Thanks for taking the time to visit Mark & Heather Osterritter's & my JustGiving page.

In memory of Paula Garnham, her fight for life & her love for myself, family, friends & life's important things, Mark, Heather & Myself have entered all 5 of the 2012 British Gas Great Swim Open Water 1 Mile events being held in various lakes around the UK ( www.greatswim.org/Default.aspx ). We're aiming to raise sponsorship funds on behalf of the Pulmonary Hypertension Association UK (PHA UK) which is the UK charity organisation that promotes & supports awareness of this very rare disease that Paula had & provides invaluable support for all sufferers in the UK, dealing with this terrible disease that can effect children, adults& OAP's at any time in their lives.

Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is a very rare, life threatening lung disease in which the blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs elevates to high levels, putting added stress on the right side of the heart & thereby reducing the amount of essential oxygen that is able to reach the organs & tissues of the body.
Because of its rarity & the fact that it shares many symptoms with other more common conditions like asthma, it can take two years or more for PH to be diagnosed. There is no cure, but there are effective treatments that can help sufferers if they are diagnosed early in the disease progression. Untreated, however, PH has a worse prognosis than many forms of Cancer.

I met & fell in love with Paula in April 2007 & was going to ask her to be my wife in Dec 2011 during the Xmas hotel break I'd booked for us - but unfortunately never got to ask her because Paula finally lost her fight with this disease 4 months before (Aug 2011).
Paula lived in Haverhill, with Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) for just over 8 years (& auto-immune hepititus for 5 years). She endeavoured to live as normal a life as she could, even though she was unable to continue work & had to stay in her house for days at a time. Paula was on an oxygen supply for a minimum of 14 hours a day, had to take nearly 20 tablets a day to fight the disease & had other complications she had to deal with. She had an electro-mechanical syringe pump pumping a drug 24/7 into her neck vein to keep her alive & during her time with PH, had a maximum amount of sleep per night of ~2 to ~3 hours for the 8 years.
For 90% of her time Paula was restricted to her house or bed due to her illness. But with all that she had to contend with, she always wanted to look at her beautiful best, have a nice clean & tidy home & when possible get out to enjoy a meal, movie or seeing family & friends when she was feeling OK to do so. Paula was a very strong lady & always fought any complication she faced & proved the doctors wrong by living for a further 3 years than they predicted.

Each swim we're doing is One Mile in distance & must be swum in swimming wetsuits.

The 2012 Great Swim Open Water event venues are :
London Victoria Docks (26 May)
Alton Water Park, Nr Ipswich (16 June)
Windermere (23 June)
Manchester Salford Quays (1 July)
Strathclyde Country Park (25 August)

Heather's dad, John, is also joining us for the events at London & Ipswich (& possibly the Manchester event).

Please donate as much as you can for us to help the PHA UK to help other sufferers of this rare incurable lung disease. Paula would have been so proud to see Mark, Heather, John & myself undertaking all these swims & she would have been our biggest cheerleader for what we're doing. Please help us to remember Paula as all those who knew her do still today after we lost her last August, by raising funds for this very worthy organisation.

Many thanks for your help & any support possible you're able to give.

Simon Coleman,
Mark & Heather Osterritter

 

So please dig deep and donate now.