Some fundraising challenges are about more than crossing the finish line. For sisters Chloe and Hannah Newman, the Royal Parks Half Marathon was a deeply personal journey, inspired by their family’s experience of the life-changing impact a hospital garden can have.
On 11 October, Chloe and Hannah took on the 13.1-mile challenge to raise vital funds for the John King Brain Tumour Foundation. Inspired by the difference a hospital garden made during their dad’s lengthy recovery following a serious cycling accident, the sisters have already raised an outstanding £4,000, helping support the Foundation’s work to create and enhance spaces that bring comfort, hope and connection to patients and their families.
Their Dad was admitted to St George’s Hospital following a serious cycling accident in May 2022. During his lengthy recovery, the McKissock Garden became far more than an outdoor space. It provided their family with somewhere peaceful to spend time together, gave their dad a sense of freedom and normality while he was in hospital, and became an important part of his physical and emotional recovery.
Now, with the John King Brain Tumour Foundation having adopted the McKissock Garden and recently opened the new Neuro-ICU Roof Garden, Chloe and Hannah want to help create and enhance spaces that can offer other patients and their families that same sense of hope, comfort and connection.
Neither describes themselves as a runner, making the Royal Parks Half Marathon a particularly ambitious challenge. But, as they explain in their own words below, they are determined to complete it together, for their dad, for the charity, and for the families who may one day benefit from these special spaces.
This is their story.
‘Why We are Running’
In May 2022 our dad was hit by a car when out on a bicycle ride. He suffered two neck fractures and spinal injuries. He was blue lighted to St George’s Hospital.
In the ICU the specialist advised us the likelihood that whatever his condition was in a week’s time would be his ‘new normal’. A week later he was bedridden, he couldn’t feel or move his right arm or legs and was being fed through a tube. It was not looking good, and Mum was probably going to be a full-time carer for the rest of their lives.
After ICU he was moved to the High Dependency Unit before then moving to the Brodie Ward. On the way he was taken through the McKissock Garden and this opportunistic detour became a seminal moment in his recovery. The family received an unexpected photograph of him in the garden in a wheelchair and it gave us all hope that something better was going to happen.
As excellent as the care was, a hospital ward is pretty grim. Once Dad was able to transfer to a wheelchair, he re-discovered the roof garden. He spent every moment he could out there, even when it was raining, parking his chair by the door so he could look out. It became an ongoing joke with the staff when we visited as he was always out there.
He met and spoke to many fellow patients in the garden and has remained in touch with some of them, including one who wrote later to say how much his conversations with Dad had meant to him and improved his mental health in such a difficult time.
As a family we were able to visit him and have the opportunity of bringing his young grandchild to the garden, rather than the rather scary ward. It was a wonderful oasis in an otherwise horrid situation and meant Dad was able to see all the family throughout the long time that he was in hospital and enjoy seeing his grandchild at a very important stage of his development.
Slowly our dad improved. With his incredible determination and the exceptional high quality of care and support from his medical team he learnt to walk, eat and use his right arm and legs again.
But it wasn’t just that, he and we know, that the garden played an immeasurable part of his recovery, his well-being and mental health.
This is why we are running to raise awareness and funding to enhance the recently opened Neuro-ICU Roof Garden and hopefully create more spaces like this in the future.
The impact that the garden had on our family was huge and so we are taking on, quite frankly, this mad challenge of the Royal Parks Half Marathon (13.1 miles!) on 11th October to raise some money for John King Brain Tumour Foundation, who adopted the McKissock garden to make more spaces like this garden in the hope that this will help more patients recover, hopefully as much as our Dad.
Neither of us are runners. One of us did the couch to 5km in lockdown and then stopped, the other started but never completed so this is a huge challenge for us. We’ve started our training and have run through God knows how many heatwaves. But we’re doing it. On race day we will have a giggle; there will probably be tears; at times we will hate each other and not want to keep running. But we will. We’re not chasing a time; we’re going to complete it together for Dad and for this incredible charity who we cannot thank enough.
Any donation is hugely appreciated and will help spur us on in those tough moments, not to mention the immense help it will give other families going through these life changing moments.
