Tag: disability

Why I prefer reading to sports

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I prefer reading to sports. I don’t know the offside rule, have no idea what the difference is between Rugby League and Rugby Union, and, even though my dad likes watching Wimbledon every year, I don’t know the first thing about tennis. This isn’t because I couldn’t play sport because of my Cerebral Palsy, it’s because I’ve yet to find something I enjoy so much that I’d choose doing that over spending my Sunday afternoons curled up with a Val McDermid novel and a cup of tea.

My parents always made sure that I knew the world of sport was open to me if I wanted it to be. My dad even sat me down and made me watch the athletics at the 1996 Paralympics on the TV when I was just five years old to show me what I could achieve if I wanted. “I’m not saying you have to do it” he said “I just want you to know that you could”.

Over the years I have tried to get on with many sports, and well, it just hasn’t happened. I decided that I hated football on the day I tried to join in with my friends and ended up tripping over the ball and falling flat on my face. Then, there was the time I tried to serve a ball in a game of tennis and fell over with the effort, and, as I’ve said before I can’t run.

Despite that, I do quite enjoy the odd game of cricket that my family used to play on holiday. I just sit in my wheelchair (it’s safer that way, trust me) and whack the ball as hard as I can to score as many runs as possible without moving until someone catches me out. It’s not the conventional way of playing but it’s my way nonetheless and I quite like that.

People often ask me if I’ve ever taken part in wheelchair basketball and the answer is no, I haven’t. The idea just doesn’t interest me (and I’m terrified of being hit in the face with the ball, truth be told) but I’d happily try any sport that caught my eye at least once. The hard part isn’t me trying something out, it’s selling the idea to me in a way that gets my attention in the first place that’s possibly the most difficult bit.

I do enjoy exercise; I just prefer the things that you don’t do in a team, so the only person I have to push and compete with is myself. I loved using the gym in high school and at university, I love going out for walks with Martha, and I can always be found on the dance floor at parties in my walking frame or wheelchair moving along to the music in any way I can. I even quite enjoy swimming even though I’m not very good. That, and I like being able to jump around in the water in a way that I can’t on land.

In the end though, I much prefer to leap into the world of a good book. I love being nosey at the other world’s that writers have created in their own head, I enjoy reading stories that I can relate to, be they fiction or none fiction, and I truly admire the way that a writer can make you feel so much emotion without ever having met you. For me, it’s hard for me to imagine loving any sport over the magic of a book, Cerebral Palsy or no Cerebral Palsy.

Lessons from my childhood

I only ever remember wishing that I didn’t have Cerebral Palsy once, and I was about five at the time.

It was summer and I was playing outside in the sunshine. At the time I was an only child because my sister hadn’t been born yet, so I’d become very good at using my imagination to make up my own games. That day I decided that I was going to practice running, not for any particular reason, I just felt like it.

I did a couple of laps going from the front garden to the one at the back of the house. I knew that I wasn’t technically doing it right, but I didn’t care. I was moving faster than I did when I walked and I wasn’t falling over. It felt good, and that was enough for me.

After a couple of laps I was starting to feel really proud of myself, it didn’t last long. As I came out of back garden round into the front again, there was another child who wasn’t from my street watching me over the fence. I didn’t know their name and I don’t think they knew mine.

“Ha, ha. You can’t run” the kid chanted, before galloping up and down the pavement to show me what I should have been doing it. I was heartbroken. She was right and I knew it. I’d known that I hadn’t been doing the same as the other child, but I’d been pretending that I was. I felt stupid and pathetic. My illusion had been shattered. I burst into tears and wondered back inside to find my mummy.

When I did I wailed to her about what had happened and declared that I wished I had normal legs like everyone else. My mum just stared at me and told to “never, ever say anything like that again,

“And anyway”, she carried on “you can run in your own little fashion, can’t you?”

