The early signs were good: Cambridgeshire county age group diving champion, county swimmer. The latter evidence is impressive: four medals including gold from the 1999 European Disability Swimming Championships, silver in the 100m backstroke at the Paralympic Games in 2000. The story, however, of what surrounds these achievements involves the slow, insidious progression of Fiona’s congenital condition. This is an athlete’s journey – through a deep pool of trauma and joy shimmering with tales of triumph, amazing mental strength and determination. Her body has brought problems but her smile endures.
I ring Fiona to set up a meeting to discuss this feature. The voice on the other end is welcoming. ‘How are you?’ she says with genuine warmth. ‘Fine,’ I answer automatically. ‘What about yourself?’ ‘Very good,’ she says slowly and the words resound in my ears. She has had a year of great hardship – a struggle to stay alive. As we talk, I am looking at a photo of her lying on a hospital bed, her back revealed and a vivid scar running down from her neck to her hips where surgeons have inserted two titanium rods from her shoulder blades to her pelvis in order to stop the increasing curvature of her spine.
Ten hour operation
‘Umm,’ she recalls, ‘my parents didn’t know I was going in for surgery. I was terrified but I didn’t want to involve them. Why? I’m quite independent, my dad (who is a Professor of Medicine) didn’t want me to have the surgery, my mum I didn’t feel would cope very well with the stress of knowing that I would be 10 hours on the operating table and there was a possibility that I would die on it. I decided that I would prefer her to know afterwards – particularly if I had not died!’
She is a forthright and fluent speaker but recuperation after the operation brought a lot of complications – nerve damage, pulmonary emboli, pneumothorax, pleurisy, pneumonia and permanent damage to her pituitary gland where she bled into her brain … to name but a few.
She has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare congenital connective tissue disorder that affects skin, ligaments and internal organs. Particularly significant have been the repeated semi-dislocations of her joints and stress fractures of her bones that led to her giving up diving when she was 15. ‘Yes, my joints were extremely mobile and I could do contortion work when I was young but it got worse and worse. I even had nerve blocks put in my ankles to take away the pain and I always thought my main achievement was by pushing myself through sport.’
And it is such determination – that ‘pushing myself’ – that is a feature of Fiona’s life. She got her lifesaving qualification and started coaching swimming and diving before going to university. Unfortunately, while struggling to cross a road on crutches and callipers, she was knocked down by a car and ended up in a wheelchair. All the time she spent in her chair made her joints even more unstable and it became progressively more difficult for her to take steps. She has not walked since 1992. ‘Yes,’ she reflects, ‘together with the bone disease in my left leg which had caused irreversible nerve damage, my legs were not completely paralysed but I did not have much of a leg kick.’
Leg kick? ‘Yes, hydrotherapy led to me seeing an article in Swimming Times about the 1995 Swimathon 5000m swim and that became the start of my comeback to swimming.’ Rather unassumingly, she continues: ‘Within three years, I was swimming at the world championships in New Zealand where I won four medals.’
Steeped in swimming
Fast forward to this year’s operation and its aftermath. Unfortunately the weakness in the muscles in her legs is significant and worse than it was before surgery. ‘They think I have both spinal cord damage and peripheral nerve damage. I am now on the waiting list to be admitted into the Spinal Injuries Unit for specialist rehab. The doctor was not very positive and said I should not expect much further improvement and that it was a waste of time trying to learn to walk a few steps in callipers. At first this made me feel quite down but now I am just getting on with things and working on getting medically better so I can get back in the water properly!’
This is a girl steeped in swimming. ‘Yes, I used to dream about swimming. I’m sure I used to swim in my sleep and I’m sure I once head-butted the wall trying to do a tumble-turn.’ And then I watch a video of Fiona’s first venture back to swimming. She is with Di Bass, who has been involved with the Paralympic Team for many years, and elite swimmer James Gibson, and it was just as well as there were a couple of times when Fiona sank and had to be fished back up again, spluttering but laughing.
She is so pleased to be back in a medium that welcomes her, where she can move easily. ‘It was really strange because I’ve always been somebody who finds swimming very natural and floating easy. Even with one arm when I dislocated my shoulder, I could still float easily and swim OK without the use of three other limbs, but now I’ve got both arms working I’m finding it really hard to stay up – because of the rods and because of the lack of use and lack of awareness of where my pelvis is in the water.’
Indeed, one of the hilarious (not sure that’s the right word) moments in the video is when James Gibson encourages her to try front crawl and ‘helps’ by putting a float under her legs. Unfortunately, once Fiona is on her front, with her legs on the water surface, she realises that because of the two titanium rods in her back, she can’t lift her head out of the water and she can’t breathe. Her first few strokes of dog-paddle, appreciated by James, are in fact a frantic effort to make him realise that she’s drowning! He does and yanks her up for air. But two minutes later, she is gliding beautifully down the Loughborough pool doing stylish backstroke and beaming when she gets to the end of the length.
