BY day, Nick Hulme walks the corridors of the hospitals under his care.

Nick is the chief executive of Colchester Hospital University Foundation Trust, a man tasked with the care of thousands of residents across north Essex.

But Nick is now preparing another walk which will be bitter sweet. He is to walk 191 miles to honour a promise he made to his inspirational late wife.

Nick Hulme’s wife of four years Annette died in January after battling breast cancer.

She was just 58 and died at their home with her family by her side.

Nick, 56, will take on the Coast to Coast walk with his faithful black Labrador Stanley at his side.

He said: “When we moved up to Suffolk, Annette was quite well and we always said I would retire at 60 and in the first month of retiring that we would do the Coast to Coast walk.

“About two weeks before she died, she said ‘Promise me you will do that walk in my memory’.

“Then she went and told everyone, didn’t she, so I had to do it.”

Nick will be fundraising for the Breast Unit at Ipswich Hospital and the homecare team at St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich.

The hospice team looked after Annette in her home, and she was able to die at home which she had wanted.

Annette had first been diagnosed with cancer six years earlier and had been in remission but three days before Nick started his job as chief executive at Colchester’s hospital trust, they learned the cancer had returned and was terminal.

Annette was given a year to live. She died 18 months later.

Annette had also urged Nick to take the job at Colchester in May 2016, at a time when the trust was under close scrutiny having been placed into special measures by health regulators.

Last year it was removed from special measures.

Nick said: “I was juggling my new job and that but I had great support from the executive team.”

Nick described Annette as “fantastic”.

“She was a very successful director in the NHS.

“She was HR director at Croydon, St George’s and the Royal Free hospitals and when she got ill again she took ill-health retirement.

“All the nurses used to say she was inspirational.

“The way she coped with her illness, she never even let anybody but her family know how worried or how sick she was, she just kept going.

“Even ten days before she died she went out walking with the dogs.

“She was inspirational, taken too soon and if she had stayed, well, she would have had a long career in the NHS.”

Nick’s walk sets off on June 18 and starts at St Bees in Cumbria, going right across the country to Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire.

The 191-mile journey passes through three contrasting national parks - the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, and the North York Moors.

Friends and family are joining Nick for sections of it but it will be just Stanley who stays by his side for the whole walk.

Nick has been training in the gym before work and walking at weekends.

He said: “For me it is going to be bitter-sweet walking.

“It is very sad, I will be thinking about Annette and all the memories we had together but I will also feel pride.

“And it will just be a celebration of her life really.

“It will remind me of how proud I was of her when she was alive.”

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