There's some things......

There's an awful lot people with DMD can do, and it's always a great idea to come up with resourceful ways around barriers. There are places however where those barriers become impossible while we have DMD. I remember one funny moment in a Geography in sixth form (after high school), the course was more and more 'outdoors' in nature.

One particular day we had to go to a picturesque part of Wales to do a survey of the area. The hilarious part was to go approximately neck high in a river. This was impossible at the time, my wheelchair isn't the submarine it could be! So this basically ended my Geography course as a lot of the work entailed strenuous outdoor activities.

Extract;
...Geography was increasingly focusing on activities ‘out in the field’. This literally meant expeditions to rivers and mountainsides. One memorable occasion on a trip to the beautifully green Gower peninsula, we were asked to go neck high in a river to take measurements. This was impossible for me and my wheelchair, it definitely wasn’t a submarine! As most of the course was increasingly getting physical again I had to drop yet another subject...

But my mother always says,"when one door closes another window opens". See what windows opened up for me in my book DMD Life art & me; http://duchennemen.net16.net/buymybook.html

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.