For the second time that day I was left feeling deeply ashamed of myself, not because I couldn’t do something, but because I knew that I’d been ungrateful for everything that I could do that so many other people with Cerebral Palsy can’t. That day, I promised myself that I would never wish my disability away again, and I haven’t. Sure, there were other times in my childhood I got upset at not being able to dance like my friends could and stuff, but I think that’s probably quite normal for any kid sometimes, disabled or not. I spent the rest of my childhood telling people that I was proud to have a disability because it meant that someone else in the world didn’t have to. Now that I’m older I know that might not necessarily be the way things work, but it was how I liked to think of things at the time.

Despite my difficulties I still took part in all my primary school sports days on my walking frame alongside everyone else and managed to think about how I usually always came in last because it didn’t matter anymore. I decided not to take up running in the end, not because I couldn’t, but because I realised that I’d much rather bury my head in a book.

So far I’ve stayed true to my word. Yes, I have CP, that will never change, nor do I want it to. More on that later.

Cooking with Cerebral Palsy

Here’s a question for you: why aren’t there more disabled chefs on Television in the UK?

These days I’m starting to feel like I can’t flip on the TV set without someone taunting me with images of delicious meals that they’ve just made themselves, quite often from scratch. I stare longingly at them all for about three seconds with mouth watering and then have to change the channel, and not just because in those few seconds I’ve become so hungry that I want to devour everything in my food cupboard. I switch over to something else because I know that there’s a good chance I won’t be able to make that meal for myself, not necessarily because I can’t cook (in truth I’m hopeless, but that’s beside the point)  I know that I can’t cook in the way that others who don’t have my physical difficulties can.

When I step into a kitchen people have to worry about more than me giving them food poisoning. I can’t lift pans full of ingredients, so cooking on a hob is a no-go, I can’t balance well enough to get heavy or big things in and out of the oven without burning myself or dropping it on my foot, and even things like chopping and peeling potatoes are a major struggle. So yes, sometimes when I see cookery programmes  where the host is casually zipping around the kitchen carrying oven trays and slicing onions at eye-watering speed (no pun intended) like it’s the most natural thing in the world, I get a little frustrated with myself.

Slowly I’ve been working out as many ways around it as a possibly I can. One of my most valuable life lessons I think I learned over my time as a student is that you can cook pasta in a microwave if you put it in a suitable container and pour boiling water from the kettle over it (in your face, saucepans!). If I’m in charge of making my own dinner I’ll use Quorn instead of meat because that too can be done in the good ol’ microwave or I eat a lot of soup because, yup, you guessed it, that goes in there too.

I know that there must be a lot of disabled chefs out there and I’d personally love it if they were given more air time so that I could learn their tips and tricks. I know that a group of disabled chefs recently made it to the final of ITV show Food, Glorious Food. While researching for the post today I came across Michael Caines, an award-winning chef who also happens to be an amputee and has featured on the Good Food Channel before. I just hope personally that one day there are a lot more cooks on our screens with difficulties simliar to mine who cook their pasta in a plastic mesuring jug and do lots of other interesting stuff I haven’t thought of yet.

If you have any hints to share that you think would come in handy, please leave them in the comments box below.

Birthday Surprises

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Dad and I

At the risk of sounding like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, I like trains. In fact I like them an awful lot, but probably not for the same reasons he does. Unlike Sheldon (played by Jim Parsons) I can’t name them model, and if there is a way to get somewhere that is much faster I’ll choose that option rather than make my friends add hours to their journey just so I can ride on a choo-choo, but they are one of my more favoured modes of public transport.

For a long time I was just as afraid of them as I am of the bus. I’d heard all sorts of horror stories from people about them being left on board and ending up in all sorts of places they’d never intended to be, but given that I knew you could book ramp assistance and seats to help with disabled access I knew it was one thing that I would have to conquer in the end. I started out small at first when I found myself an internship at a company that was based a half-an-hour ride away from my home. Mum came with me the first day to make sure that everything went smoothly – and it did- so for the rest of the time I was on my own. Although this short journey was a massive victory for me, the real turning point came for me a few months later when I decided to travel back home from university by myself to surprise my dad for his birthday.