Designed to keep in touch with people after her operation, she has her own website. The home page shows a free-flowing Fiona swimming underwater off the Gold Coast of Australia, an image of fluidity and escape. The name of the site is ‘Dare to Dream’. Why? ‘To challenge people,’ says Fiona, ‘and to remind myself that you have to get out of your comfort zone and think “this is something I really want to achieve”. Dreams tend to be that, something that we really want, but we’re not quite sure we can achieve. If we didn’t dare to dream, we wouldn’t achieve the things that we do. So in spite of what people say, even if every other person thinks you’re not going to make it, it’s between you and your dream and setting goals to get there.’
‘It was possible I would die during surgery so I didn’t tell my parents’
Is she still daring to dream? ‘I think everyone else wishes I wasn’t but, yes, in my heart of hearts, I’d love to do another Paralympic Games. I want to walk again and to be able to stand and to do things that the doctors seem to think just aren’t worth daring to dream of. Well to me they are … I’ve had permanent physical damage from the swimming I’ve done in the past so my dreams come at a cost but it’s me I answer to and I have to get to sleep knowing that I’ve either ignored my dreams or gone for them. I’ve known the price and it’s been worth it. And I want to have another go. I dared to dream that I’d swim again, I got in and did my first length of backstroke and there was a little voice inside me saying “Dare to dream a little bit bigger”.’
‘Bigger’ means Paralympics in 2008 or 2012. Can she fight back to the Games again? The worst part of Fiona’s life was dislocating her shoulder just a month after being selected for the 2000 Paralympic team. She did it swimming at the Bath high performance centre. ‘And the pain was indescribable. I just went straight down and screamed when I came up.’ Later in hospital, she was told of the severity and that she needed surgery and that there was no way she would swim again that year. Her heart and soul had been put into qualifying for the Paralympics and in that moment her dream was gone.
However, Fiona did not accept it. She had the shoulder strapped up, refused surgery and went back to swimming – with just one arm. ‘It was a slow process,’ she says. ‘I had to do one arm swimming, one arm hand-crank cycling, one arm weights, then a bit of doggy-paddle and eventually moved back to Loughborough working on my own at the local leisure centre but by the time I finished there, I was swimming 3000m sessions with one arm, overtaking people who were using all four limbs. It felt really good to learn my new balance. Then I did bits with Di Bass and Ian Armiger at the university. It wasn’t easy, I’d get in, do a warm up, get out and throw up with pain, then get back in and do my main set.’
Was it worth it? ‘Well, silver at the Paralympics and a smile from ear to ear – yes!’ She pauses. ‘I have caused permanent damage to my right arm. And clawing to two fingers together with repeated semi-dislocations of both shoulders. I didn’t rejoin the team until six days before they flew. Everyone thought I was fighting a losing battle. But I couldn’t accept that I wouldn’t be there. People were doubting me all the way, they weren’t sure I would perform, whether medically I should be in the water, and I had to prove my fitness again before I was taken on to Sydney, but if it looked like my shoulder was breaking down I would be sent home.’
‘The pain levels were building and building’
But it didn’t? Did it? ‘I was phoning my physio at midnight in tears saying I couldn’t handle the pain. I was distraught because I was aware that the pain levels were building and building as I was being asked to swim harder and harder. I was in agony and unable to tell the team doctor of the pain because if I did, I would be on my way home. I used to have ice brought to my room to numb the pain and nobody was really aware of how bad it was.’
But she stayed with the team and went to Sydney. She pauses to stretch out on her bed, still needing morphine for pain relief after her operation. ‘You just have to want it badly enough. The morning of the race came and I felt good. My heat was fantastic and I was right next to the world record holder who was way ahead of me time-wise. I had set my dream goal to drop by four seconds. It was mad but I couldn’t let go of it’.
She recalls the race in crystal detail… ‘splashing from the side of me’… ’right with her’… ‘I want to beat her’… to the ecstasy of touching the wall first, reaching her dream goal, beating the world record holder and getting a Paralympic record. ‘I looked up,’ she says, ‘and being extremely stupid and dyslexic’ (she actually has a degree in human biology) ‘saw PR and thought it meant personal record and thought “how do they know?”’
The final brought her the silver medal. Was she disappointed not to win gold? ‘No, silver had been my long-term goal and that was what I got. I swam even faster than the heat – the fastest I had ever swum so I was delighted. The crowd of 17,500 were marvellous, I smiled at my parents, this was my childhood dream – to swim against the best in the world in an Olympic arena – that was my dream come true. But now I want to do it again. I want to get to Beijing in 2008.’ n
If you want to contribute to Fiona’s rehabilitation both in the water and on land as she strives to walk again, visit her website at: www.dare-to-dream.co.uk.
Courtsey of Swimming Times magazine
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