As a disabled person, you’re forced to repeatedly explain your medical history – but for this article, I think it’s important. I was born with a very rare type of cancer called a neuroblastoma. In 1965, it was pretty much a death sentence.
Luckily, I took part in a clinical trial and, with only days to live, I had major surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy with a new drug. Despite being given no more than five years to live, on my last birthday I celebrated hitting 60. I doubt anyone in 1965 would have imagined how attitudes towards disabled people would improve as I grew up.
It is devastating to see how those same attitudes have reversed in the past decade or two. The cancer left me with a paralysed right leg, so I wore a leg brace, but otherwise I was a pretty normal kid. I was lucky to be starting school in 1970 when the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act came into force, which made it possible for disabled children to attend mainstream schools, if they could manage it.
My parents moved across Luton to be near the only school that would accept me on a trial run and then as a pupil. When I was a child, if you could manage living like non-disabled people then you were allowed to do so. Not the fully inclusive practice I later campaigned for, but an acknowledgment that disabled people shouldn’t be written off.
At 15, my spine collapsed and crushed the nerves to both legs, an unforeseen side effect of chemo. After months in hospital I came home a full-time wheelchair user. I was lucky our town centre in Luton was very wheelchair accessible and, during my time in hospital, my high school put in some serious adaptations to ensure I could return.
Accessible toilets and a lift meant I could take my exams without any real difficulty, thanks to Putteridge high school and the then headteacher, Mr Price. At Luton sixth form college, adaptations were made again, this time under my guidance. Through the course of my childhood ideas around disability had changed from “if they can, let them try” to “what can we do to help them succeed?” and even “what do they want us to do?” That was the overarching attitude I encountered for the next 20 years.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
