“We know that she’ll be with us in spirit”

PUBLISHED APRIL 2024

“We’re a very small family, and Leslie lived with her sister Linda who has a mild learning disability. So she had caring responsibilities before she became ill, and once she was diagnosed with PH, it was a case of them caring for each other.

It was fortunate that her PH was picked up by the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Glasgow quite early, as it meant she got started on treatment quickly. That gave her a decade of really good quality of life, before we lost her a year ago.

Lesley had a great sense of humour, despite all the challenges, and she always positive. That was massive; her ability to get out of bed every day and just tackle everything. She was incredibly caring, and always thinking about other people, rather than being solely focused on the illness.

I moved away to study in Ediburgh from 2018 until 2022, which is when my younger brother Rory became more involved in caring for Lesley. As well as providing emotional support he learned how to make up her drug cartridges, as she was on a Hickman line, and that all had a massive impact on his decision to train to be a pharmacist – which he’s doing now at university.

Lesly passed away on 27^th February 2023. Rory and I had already decided to do the Edinburgh Half Marathon that summer, with the hope that she would have been there to cheer us on. But it wasn’t meant to be.

After chatting through some ideas over Christmas, we decided to do something really positive in her memory by running a half marathon every month for a year. We know she’ll be there with us in spirit. We started with the Inverness Half Marathon on 10th March  –  the day she would have turned 57.

As well as raising money, it’s important for us to raise awareness of PH through doing this too. It’s misrepresented, it takes too long to diagnose, and it’s essential more than ever to spread the word. I want more people to talk about it, and to have PH in their vocabulary, and to understand that anyone can be impacted by it. You can be a top athlete, and you could get hit with illness like this, and it could just wipe you off your feet.

I miss Lesley a lot and as a family we’re all doing our best to be there for each other. If she was here, I know she’d be at the start and finish line of every event we do, as that’s just the kind of person she was.

As well as the monthly half marathon, I’ll also be cycling 100km each month to add an extra element to the challenge. I’ll be putting my body under stress, to highlight the stress that people with PH have to go through every day of their lives.

Rory is doing his training up at university in Aberdeen, and I’m doing it here in Fife. We spur each other on as although we are very close, we are also quite competitive.

We’re almost at our fundraising total already, and I’m hoping we’ll smash that soon. We’ve got a whole year to keep asking for sponsorship, and that’s the beauty of the longevity of the challenge, as it will keep the conversations about PH going too.”

You can sponsor Duncan and Rory here