Personal: Simpsons Special Care Babies – They helped my son, now I want to help them!

My son celebrating his first birthday

Some of you may remember I introduced my son on this blog last year.

He was born 7 weeks early back in May 2014, and spent his first  23 days in the Simpsons Special Care unit. They helped him to breathe, keep warm and feed until he was ready to do those things for himself. He was wonderfully looked after, as were Ruth and I.  We knew he was likely to be delivered early, so the staff had given us a tour in advance, and once he was born they did a fantastic job of making a tough time for all as easy as possible. As a result of their care we have a lovely growing interested happy little boy whom we love very much.

We were so well looked after that I want to say thank you, so I’m running the Edinburgh Marathon Festival Half Marathon for to raise money for Simpsons Special Care Babies at the end of May.  These funds help the hospital get access to equipment, training, and to conduct research that would not otherwise be funded through the NHS.

I hope that by setting myself a big challenge I can encourage some of my friends, family and colleagues to make a contribution to the unit that did so much for us. I only started running in July to get fit after months of hospital visiting, and I followed the “Couch to 5k” plan.  I did my first 5k about 10 weeks later, and I did a 10k in March, but a Half Marathon (13.1 miles / 21.1km) is a big step up – I hope you will see taking it on as a suitable challenge!

The link below is for my fundraising page – if you’d like to help us to thank Simpsons Special Care them for their work, and to help other babies like Arran, then I’d be really grateful if you could sponsor me.

I also understand that we all get a lot of these requests and that we can’t all support all of them.

https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/ianstevenson

Ian