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Alex Cowan during her 10,000ft sky-dive |
Go ahead and jump!
Wheelchair-user Alex Cowan, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, tells Ruth Gorb why she decided to take the plunge and ‘do something scary’
IT takes guts to do a parachute jump. Strong men would quail at the very thought. But this summer Alex Cowan did it.
She is small and fragile, she suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS) and she is seriously disabled.
She decided to do the jump because she wanted to do something extreme. “I can’t control the physical things happening to me,” she said to herself, “but I can control how I feel about it.”
She zips around in her state-of-the-art wheelchair but talks frankly about her dependence: she can’t get out of bed on her own, she can’t dress herself, and yes, it is hard.
“It was a particularly bad time this summer,” she said. “I was sitting in the dark. I told myself I had to do something to break out of this dark hole. I had to do something challenging, something scary. The jump just came into my head – I could do something not only for myself, but for the organisations and people I turn to when I’m feeling like this.”
She immediately contacted the London Parachute School. The response was calm and positive. “Just OK it with your doctor,” they said. “You’ll be strapped to an experienced instructor. We know how to deal with it.”
Two months later she flying over Oxfordshire in a small plane with no door, watching the ground disappear as she went up 10,000 feet.
Wasn’t she scared? “Yes – just for one second, when I was sitting on the edge of the plane thinking: ‘Oh bugger, what am I doing?’
“Then I was plunging head first into the free fall, the air rushing past. Then the parachute opens, jerks up, and you’re drifting peacefully down. It’s quite silent, and the view is amazing.”
The five minutes it took to land seemed like a very long time, but she was down – minus one shoe – and there were all her family and friends.
“She was wheeled across to us,” says her husband, Lionel Roth, “and she had this great beaming smile on her face. She didn’t stop talking for three hours”
“It was a once in a lifetime experience and everyone I cared about had seen me do it,” Alex said. “Yes, I raised about £8,000 for MS charities, but what was more important was that word got around, and other people who were disabled felt they could do something about their illness. It was the impossible made possible.”
She has always been strong-minded, says her father Rex Cowan, (underwater archaeologist and champion of The Coffee Cup café in Hampstead), and very much a local girl.
As a toddler she attended the Anna Freud nursery in Maresfield Gardens, went on to New End Primary School and then spent two years at the Purcell School for musically gifted children where she studied piano and singing. After a spell at Haverstock School she went to a Quaker boarding school and then on to Oxford Brooks University to study psychology and education. Dynamic and only five foot tall, her campaign for student union education officer had the banner – “Think Big, Vote Small.” She got the job.
She began to feel vaguely unwell when she was 19. They called it neuritis. She wasn’t officially diagnosed with MS until she was 25, and the illness – a condition of the central nervous system which affects 85,000 people in the UK – has inevitably progressed.
She summons up all her strength to give talks about disability, to advise on access, to train companies on how to employ disabled people.
It takes a lot of emotional and physical energy, and she couldn’t do it without help. “I may not be able to get around by myself, but I’m still an individual person – I still want to be out there,” she added.
After the parachute jump, has she any other crazy ideas? “I did a burlesque cabaret with two other wheelchair users at the People Show in Bethnal Green,” she said. “We put a show together with the help of the London School of Striptease. I never thought I’d be able to take my clothes off in public, but it was most liberating.”
She did it to make people in her situation think about their bodies and how they feel about their disability. She wants them all to have a go at line-dancing, as she did in Trafalgar Square for the disability festival.
“We can’t move our bodies like other people do,” she says, “but it’s about enjoying ourselves and celebrating our difference.” She wants to see a world where disabled people strive to get out of life what they want. |
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