and an evening spent having dinner in the garden. The next, I was on the kitchen floor the following morning, unable to move my legs. It wasn’t a simple stumble; it was the beginning of a journey I could never have imagined.
The diagnosis that followed: a chondrosarcoma. A rare cancer that had been silently attacking my spinal cord without me knowing. Incurable. The conversations that followed only deepened the impact of what was to come: paralysis from the chest down. I would never walk again.
In those early moments, I strangely accepted what I had been told. However, questions soon followed. How would I live without the freedom I once took for granted? How would I navigate life in a wheelchair? And how could I face the reality that my life would now be shorter than I had ever planned?
Yet in losing control over my own body, I found something I never thought I had. belief in myself. I learned that paralysis didn’t mean the end, but the beginning of a different kind of life. The wheelchair became a symbol not of what I had lost, but of how I chose to live with what remained.