FUNDRAISING
A chocaholic couple from Rutherglen are urging locals to follow their lead and ditch the sweet stuff throughout March whilst raising money for charity.
Gwen and Mark Blair are urging people to take part in the British Heart Foundation’s DECHOX event to help raise funds for the charity’s life saving research into heart and circulatory disease.
The chartered accountants, aged 38 and 43, successfully gave up chocolate for the whole of March last year, raising £1600 in the process.
They took on the challenge in honour of Gwen’s best friend Linda McStay, who was born with a univentricular heart, a type of congenital heart disease where the two pumping chambers in the heart are not fully developed.
Linda has lived with a pacemaker for over 12 years and has undergone a number of major surgical procedures, but with no cure, there is a strong chance that she will have to undergo a heart transplant in the future.
Gwen and Mark are now calling on others to sign up to DECHOX and raise even more funds, which will go towards funding pioneering research in the fight against heart disease - the cause of 26 per cent of all deaths in the UK.
Gwen said: “Mark and I are selfconfessed chocoholics, so as soon as we heard about DECHOX, we knew this was the challenge for us.
“The first surviving generation with her heart condition, I can only imagine what my best friend Linda has gone through since the day she was born.
“There’s no cure for her condition and she’s faced operation after operation with incredible strength and a positive attitude. And with her pacemaker needing to be replaced every six years and the prospect of a heart transplant always in the forefront of our minds – giving up chocolate for a month seemed a tiny challenge in comparison.
“But it was still tough-going as we eat chocolate almost every day, especially in the evenings watching TV on the sofa.