Free Aim High by Tanni Grey-Thompson Page A

do something, then we want to do it right now! I have a tendency to think quickly about what I want to do, sometimes making rash decisions as a result.
    Sian was a great sister to grow up with; she wasn’t that interested in taking part in sport when she was young, although she watched a lot, and has always been incredibly supportive, often travelling with me to events and helping to pay for stuff (as did my parents).
    She’s not as competitive as me, but then very few people are! I always knew that I wanted to do sport, and that I had to compete as hard as I could.
    Unfortunately, I didn’t really get to know my grandparents, also all from Cardiff, who died before I was old enough to remember them well. My dad’s father was a very good motorbike rider, who competed in the TT races. He was unable to turn professional, though, and had to get a real job.
    My primary school was really inclusive in terms of letting me take part in PE lessons. It was different in secondary school because the rules were different. There were a number of disabled children in the school and it was felt that we should do our PE at the special school next door. It wasn’t that I didn’t really want to go to the special school, but I didn’t know anyone there. I had some good PE teachers who let me join in with my friends as much as possible.
    To be honest, I didn’t really know what Spina Bifida was until I was about ten years old. I didn’t actively try to find out because it didn’t matter to me what had stopped me walking. I just knew that I couldn’t walk, and that there was nothing I could do to change that, so I just had to get on with it. This wasn’t a conscious decision. There were simply lots of things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to spend my time doing them, not sitting around thinking about what I couldn’t do.
    Many people who become wheelchair users don’t feel this way, and I know that some of them find my attitude challenging. For many young people, a tragic accident – which is sometimes their fault, sometimes someone else’s – means that they can no longer do things the way that they used to. For them, it means learning everything again from scratch, from dressing themselves to driving. But my rehab all took place while I was slowly losing the use of my legs, so it never really felt like ‘rehab’. It felt normal.
    Spina Bifida isn’t anyone’s fault, although over the years I have learnt that it can have many causes – previous family illnesses, poor diet, living near coal mines, for instance. These days it is accepted that folic acid does make a difference (and lack of it could have caused my condition), so every pregnant women or a woman thinking of having a baby is advised to take it. But the cause never really bothered me. It could have been the man on the moon who caused my impairment, and this would certainly have made a more exciting story!
    Some people find it hard to believe that I have honestly never spent any time thinking about what I didn’t have. But the last couple of years when I was trying to walk were hard, and I don’t really remember a time when walking was easy. So I didn’t have a great deal to compare my situation with. All I knew at the time was that occasionally I had to go for hospital checkups, where I was prodded and poked around, and then I came home.
    My parents had a lot more to cope with than I did, because they had more idea what was going on. They had to make decisions about my mobility, what treatment I would or wouldn’t have, and they had more knowledge than I did about what my long-term expectations might be. In fact, they kept me blissfully unaware of these expectations until I was in my thirties.
    But if I was unconcerned about my impairment, how did – or do – other people deal with it?
    My mother always said that she had too many things to worry about and that she didn’t