Wheelchair for family days out
JOSEPH, 10, HOPES TO ACCESS ALL AREAS
THE Warrens love adventurous days out in the great outdoors, just like any other family.
This includes 10-year-old Joseph who, though he uses a wheelchair due to his cerebral palsy, adores day trips with his parents and three siblings.
But it isn’t easy for them to include Joseph in every activity – something most families would take for granted.
His current wheelchair doesn’t make it easy for him to venture to most parks, National Trust sites and farms due to the often rough terrain which means a struggle for his parents pushing his wheelchair as he grows bigger.
Mum Nicola, 46, said: “We’d love to be able to spend more time all together as a family and not have Joseph sat in the back of the car with his iPad because he can’t do something we’re doing. “I think it does affect him. “We have National Trust passes but it’s becoming difficult to take him to any of those places. We also have Beamish passes but I took him recently and I really struggled getting him around on the cobbles.”
Joseph was born along with twin sister Eleanor and was soon diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
But despite it all, Joseph still has a smile on his face and loves nothing more than spending time with Nicola, Eleanor, dad Stephen, 46, brother Samuel, 13, and little sister Eliza-Rae, three.
He attends special needs school Woodlawn in Monkseaton four days a week and joins Eleanor every Friday at mainstream school St Columbus RC Primary, in Wallsend.
“They’re close, with being twins. It’s been the same since they were at nursery – he’s always joined her one day a week. He loves it,” Nicola added.
To make their everyday lives easier and make Joseph’s more comfortable, the family would love a more robust wheelchair.
Nicola, a parttime paediatric intensive care nurse at the RVI, said: “It would be great for him to have a bit more comfort. In the chair he’s got, it would be like us sitting on a stool all day. The chair we’d like isn’t classed as all-terrain but it’s definitely more robust.” The wheelchair essential for the family to live life to the full would cost more than £2,500 – a far reach for the Wallsend family. That’s where the Sunshine Fund comes in. Joseph has been chosen as one of 10 children to benefit from the money raised by the Go Bananas campaign this June.