MY DANNY’S GONE BUT HIS DEATH HAS MADE A DIFFERENCE
LIZZIE JONES lost her husband Danny, an international rugby player for Wales, when he was just 29 after he suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch in May last year, just a few months after the birth of their twins, Phoebe and Bobby.
‘I had two six-month-olds relying on me to be there, so I just had to survive and carry on,’ the 31-yearold from Halifax, West Yorkshire, said when she accepted her award for First Aid Champion. Lizzie was honoured for turning her grief into a force for change and launching the Danny Jones Defibrillators campaign to supply machines to rugby clubs across the country.
She said: ‘Danny may have been saved had there been defibrillators there that day.
‘In the past six months, we have been able to get 40 defibrillators out to rugby clubs across the country with another eight to be sent out.
‘I hope that when people see a Danny Jones-marked defibrillator, they know exactly why that’s there. And the fact that his kids will see that and know that “that’s my dad”… it’s just wonderful.’ Lizzie has also successfully campaigned for the screening of all professional rugby league players for cardiac problems. It transpired that Danny had suffered from an undiagnosed inherited condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which causes the muscular wall of the heart – the myocardium – to thicken. The same disease nearly killed ex-Bolton Wanderers football player Fabrice Muamba on the pitch in 2012. It affects one in 500 Britons, although most never experience symptoms.