If all goes well, as soon as the sun has dried off the morning dew on a beautiful golf course in Worcestershire, Wayne Greenwood will be teeing off on a day-long golfing challenge for our Ramsay Research Fund.
At 4am on Saturday 17th June, Wayne – the father of an 18-year-old girl who has been unable to get out of bed for months because of her severe M.E. – will gather with friends at Hagley Golf Course just outside Stourbridge to play four complete rounds of the course by sundown.
That’s 72 holes, roughly 24 miles or a whole walking marathon if you like, which if they’re lucky they’ll finish well before they lose the light.
“We’re aiming to finish by 7pm so we can have a bit of a celebration afterwards”, Wayne said this week.
“Once they heard what had happened to my daughter Tiegan, friends and fellow club members very generously volunteered to join me on the day to raise money for M.E. research.
“I recruited someone just today. Actually, he thought he had volunteered for just 18 holes and I had to explain to him that ‘No, this will take a little bit longer’. He’s accepted the idea now and I think he will stay with us for the whole day.”
We wrote at length in the middle of last month about how Shropshire couple Wayne and his wife Sue have been providing devoted round-the-clock care for their daughter Tiegan, who has severe M.E. and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (PoTs).
Tiegan has been sick for half her life after suffering a major intestinal bleed when she was nine years old. She has now been bedbound for five years and hasn’t actually been able to leave her bed these past 15 months.
She is unable to speak more than a couple of words at a time, requires a whole range of mitigations to dampen down her hypersensitivities and needs tube-feeding.
Since Tiegan became ill, she’s never been well enough to attend school for more than a few days at a time. She completely missed out on secondary school.
Her parents say her life has been “completely destroyed” through years of misdiagnosis, NHS failure to get to grips with her illness and the lack of any professional wanting to take responsibility for her care.
They’ve even been threatened with child protection proceedings due to a failure to diagnose her accurately and in an attempt to force Tiegan back into school.
“Tiegan’s much the same today – her condition thankfully seems to have stabilised these past few weeks”, said Wayne this week.
Wayne works from home for an international brand called Sealed Air, the firm which invented bubble wrap. He has played golf regularly for 20 years and has been a Hagley Golf Club member since 2007.
This week, he named the other heroes who have signed up to his event so far. They are Jonathan and Matthew Greaves, Jason Marston – father of Tiegan’s best friend Georgia – Mark Gibbon and James Moreton.
Others are joining in for a round or two, and yet more are out there looking for sponsors for the event. There will also be another golfer on the course with them at the same time but he will be raising money for a prostate cancer charity.
If you would like to sponsor their team event for our research fund, please click on the link to their GoFundMe page below:
Views of Hagley Golf Course – from the club's website at https://www.hagleygolfclub.co.uk/
Tony Britton
Senior Fundraising Consultant, The ME Association
tony.britton@meassociation.org.uk Mob: 07393 805566
