Ger Moran

Jamie had been heavily involved in soccer in particular from the age of five or six, from his first mini World Cup, right up to playing for his local club in Firhouse and then progressing on to a bigger community club in Knock Line in 2022 and 2023.

He was leading the club, leading his team from midfield, won a couple of league titles, Player of the Year, all that sort of stuff.

And right up until March of 2024, you would look at him and go, he's the engine.

He's the engine room.

He's up and down the pitch and fit and healthy.

And like a lot of teenagers, chipped out of marble, looked very, very fit and healthy.

And then on the 5th of March, we'd gotten notification of the availability of a heartbeat screening.

in school and Jamie's reaction was, yeah, I'm happy to do it because I'll probably get out of class for half an hour.

And our reaction was, look, if it's covered by Léa, then why not?

We've got to lose, so may as well do it.

And they did that on the 5th of March in 2024.

And even reading the small print, one out of 600, one out of 700 people might get a phone call thereafter.

And my phone rang the following morning.

And it was feedback that they had found an anomaly in how his heart operates, which indicated what's known as Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which is an extra electrical kind of signal pulsing in his heart.

And at high levels of exercise and activity, it can get erratic and can trigger, you know, kind of very unfortunate circumstances.

We had to approach it from the point of view of telling a fish not to swim because if he wasn't doing his press-ups at home and his workouts at home, he was at the wall kicking the ball around or he was up on the green with his friends or he was training with his team.

He was constantly active.

But with this anomaly being found, the word was all physical activity right down to a very small push-up had to stop.

We were really, really well taken care of.

Everything was explained.