Imagine having such severe eczema that you have to be bandaged up to sleep.

Then imagine this happening to you when you were only five years old.

Jo Chatterton, a 19-year-old student, had just this experience and has decided to say thank you to the people who treated her by running this year's London Marathon for Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Miss Chatterton, of Mersea Avenue, West Mersea, developed severe eczema all over her body at the age of two weeks old.

Her parents spent her first few years trying a number of treatments before she went to the London hospital.

The eczema has now virtually gone and Miss Chatterton, who is in her first year at Kent University, hopes it is something she has grown out.

She hopes to raise £2,000. of and she wanted to show her thanks to the hospital staff.

"They have been really helpful and everyone up there is really lovely and they see all sorts of cases come through and it was just something I wanted to do."

This will be her first marathon on the dry land but she has completed a canoeing marathon. She hopes to raise £2,000 for the hospital.

She said: "We took all sorts of different things, homeopathic remedies and other treatments and I used to go to the doctors but basically the treatments were unsuccessful so I was referred to the hospital."

This was at about the age of five and she began weekly trips to the hospital for treatment which lasted for about another three years.

"It was so severe that at night they would have to bandage me up to sleep."

"Then when I was about eight I got chicken pox and after that it got quite a bit better and since then it has just been slowly going."

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