Trapped

Fran Macilvey, whose book Trapped: My Life With Cerebral Palsy has recently been published, reflects on some of the challenges of living with disability.

by Fran Macilvey 20th June 2014

‘Why me?’ is, ultimately, a futile question, which dominated forty years of my life. I’m not quite fifty. The grief of being born into a body heavy with cerebral palsy offered plenty of scope for self-pity. Though the first alarming signs of suffocation at birth suggested I would need constant care, the physical realities resolved into a mere shuffling walk and an unbalanced gait that lurches awkwardly from side to side. Even so, it soon became apparent that, unless I fought very hard to stake my claim, these minor aberrations would be enough to exclude me from most everyday hopes of an ordinary life.