The KFA team have started strong in the ‘Run 4 Respite’ challenge!!
Day 3 – Wednesday, 3rd March 2021
Eight of the KFA Connect team are taking part in ‘Run 4 Respite’ for Naomi House and Jacksplace, a hospice supporting life-limited and life-threatened children and young adults in Winchester.
The challenge involves running, jogging, walking (crawling) 105 miles in the month of March to raise £105 which funds 5 hours of respite care at the hospice.
Our team of 8….
- Have covered 85 miles in 3 days
- Need to cover another 755 miles to make the 840-mile target
- Have already raised £1280 – and we are only 3 days in!
“Having said yes to this challenge – running/jogging/walking 105 miles in a month, I must be honest I initially thought it would be easy.
Today, if I’m completely honest I sit here today wondering if my knees will make it?
Yesterday on my way back home from my run, I bumped into my neighbour (who lost his wife to cancer in May 2020). He asked what on earth I was doing – assuming I must have looked a bit of a mess! So I told him.
I learned that they lost their Grandson 6 years ago to Leukaemia when he was just 9 and that his son’s family had benefited from amazing care from a children’s hospice where they live in Stevenage. It proved to me that we all know a family who has benefited from the type of support Naomi House offers. It made me even more determined.
I watch each day as my colleagues and teammates wrestle for the top spot on the leaderboard of our team challenge with a chuckle, and a slight sinking feeling that they are all fitter and stronger than me! We know it’s not a competition – but it’s funny how the competitive streak in all of us has suddenly come out.
That story of the Hare and the Tortoise also pops into my head… so maybe there is hope for me yet!
Nicki Smith
We will make it because we must!
And if any of us are in need of additional motivation this month we would be sure to find it in the story Joe has written on his Just Giving page…
“When my eldest child Sebastian ‘Bod’ Vavasour was born he was a happy little baby, and I was a typical shell-shocked, proud father, very much in love with him.
At 18 days old he suffered critical heart failure, and thanks to the hard work of the medics and nurses in A&E and then intensive care he survived the night we’d been told he wouldn’t and appeared to make a miraculous recovery. By the time he was a year old, we realised that Sebastian wasn’t making the physical progress that would have been expected of him, and he was diagnosed with Barth Syndrome, an incredibly rare, life-limiting, genetic condition.
When we moved as a family to Hampshire we were a happy unit, finding our way, and having welcomed Gabriel, Sebastian’s brother into our lives. But our lives had also become very medicalised, with multiple weekly blood tests, injections, interventions necessary to care for Sebastian and give him the best life possible, we were put into contact with Naomi House who would be able to provide respite care as Sebastian grew older; for short periods of time in a fantastic environment.
Sebastian didn’t reach his third birthday and died tragically aged two and a half in December 2013 in Great Ormond Street Hospital whilst waiting for a heart transplant.
At the darkest point of our lives, Naomi House arranged the collection of Sebastian from the hospital in London and brought him home for the last time. Then the staff there took us to the Butterfly bereavement suite at the hospice where Sebastian could be looked after before the funeral, and where we were given compassionate and practical help over the next week. They offered warmth and light at this dark time.
Sebastian is memorialised alongside numerous other lives lost early in the beautiful garden of remembrance at Naomi House and we can visit whenever we want.
Everything Naomi House offered to us was given without strings, they and many hospices rely on the donations of people like you and me. I won’t be able to repay them for their amazing work, but I will do what I can.“
The incredible support Naomi House gave to Joe and his family in the days and weeks after losing their son was invaluable and it is important for us to support the charity in order for them to continue to help other families into the future.
You can show your support to Joe and the rest of the KFA Run 4 Respite team (Richard, Liz, Nicki, Julita, Dan, Jim & Pauline) and help Naomi House & Jacksplace continue this vital support.
