A MOTHER has spoken of her horror after learning that her adult daughter had begun to suffer heart failure on the opposite side of the globe.
Wendy Spencer, of Ayrshire, said she reacted with "disbelief" when she found out that her daughter Alice had fallen ill while living in New Zealand.
Doctors discovered the 32-year-old had an undiagnosed heart defect called atrial septal defect, where there is a hole in between the upper chambers of the heart.
She had lived her whole life with the condition unaware of the ticking time bomb in her chest, but was able to return to the UK where her life was saved by doctors at the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank.
Now her mother has taken up fundraising to support other families who face the same trauma, and is urging others to follow in her footsteps.
She said: “Alice was so far from home, and I was away as well at the time, so I was so worried when she told me what happened. I was just in complete disbelief, she is so fit and healthy it just didn’t seem possible.
"But I knew I had to be strong for her, as I just wanted to get her back to the UK as soon as possible. It just shows, if it can happen to Alice, heart disease can affect anyone."
The 63-year-old has raised more than £1,300 for the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) life-saving research after completing the charity’s MyMarathon challenge, which sees participants run 26.2-mile during a month.
Heart and circulatory disease affects around 7million people in the UK and is responsible for around 155,000 deaths each year, the equivalent of one person every three minutes.
Every pound raised from MyMarathon goes toward funding the BHF's ambition of paying for half a billion pounds of new research in the next five years.
Alice said: “To have something like this happen to you really makes you value your life. I didn’t have any symptoms. The doctors said because I keep so fit and active, I would be the kind of person who would have just collapsed out of the blue, which is a scary thought.
"But I’m so positive about everything, and I’m all fixed now so I’m so grateful to the doctors who spotted this and all the nurses, specialists and surgeons who helped me at the Golden Jubilee Hospital.
"They are extraordinary people, and so is my mum. I’m so proud of her for raising so much money for such a good cause.”
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