A dad says he hopes he will be making his daughter proud by delivering hundreds of heart tests to Nottingham schools in her memory. Aged just 25, Amy Osborne died six years ago in her sleep from a rare condition known as brugada syndrome, which affects the electrical messages controlling a person's heart rate.
Undiagnosed heart conditions are said to claim the lives of 12 young people in the UK every week, with 80% of people not experiencing any symptoms. Soon after losing his daughter, 57-year-old Andrew Osborne, along with Amy's mum and two elder sisters, decided to set up a memorial fund that would raise money for heart screening tests across the country.
Andrew, who lives just outside Melton Mowbray, says the fund has already raised enough money to pay for more than 600 children to be tested. Now, he has just raised nearly £170,000 for the cause by rowing 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.
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The money includes public donations, gift aid and the support of sponsors including Nottingham-based HR business, MHR. Speaking about the challenge, Andrew said: "Amy's sisters had already been doing some fantastic fundraising and so I decided it was time for Daddy to step up to the plate and trump them.
"The challenge took 78 days and I rowed about 3,200 miles from Gran Canaria to Antigua. It was a solo mission and I didn't have any back-up, so for most of it I literally had no interaction with anybody else at all.
"There were points where as far I was concerned, it was as if the world had ended and when I arrived in Antigua I actually joked by asking who the Prime Minister was. But the amount of money we raised smashed the target and so we've now got an ambition to test around 2,000 young people, because each test costs around £100 and every penny of the money raised goes directly towards that.
"In terms of donations I had some companies donating over £1,000, but I also had a donation of £2 from a teenage girl and all of the donations were equally as humbling." The tests are delivered by health professionals with funding coming from the Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) charity, within which sits the ring-fenced fund in memory of Amy.
Given that Nottingham-based MHR contributed significantly to the effort, Andrew says schools in the area will be one of the target areas for the roll out of the heart tests in the coming months. Two days have also been booked out at MHR's offices, where people will be able to go and have a test.
Dr Steven Cox, Chief Executive of CRY, said: "We'd like to congratulate Andrew Osbourne on this amazing feat of crossing the Atlantic We are privileged to continuously receive inspiring support from families such as Amy's who sadly know all too well the pain of losing a loved one at a young age to sudden cardiac death.
"I always admire how these bereaved families are able to channel their own traumatic experience to prevent others suffering a similar loss, by undertaking amazing awareness and fundraising challenges such as Andrew's rowing event, which was generously supported by MHR. The amount of sudden but preventable deaths that undiagnosed heart conditions are causing among young people is exactly why CRY believes screening is so crucial."
Andrew added: "I later found out that I was actually a brugada carrier and I asked why I was still here and yet Amy, who was very young, fit and healthy, wasn't. They essentially said that it's a lottery, but we're hoping that what we're doing will stop other families having to go through what we did.
"Any death is tragic, but we were left wondering what would have happened if we'd have known about Amy's condition and unfortunately, we didn't. During the Atlantic challenge, there were moments when I was dealing with capsizes and storms and I could really hear Amy telling me to shut up and get on with it.
"She had a love of the sea, so that tied in with the challenge, and she was someone who was very full of life and had so much ahead of her. She'd probably think I was a total twit for doing the challenge, but I hope that I'd be making her proud as well." People can still donate to the cause by visiting the Row for Amy website.
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