Sunday swimming smiles...

Recently my mom was showing me some photographs of me holding up some swimming badges and that links well with today's topic. Every sunday for many years until about sixteen I used to go swimming with my dad at a local disabled swimming club called Starfish. You could earn badges if you could do certain things whilst swimming. There were 4 badges to earn, Red, Green, Yellow and Blue. Blue was absolutely solid to get and only very few earned that. I got Red and Green but I always used to rue the fact that I couldn't even try to earn the next two, DMD had taken too much strength away. We had fun but it was freezing while changing after the dip! I'd recommend swimming very much while it's possible.

Extract; ...In my later swimming years my father would drag me around the pool with his feet under my arms so I could join in with the lengths. It was a happy time that all the family joined in with, including my mother who would watch us through a large window sitting in a small cafeteria...

To read more of what I got up to despite DMD, then buy my book here; http://duchennemen.net16.net/buymybook.html also buy on UK amazon here and USA here!

Life with DMD is all about the things you can do not what you can't.


Foreword

I’m Ian Griffiths from South Wales. This book is a story of my life so far up to the age of twenty five years. I live with and suffer from the ill effects of DMD which stands for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It is a severe muscle wasting disease and a life limiting terminal illness. It won’t kill you in six months in the traditional sense of ‘terminal’, but it’s far crueller than that, it steals every muscle in your body first and then kills you, anywhere up to the age of thirty. There have been cases of men living past that into their forties and fifties but only with drastic interventions such as ventilators and tracheotomies, more on this can be found by reading on.
I hope to cover a few things in this book, from a history of my childhood years to a more detailed history from sixteen years onwards and finally onto my current problems and triumphs. At times things I write may make you smile or may make you pause and think about the seriousness of life with this devastating disease. I really hope there will be a cure but currently for us supposedly ‘older’ guys with DMD (over twenty one), there seems very little hope. If I don’t see a cure in my lifetime, I hope my campaigning helps in some way bring it about for future generations, so another child won’t have to see their body wither and die before their time.