This was an even bigger challenge than the one I had faced getting to my placement and back. I had chosen to go to a university that was about 70 miles away from where I lived and would take me two trains – yes two – to get there. I’d had the idea for weeks, as soon as I realised that I had the afternoon of his special day – a Tuesday- off and I didn’t have another lecture until Thursday afternoon, but it took me about a week to pluck up the courage to book the tickets. I paid for them instantly and made arrangements for assisted travel before I could change my mind.  I hardly slept the night before with nerves. I’d never got more than one train per trip before and all I could think about was all the things that could go wrong. Every time I had a thought like that I tried to push it away and think only of how it would all be worth it to see the look on Dad’s face. This wasn’t about me, it was about him.

Thankfully on the day things all went according to plan. Members of station staff even walked me from one platform to another which was more than I had been expecting (in a good way) and when I saw my mum and her new partner waiting for me as I got off the last train so that she could take me to my Dad’s flat I thought that I might fall to my knees in relief.

When the three of us wondered into his kitchen together he just looked between us all and saw that my Mum and her partner were both in their work uniforms. For a second he looked confused and then he realised what I had done to get there,  smiled and looked as if he were about to cry.

I learned an important life lesson that day, two actually. I learned that I could manage the train by myself (with a little help, but there’s no shame in that) and I learned that it is important to push ourselves sometimes, if not for ourselves but for the sake of those around us.

That was almost two years ago now. It is my Dad’s birthday again on Friday and I really have no idea what to get him this year. I’m not sure if I can ever top my surprise, but I’m always willing to try.

I beat the bus!

Well, I did it! I managed to get the bus by myself yesterday! FOUR buses to be exact. I’m even more proud of myself for doing it too because I’m really ill which makes moving around even harder.

For those of you who didn’t read my post about battling with buses I suggest you go and do that now before you finish this one or you might be a little confused.

Like I said, not only did I have to catch one bus, I had to catch a few to get to where I needed to be and back. I could have used the train for part of the journey if I had wanted, but as that would have meant extra walking that I really did not feel up to doing yesterday so I opted to stay on the bus route. I thought that even though I find the train so much better to deal with it might make things easier. It did. By the end of the day yesterday I had a new-found appreciation for the bus that I’ve never had before. I’m still not any less scared of doing it alone, but I was grateful that I managed to cut out a lot of the walking that I would have had to do had I chosen the easy option and got the train half of the way. Ironic, huh?

It turned out that using public transport yesterday was far better than I could have hoped for. Other passengers helped me to get Martha on and off at most points where I needed to and were very patient. Some even helped to guide her into the designated spaces on board. As you can probably guess I had to go outside my local area yesterday and the bus company I was using most of the way had a layout of bus that I had never seen before. There was an actual bay for people to put prams, or wheelchairs or walking frames in,  even with enough room for another person to stand in it with them. It didn’t have any seats in which meant that I didn’t have to feel guilty about blocking any up, but it was close  enough to some that I could keep hold of Martha in case she decided to roll away and I would have been able to chat to anyone travelling with me had I been in my wheelchair. I could also tuck Martha in quite nicely so that her wheels didn’t stick out and there was no risk of anyone tripping on her. One lady even told me how much she liked Martha.

As for finding my way to an unknown place, I don’t know why I worried so much. The lady at the travellers’ information desk told me in great detail where I needed get off and where I needed to walk after that. She even wrote it down for me so that I could show the bus driver if he didn’t understand where I meant. That took a weight off my mind.

My journey started just after 7am and I got home just before 7pm. I could tell it was going to be a long one before I even left the house because when I tried to sit up I couldn’t. My boyfriend had to pull me up and then hold me up as I staggered to the bathroom. My Cerebral Palsy always seems to affect me more when I’m ill. My muscles all seem to get tighter and it gets harder to walk, but I had no choice but to go yesterday. By the time I got back I was exhausted but it was definitely worth the hard work. I did it. I didn’t think I would, but I did.