When I took my first steps I didn’t feel like Supergirl – it just felt natural

At the age of seven, Gemma Quinn was paralysed in a car crash. Doctors said she would never breath unaided let alone walk again. Now, 11 years later, she has proved them wrong. Elizabeth Day hears her astonishing recovery tale

The television screen flickers into life. A beautiful blonde teenager in a red, velour tracksuit stands shakily upright and takes a single step.

The lounge room erupts in shrieks of joy, screams of disbelief, the sound of clapping hands and muffled crying. In the middle of it all, the girl in the red tracksuit smiles – composed and separate from the mayhem that surrounds her. Then the screen goes fuzzy.

Gemma Quinn’s first step in more than a decade was captured on video as a 44th birthday present for her father.

“I wanted to do something special for my dad, because we have a really strong bond and he’s always been so supportive of me,” says Gemma. “By the end of it, everyone in the room was crying. There wasn’t a dry eye, but I didn’t cry. I always thought it would feel different when I walked, but it didn’t. It was instinctive. I didn’t even think about it. I just did it.”

“Just do it” is a catchphrase that encapsulates Gemma’s attitude to life. On the day we meet, the motto is emblazoned in loopy white writing across the grey sweatshirt she is wearing. The three words sum up the cast-iron determination that has characterised the years that have passed since Gemma was paralysed from the neck down in a car crash at the age of seven.

On June 6, 1992, Gemma was asleep in the back seat of a Rover Maestro driven by her father, Mike, on the way to a family holiday in North Wales. On a winding country road, the car was clipped by an overtaking lorry, ploughed into a wall and flipped over into a field.

The accident left her with a severed spinal cord and a categorical declaration from her doctors that she would never walk again. She would, they said, be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, dependent on 24-hour care, unable even to breathe on her own.

“I never let that get me down,” she says with a smile. “I just got on with it.”

After nine months in hospital on a ventilator, Gemma had recovered the ability to breathe independently. The doctors, amazed by her determination and their own misdiagnosis, still insisted that she would never recover any movement from the neck down. But last November, after a decade of immobility, she began to regain sensation in her feet.

In all, it took 11 years of “getting on with it” before Gemma’s star turn last month in the video for her father. He broke down in tears when he watched it. Within a fortnight, Gemma could walk 20 paces, ride an exercise bike and kick a football.

Now she talks of having the metal rod in her back surgically removed, of regaining full movement and of her desire to travel to Kenya. The medical profession, slack-jawed in astonishment at her transformation so far, would be wise not to say “never” now.

…continue reading on
http://www.telegraph.co.uk…

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