THE INSPIRING COURAGE OF I am 31in tall at 19 and in constant pain but it’s great to be unique
WHEN schoolgirl Georgia Rankin brought home an eightweek-old shih tzu puppy, it was remarkable enough that the dog already reached her knees.
More than ten years later their pet Poppy has reached full height at almost 11 inches. But Georgia, aged 19, is still exactly as tall as she was on that day.
At just over 2ft 7in, she is Britain’s tiniest teenager, shorter than the average two-year-old and under three times the height of her canine pal.
Georgia has a form of skeletal dysplasia. Her bones fused together when she was a toddler, stopping her growth. Her condition is so rare she has never had an official diagnosis.
But it is not her height that bothers Georgia – it is the constant agony.
She says: “It’s a big cloud over my life. My life is pain. It’s not just about being small. There’s no escape.
“The pain is there from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed.
“Poppy knows when I’m in pain, she is so protective. I’ve been around her from a puppy so we always had a bond.”
Different
Playtime with Poppy is one of the few things that helps distract Georgia from her chronic aches.
Yet you could easily overlook the depths of her suffering – because this remarkable teenager hides it all behind a constant smile.
She laughs through stories of her height being an issue, such as the time she started secondary school and the tie she was given was as long as she was tall.
Or when she was able to climb into her Christmas stocking as in a sleeping bag.
Finding adult-style clothes, shoes or underwear at a size to fit a three to four-yearold is also a challenge.
“I l ove being so unique,” admits Georgia candidly.
“I never used to. I hated being different. Throughout high school I was isolated and left out.
“I didn’t get invited to parties with the other girls.
“So I became this person that thinks, ‘ Who cares, people are judging me anyway – why let it stop me being who I want to be.’
“Now I don’t want to be the same as everyone else.”
Georgia shares her infectious zest for life with the 1,400 people who follow her YouTube channel MakeupJunkieG, where she posts video tutorials as a qualified make-up artist. Each one is a testimony to her daily determination not to let her small size shrink her future. Georgia’s parents, school admin assistant Andrea, 40, and police officer Simon, 42, realised Georgia had problems soon after her birth. She could not keep food down and rapidly lost weight. Experts at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, near t he f amily home in War rington, Cheshire, diagnosed a life-threatening bowel condition called tufting enteropathy. It meant for her first ten years Georgia had to be fed through a tube and suffered constantly from infections and septicaemia. “Doctors told us a few times we’d lose her,” said Andrea. “It was agonising.” When they realised Georgia was still smaller than her primary school pals and not growing, they took her back to Alder Hey.
Dream
There they learned she would never grow again and she had an inherent bone weakness, osteoporosis.
At 13 Georgia was given a heartbreaking choice.
Doctors could ease some of her chronic pain but it would cost her the use of her legs.
She chose an op to remove the ball joint in both her hips.
Mum Andrea says: “It was hard seeing her go into a wheelchair at that age. Before, it was all about her bowel condition.
“That was life threatening and we accepted that. But never in a million years did I think one day she’d be in a wheelchair.
“I couldn’t imagine Georgia living a normal life, the size she was.” It was also difficult for Andrea and Simon to watch Georgia’s brother Brody, now eight, reaching milestones his sister could never dream of – such as doing sports and riding a bike.
But it was Georgia’s pain that was hardest for them to come to terms with.
Andrea says: “Georgia has always been in pain but just didn’t know it when she was young It was normal to her. Now we look back at pictures and you can see her grimacing.” Georgia depends on a daily cocktail of drugs – including morphine and paracetamol up to four times a day.
She takes anti-inflammatories twice a day and a local anaesthetic patch on her hips when they get too much.
“I can’t cope without pain killers,” she says. “But I already notice the side effects from the morphine. I don’t know what long-term damage it’s done. I get really drowsy, shaky, spaced out.”
On a recent trip to the US, Georgia considered using cannabis oil. At the 70,000-strong Little People of America convention – where Georgia still found no one smaller than her – she heard how much it had helped others.
In the UK it is an illegal class B drug. She says: “I’m really frustrated knowing there’s something out there that is natural that can help me be pain free.
“Not being able to access it because of where I live is hard to understand. It makes me angry.”