Free Aim High by Tanni Grey-Thompson

PART ONE
    CHAPTER ONE
    Growing Up
    We have a picture in our family album of me sitting in my first little red wheelchair wearing a Brownie uniform, with little knobbly knees and wearing some dodgy trainers. The picture was taken not long after I started using a wheelchair and we were on a Brownie ‘pack holiday’ in Swansea.
    The strange thing about this picture is that I am trying to skip. It looks funny, as all the other Brownies are behind me (all non-disabled), skipping away with different levels of ability.
    The reason that this picture is really important to me is that it shows that no one ever told me that I shouldn’t skip, and no one ever told me that I shouldn’t try. It confirms that, as I was growing up, my parents never told me there were things I couldn’t do solely because I was a wheelchair user. There were plenty of times that I was told off for doing something (possibly naughty), but I was never told off simply for trying.
    If my parents had been different, if they had had low expectations for me, I could have grown up thinking very differently. But for me it was about having the chance to try, and seeing what I might achieve. If someone had told me that I couldn’t skip I might have found this out a little sooner than I did, but then I might have spent the next five years thinking ‘what if’. My parents were both only children, and had quite restricted upbringings, and I think this is part of the reason why they always encouraged us to go out and try things.
    The reason that I became a wheelchair user has never been particularly important to me. I was born with a condition called Spina Bifida, and to begin with my disablement wasn’t obvious. I had a tiny lump on my back. After spending a short time in an incubator I was sent home and everything seemed OK. My elder sister Sian, who is eighteen months older than me, hadn’t had an easy time of it. She was born with a heart condition that was fixed with some fairly major surgery (these days it is through a key-hole procedure near the groin). It was then found that she had been born with dislocated hips, which resulted in eighteen months in a frog plaster, and after only a couple of days out of that, she fell and broke her leg. My parents certainly had their hands full for a couple of years!
    I could walk till about the age of five or six (I don’t remember exactly). But as I grew, my legs couldn’t support the increase in my body weight, because of my condition, and I slowly became paralysed. So I didn’t, unlike others, have to suffer some dramatic accident, or spend months on end in a spinal unit. For me, becoming a wheelchair user wasn’t an awful experience. Although I had stopped walking I didn’t feel that something had been taken away. Having said this, the last few months when I was walking were pretty tough – this was the only time in my life that I have felt really disabled. I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do – like run away from my mum!
    Having a wheelchair gave me a renewed sense of freedom. Because many people think that the life of a wheelchair user is pretty miserable, they make judgements about it. But the wheelchair allowed me once again to do the things that I wanted to do, such as trying to run away from my mother, chasing after my older sister, and being with my friends.
    I was born on 26th July 1969, and had the good fortune to be born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. My sister Sian and I were brought up in the house my dad grew up in. Mum is also a Cardiff girl and Cardiff, a great city, is very much my home town. I’m very proud of being Welsh and that I’ve been voted Welsh Sports Personality of the Year on three occasions.
    Dad is an architect; he’s a very organized person, who likes to know what he is doing and when. I hope some of this has rubbed off on me, but in temperament I’m more like Mum – if we decide that we want to