A dad whose kidney failure forced him to cancel his honeymoon will be on dialysis when he runs the London marathon for a baby charity in April, after his son was born with pneumonia and spent his first 10 days in intensive care.
When project manager Tom Giles, 28, was reunited with the school pal he met as a teenager during freshers’ week at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and they fell in love, he was fighting fit – going on to play lacrosse and enjoy boozy nights out with pals.
But three weeks before his third year final exams, he noticed blood in his urine and was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy, or Berger’s Disease, an incurable autoimmune condition, causing kidney failure – setting a pattern for his illness to impact on important life events.
Tom, of Enfield, north London, who is now married to his university love, civil servant Chloe, 28, and on the kidney transplant list, said: “About a month before my wedding in August 2018, I had to go on dialysis.
“We’d planned a three-and-a-half week road trip through Canada for our honeymoon, but my kidneys were too bad, so we couldn’t go.
“Then I’d planned to take Chloe out to dinner every night for a week after our wedding, but my treatment left me too exhausted to do it.”