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Brave mum's battle to live
Terminally-ill mum Jacqui Boldy is living on borrowed time after being diagnosed with a fatal lung disease, but she is leading a national drive to raise awareness about the condition.
When mum-of-two Jacqui, 49, first started suffering from pulmonary hypertension (PH) four years ago, the average survival time for sufferers was just two years – but she continues to fight it and raise awareness of the disease.
Mrs Boldy said: "There's no cure for it. I don't know whether I will wake up tomorrow. We have to live with this every day."
She describes her husband Mark, 46, and daughter Kylie, 20, as her towers of strength.
She said: "My hubby baby's me, as does my daughter."
But knowing that his mother is going to die is too much for her son Craig, 22.
She said: "He has blocked it out. He doesn't want to know about it. If we are talking about it he goes out of the room.
"Through the disease I have lost quite a few friends who cannot cope with it. I was upset and hurt. But then I realised they were not my friends."
PH starves a sufferer's body of oxygen, making any kind of physical effort almost impossible.
Mrs Boldy, of Edward Road, Kettering, has to wake up at 6am every day to take the first of seven doses of medicine. Her last dose is at midnight so she only has a few hours' sleep a night.
She said: "You get used to it. It has become part of my life. It's keeping me alive."
When Mrs Boldy visited a GP in 2005 she was told she was imagining the problem.
She said: "At first I believed it was that but that didn't last long because I soon deteriorated further and couldn't manage the stairs."
She went back to the doctor to be told, like many PH patients, that she had asthma. Eventually, she was admitted to Papworth Hospital where PH was confirmed last July.
Mrs Boldy has now become a fundraiser for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association and will be running a tombola and a PH awareness stall at the Newlands Shopping Centre on Saturday. Her effors are part of a global awareness initiative which will be launched next Monday.
She said: "Few have heard of PH yet there are people out there struggling with it and may not even know they have it. The earlier they are diagnosed the better and if I can help just one person I will feel as though I have played my part as best as I can."
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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