Joe’s going the keep brother’s
THE brother and father of a young West man who died only months after being diagnosed with epilepsy will run a marathon in his memory.
William Workman, 21, suffered his first epileptic fit in January this year, having never previously shown any symptoms of the condition.
His brother, Joe Workman, who is from Bristol but based in Newport in South Wales, said William died on June 30 and a post-mortem examination revealed he died while having an epileptic fit.
Joe and dad Nigel are set to run the 26 miles of the Brighton Marathon next year in memory of his younger brother, who he described as an “outgoing, laughing lad”.
“He had his first one in work I believe, and we sort of knew nothing about it as a family. He’d never suffered before,” he said.
Joe, 25, said William went for some tests which “couldn’t find anything” and said doctors didn’t initially put it down to epilepsy.
“They did all these tests which came back negative, he didn’t have an irregular heartbeat or anything,” Joe said.
“Everything was coming back saying ‘it’s not this, it’s not that’, but nobody seemed to be able to give us an answer.”
But it was only in around May that doctors told William they believed he had a mild form of epilepsy.
By this time, he said his brother’s seizures, which were initially mild and sporadic, became more irregular, severe and frequent over time. At one point he suffered a 25-minute-long seizure and his family grew more concerned.
“He’d be exhausted the day after, but he was never very unwell,” he said.
“They said that apparently teenage boys can grow into it and grow back out of it, that it’s not always a condition that’s known from birth.”
Joe said his brother’s seizures came as a particular shock given there is no history of epilepsy in his family.
“It was a huge shock to all of us. There’s no history of that anywhere in the family prior, so it was something all of us were very, very fresh to.
“It was one of those things where you couldn’t predict when it was going to happen. They tried him on medication and he was fine for a bit, but then he’d have one so they’d try him on different medication. And then he’d have two in a week, so it was clear it wasn’t working.
“He’d have a fit and have no idea, then he’d settle down and come round and be like ‘what happened?’.
“They said that because it was something he’d grown into, it’d never become something serious, but it didn’t prove to be the case unfortunately.”
Joe said his family sat down with William early on in February to discuss the impact it could have on his life.
“We said he needed to hand in his driving licence, because it was fine when he had [a fit] when he was in control, but if he had one while driving it could be a whole lot worse.
“Worst case scenario it could injure himself and somebody else.”
Describing William as a “healthy young lad” who played five-a-side football, Joe said his brother never let his condition get to him, even after it forced him to stop driving.
“He knew he had it, but he never liked to talk about it. He never let it get in the way or change him, and I think that was the strongest part of him. He said if it happens, it happens.
“He was sort of trying to follow after me, because I always moaned at him that ‘you’ve got to work, get a job’, things like that. But he was always a lad that said he’d just be good at video games when he was older, and I’d tell him to wake up and smell the coffee,” he chuckled.
On the morning of Wednesday, June 30, Joe got a call from their dad Nigel to say William had died.
“When the phone went I thought it was a bit strange, you know. My dad doesn’t normally ring when I’m in work,” he remembered.
“He said ‘you need to sit down’ and I just thought, ‘oh God’.
“The autopsy came back and the only thing they could put it down to was that he passed away while having an epileptic fit.
“The Tuesday night [before he died] was when England beat Germany in the Euros, and he’d phoned me up saying ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it’. We were having a right old natter. I said I had a few tyres I needed fitting and he said he was back in next Monday. But a day later I got the call.”
Tragically, William’s death came the week he was due to complete his apprenticeship with Kwik Fit in Keynsham.
Joe said losing William was a huge blow as he had never previously lost a relative, not even a grandparent.
And he said it came at a time when his brother had really started to enjoy his work.
“It was something he had become passionate about doing. He genuinely loved going out, he never had an issue getting up for it. It was really nice to see him take that approach to it.”
Joe admitted things have “not been
all sunshine” since William died, adding that his work as an HGV technician “stops me thinking about things in that sense, but if I do step back it starts to hit home”.
He said he decided to enter the Brighton Marathon as a way of honouring his late brother’s memory and to repay the love his brother’s friends had shown after his death.
“A lot of friends he used to play football with wanted to do something for him. He used to say he had no friends, but when this happened, we’d never seen so many people in one place,” he said.
“The restrictions on only having 30 people had been in place and we’d been thinking ‘how are we going to decide which 30 to invite’, but then they were lifted a few weeks before.
The turnout was unreal. We sat down and had a chat and said we had to give something back.”
Both Joe and the brothers’ dad Nigel are currently training for the Brighton Marathon next April, and have set up GoFundMe pages at https://www. gofundme.com/f/brighton-marathonin-memory-of-william-workman to raise money for the National Society for Epilepsy. The pair have already raised £5,050 for Epilepsy Research UK.
Joe will be running a marathon for the first time, and he’s hoping to complete the event in under four hours.
“I’ve done a couple of 10Ks in Bristol, and always thought about doing a half.
“Then my dad signed up for this and I thought ‘I’ll really push the boat out.’”