My name is Dan Skinner, comedian, writer and actor and I’d like to explain why I have decided to become a patron of Harry’s Pals. My son was born in 2015. It was, what might be described as a traumatic birth, very quick with the umbilical chord wrapped around his neck – he was blue and floppy. Elation and terror all at once. A couple of days in the ICU however and he seemed fine. We took him home. 

As he grew it became obvious that he wasn’t hitting his markers – he didn’t walk when he was supposed to and didn’t talk. He also had viral wheeze/bronchitis and so we were in and out of A and E frequently throughout the winter months. It was on one of these visits that a consultant realised he hadn’t hit his markers and suggested we give him an MRI, just in case. We were shocked, found it hard to process but agreed, assuming that everything would come back normal. 

You don’t expect your child to be anything other than perfect, because that’s all you’ve dreamt about through pregnancy, and we had no reason to think otherwise. When the results of the MRI came back, we were dumbstruck. Ted had a thin corpus collosum, the bit that separates the two hemispheres of the brain and reduced white matter. Scarring on the brain essentially. It would have a serious impact on his speech, cognition and motor skills. Had something had happened in the pregnancy, had we done something wrong?