Swimming gives teen amputee her freedom
While some 13-year-olds attend swimming lessons reluctantly, North Canterbury amputee Grace Johnstone relishes every visit to the pool.
After removing her prosthetic leg she hops to the side of the pool, down the ramp and finally lets the water envelop her petite frame.
Just four months after having her right leg amputated she glides through the pool, demonstrating her perfect freestyle stroke.
‘‘It makes you feel free in the water and there’s so many things to think about you forget about everything else.’’
Grace was born with severe physical disabilities and had endured about 20 surgeries and procedures to straighten and lengthen her badly deformed legs and feet.
Her love of swimming began as a preschooler with regular sessions at Burwood Hospital’s hydrotherapy pool.
Grace later taught herself to swim at the local public pool.
‘‘I could swim but it was more of a drowning swim, it was really awkward and choppy,’’ she said.
Three weeks after her last operation, her first question to the surgeon was ‘‘when can I go swimming?’’.
But when Grace got in to the pool a week later she was shocked to find she ‘‘pretty much sank to the bottom’’.
Tracey Johnstone watched as her daughter’s legs became dead weights, pulling her under the water.
‘‘She just started doing overarm on the top of the water and she kept doing over-arm until she was actually hitting the bottom of the pool.
‘‘Then she would push herself up to the top again and take a big breath and then she’d just sink again.’’
Johnstone called disability advisor Justin Muschamp, from the Halberg Disability Sport Foundation, to see what could be done for her sports-loving daughter.
A funding grant from the foundation helped provide one-onone specialist swimming lessons to teach Grace how to swim again.
She conquered the pool in just one lesson and knew swimming was back in her life for good.
Grace was conceived with the help of fertility treatment, and at their 18-week pregnancy scan Tracey and Mark Johnstone were told their baby probably had spina bifida.
The baby was not expected to survive for long after birth, if at all, but Grace defied all the odds.
Despite efforts to retain her right leg, the decision to amputate was made at the end of last year.
‘‘She couldn’t walk any distance without pain . . . she was on her crutches all the time and then it came down to what do we want for her long-term future,’’ Tracey Johnstone said.
Getting back to high school and dealing with other people’s reactions to had been difficult, Grace said.
‘‘[People] come up to me and treat me differently in a way that’s hard to explain, and they still do because it looks different ... and it’s not how they knew me before.’’
The amputation brought her more pain-free movement, including the ability to swim.
‘‘I can now kind of run, I can ride a special bike, I can keep up with my brothers and sisters and I can walk without crutches.’’
Grace hoped to begin swimming competitively next year with ParaFed Canterbury, an organisation providing sporting opportunities for people with disabilities.