been decorating the downstairs bathroom in the day before it happened that night. He had been on a holiday of a lifetime to India with my Mother in the November of the previous year. We had just enjoyed a happy and peaceful Christmas as a family together. He had driven to Bolton hospital from Chester one week before his passing to help me look after my girlfriend, who had been taken ill at the time. This was not a man that anyone would have expected to be leaving us so soon, and so suddenly.

As people do, my Mother and I began to pick through the wreckage of what had happened to us, attempting to work out whether we had missed something we shouldn't have. Were there obvious signs we had missed? Was it our fault, or my Dad's, for not spotting some red flags in his health? He had been suffering from long covid for the best part of a year beforehand, which was causing him breathlessness, and meant he couldn't walk as far as he normally would. He had mental health issues which sometimes drained him of his energy and verve for life; meaning he would sleep in the day sometimes, and lean on his vape as a crutch. He would occasionally be sick in the night. Me and Mum would normally put that down to some secret drinking. In recent times, he had also had some patchy dry skin on his face, that would irritate him slightly. Naturally, we assumed it was to do with sensitive skin, which he had several topical creams prescribed to treat. We only very recently found out skin issues such as these can be an indicator of high cholesterol.

By the time the coroners report found that my Dad had died from Ischaemic Heart Disease and Coronary Artery Atheroma; we had done enough reading, thinking, fretting, agonising about it all to not be totally surprised by the outcome. Clearly some of his other issues had been masking a much more dangerous heart disease growing beneath the surface; and we have had to battle hard to not punish ourselves for not getting to the bottom of this before it was too late, ever since his passing.

But whenever I take myself back to that morning on February 1st; to hearing the news over the phone from my Mother that my Father had died; I am reminded that the agony of the moment was not one I was expecting. The only word to describe my response to the news is shock. All of us: my Mother, Aunt, the rest of the family, our wider circle of friends, were shocked. Clearly no one had looked at my Father's various health challenges and had seen them as anything other than circumstantial. Certainly no one had thought that they might be an indicator of life threatening heart disease. And, clearly, none of his doctors had thought this could be the case either - despite the fact that he was on statins, and that he had had an assessment and a blood test that hadn't raised any concerns as recently as December; just two months before he died. It's tragically evident that none of us really knew what we were witnessing; and none of us knew that the signs of something more sinister could so easily slip under the radar. It's a cautionary tale to remember the importance of looking beneath the surface of an initial diagnosis; to question your, and the doctor's, unconscious assumptions about what the health issues at play might be.

British Heart Foundation do amazing work researching heart and circulatory diseases, and raising awareness from the top of government through to GP surgeries and out to the general public about how to tackle them better than ever before - and I'm very happy to be supporting them in their fundraising.

My Dad would think I'm mad to be doing this - long distance running was not one of his great loves! But he'd be very proud, and quite impressed at my bravery. I'll listen to a playlist of songs he loved to keep me going as I run - and if nothing else, I feel like that experience will feel like a spiritual one, and connect our souls even more closely in some way.

Thanks so much for reading. Look after yourselves. Try to look beneath the surface, and to question the overall picture of your health, if you have concerns. xx