Hello gorgeous, yes, that's you. Thanks for supporting the fight against Leukaemia. In return i'll be walking 26 miles at night around the streets of London and for once it wont be because i'm drunk. Why am I doing this I hear you ask? Well, here's my story...

Prior to November 2005, it was fair to say I had a limited understanding of Leukaemia. It wasn't a good thing, I knew that much. I also had a vague recollection that one of the patients in the film Patch Adam's suffered with it, thus crediting my entire medical knowledge on the subject to a Robin Williams movie. That can never be a good thing.

While I'm not proud of this scientific ignorance, it just wasn't relevant to my life. I was a fit and healthy 25 year old. My career was progressing reasonably well, i'd just bought my first property with my fiancé Georgina and as is inevitable where a fiancé exists, a wedding was planned for the forthcoming summer. Life was great, really great in fact.

Little did I know that as I travelled the tube to work, picked out bed linen for our new flat and was dragged around what felt like every wedding venue in the south east, my body was ravaged with leukaemia.

Thursday November 3rd 2005 was simultaneously the worst and the luckiest day of my life. While accompanying my sister to an appointment at our family doctor, I opportunistically asked if they could check out a small blood blister in my mouth. What I hadn't noticed were the numerous bruised patches around my joints indicating I was bleeding internally. Fortunately, Dr Ross' medical knowledge was more extensive than just watching Patch Adams. She quickly identified the bleeding implications and in doing so saved my life.

Within hours I was in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead under the care of the brilliant Consultant Haematologist, Dr Kottaridis. A bone marrow test detected that I had Acute Myloid Leukaemia, a rare form of the disease that affects just under 2000 people in the UK each year. I started intense chemotherapy that night, which saw me in a critical condition a number of times in a five month, isolated stay in hospital. This was followed by a two year clinical trial, the kind funded by Cancer Research UK, which ensured I entered remission and thankfully remain there today.

With out doubt I owe my life to Dr Ross, Dr Kottaridis, the incredible nurses at the Royal Free and the talented scientists at Cancer Research. However, there is another individual who saved my life and did so without any medical training whatsoever. The hardest thing I have ever had to do was break the news to Georgina. How do you tell someone that all the plans we had for our future, the wedding, the babies may not just have to be put on hold but they may never happen at all. But Georgina stayed strong, continued to make plans and refused to move the date of the wedding insisting that I will be there. And she was right. We got married, as planned, seven years ago on June 4 2006.

I'm walking the Shine 26 mile route as a thank you to all those who's who perform incredible work on a daily basis to ensure people like me have a chance of a future. And thanks to them, and a few nifty moves of my own, 2 years ago Georgina and I had a beautiful little girl Lyla. The work of Cancer Research UK literally keeps families together.

Around 8,300 people of all ages are diagnosed with leukaemia every year in the UK - that’s 23 people each day. The number of people surviving leukaemia for five years or more has more than tripled since the 1970s. That’s amazing progress, but around 4,500 people still lose their lives to the disease every year. Every pound you donate really does make a difference towards the work into diagnosing and treating leukaemia

If you are a UK taxpayer, please remember to tick the Gift Aid box when donating as this will increase your donation by at least 25% at no cost to you.

Many thanks for your support. Let’s beat cancer sooner.

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