Bravo Hotel Mike 1,3. Over and out.

The title decoded, Brighton Half Marathon 13 miles - it is over for me before it has even started.

I am now in my 6th week of this stupid knee injury and it will not budge. I have been backwards and forwards to the physio, spending a small fortune to try and fix the problem, as well as the rigorous strengthening and stretching routine which I have religiously completed at least three times a day. I've been back to the osteopath who manipulated my sacroiliac joint into position and stuck his elbow into a tight piriformis muscle but nothing has solved the problem.

The pain has changed from a niggly sharpness only when I'm running to a constant dull ache, with the sharpness stabbing into the outside of my knee on each step I take. Coming downstairs is becoming more and more problematic, and requires a great deal of concentration. Or just bumping down on my bottom (remember the days when that was great fun?!).

Both the physio and osteopath noticed that my patella was tracking, and I was so disappointed when I was told that I had poor muscle tone in my thigh; unbelievable to my eyes which has seen the change in my leg from a withered old twig at its worst with the SPD to having clear muscle definition and strength!

The past two weeks have been a roller coaster of indecision, moodiness and frustration. The physio was initially hopeful that the treatment was going to work in time for me to be on the start line this Sunday. I saw him yesterday and he could see a marked improvement from the exercises I've been doing. My knee is painless on passive movement. So, he strapped my knee and IT band up and today I was allowed a light run. I knew before I'd even got to the bottom of my road that my knee wasn't going to carry me for 13.1 miles. I wanted to give it a chance to warm up and get moving again, so with tears flowing I kept going for a couple of miles, my heart sinking further with each painful step. I kept hoping that it was just the dreaded 'I can't do this' monster squeaking at me, and trying to decide if I could cope with the pain for a couple of hours but I knew deep down that I had to stop. I rang the physio and told him the run wasn't pain free, and he confirmed my fears. Do not run on Sunday. He wasn't the first person who knows sport to tell me not to run, and I know I have to listen.

I'm not sure I can even put into words how I feel. Selfishly, I want to hide away under a duvet for the next few days so that I don't hear what a great day everyone had in Brighton, how proud they are of themselves etc etc. It magnifies my feelings of failure, of defeat, the demons jumping up and down laughing at me saying I Told You So!! I can't be childish though, and I will be proud of all of my friends running on Sunday. Proud but jealous.

The reality is also dawning that I have to defer my marathon place, too. I've always maintained that I will be sensible in my approach to the marathon and not underestimate its enormity. It is a mere 7 weeks away and it is very, very unlikely that I will be fit enough or up to the required mileage in that short time, especially considering I am not even able to run 2 piddly little miles to date.

I am discovering that I have a reckless side, as well as a competitive side. The decision is made that I can not and will not run on Sunday. It is senseless to run on an injury, even without four children to look after it would be a huge risk to try. Yet there is a part of me which would quite like to sneak out of the house early on Sunday morning and run it anyway...

The next few weeks are going to be trying. E is having grommets fitted in the first week of March, which brings a whole set of worries new to me. None of the girls have ever had a general anaesthetic, and handing my little girl's entire existence to a doctor is going to be hard. I don't have a huge amount of trust in our local hospital; they have made far too many mistakes with her care already and I am terrified that they are going to stuff up again this time. Once the grommets are in and E no longer has glue ear, she should be able to hear much better. She already struggles with loud noises, and the grommets will make everything louder, so I am expecting a very sensitive little girl for a few days.

All being well with the grommets, the rescheduled APD assessment at Great Ormond Street is booked for early April. Two days before Brighton Marathon to be exact. It is a lot to get my head around. Bearing in mind I over-think and worry about, well everything possible if I'm honest, shove in a knee injury on top of that and it is just recipe for disaster.

Despite all of this, I have been encouraged and comforted by so many people. Amazingly the fundraising is going well, and I have almost reached £600 which is phenomenal. I have no intention of giving up on the 1000 mile challenge. I WILL complete 1000 Miles. I'm not sure if that will be as I cross the finish line of Great South Run, by the end of 2015 or even further down the line. But I will do it. I'm not lucky enough to have a body that will just run with no repercussions, so while I am off my feet I will be working hard at strengthening the weak bits, stretching out the tight bits and obsessing about not running. I will miss the freedom of running, the time to clear my mind of the stresses and strains of the day. I will come back to it, stronger than this time and having gained a lot of experience along the way.

15 days until Brighton Half Marathon.

Two weeks tomorrow... that's it. 14 days and a few hours until I am due to stand on the start line on the first of the big ones.

I've been asked several times recently how my training is going. The simple answer is: it's not. It's going nowhere, as am I. Great South Run was only a few months ago and I was in a similar position then, a great big grey cloud of misery hanging around, raining question marks down on my ability to not just finish the race, but to start it too. My toddler-esque self would quite like to have a bit of a tantrum and shout "It's. Not. Fair" while stamping my foot, crossing my arms and pouting my bottom lip so low I would risk tripping over it.

The IT band problem isn't going away as quickly or as easily as I would like it to. The physio for my knee isn't as easy to do as my ankle was. The stretches are harder and I still need to combine heat and ice on my knee; it is much easier to dunk an ankle in a bucket of cold water! The pain afterwards is horrible. Nothing seems to make it better, and the stairs have become Mt. Everest. However, I have seen improvement in the amount of time I can run for, going from 20 minutes (just) 2 weeks ago to an hour today.

The biggest difference this time is how I am coping with having an injury at this stage of training. I feel defeated before I've been overcome, I feel like giving in, and yet at the same time I want to keep going and not be beaten by a stupid injury. Such a conflict of emotions, which is exhausting in itself. The last few weeks have been challenging; E's hospital appt with the ENT consultant wasn't a pleasant one, Husband has been off work all week with bursitis of his hip and has been limited by pain and a hobble, thrown in on top of tired children who have been working hard at school and are more than ready for half term holidays. I've lost my coping mechanism and as much as I've wanted to go out and run away the stresses I haven't been able to.

There have been many tears. Tears of anger, frustration and resentment. I'm seeing many people celebrating their running successes (and rightly so) and while I am proud of them, I feel the ugly green-eyed monster raising in me. Instead of being inspired to go on, I want to crawl into my bed and hide away from the world. Where I see their courage and achievements, I also see my fear and failure. The latter two are much, much bigger.

While I was running today, I started with hope. I'm on my third pair of running shoes in less than a year, and it would seem that these ones don't irritate the old-lady bunions. This is good; it addresses the source of the IT band inflaming. It was freezing cold but I didn't feel the iciness. I felt the freedom of being out in the bright sunshine, despite the frost on the ground. When the pain struck just before 3 miles I had already decided I would cope with it. The Body Vs Mind battle was on; I could be stronger than the pain. It soon took over though, and I began to believe I was going to have to abandon the run and phone home to be rescued. The positive, warm feeling of hope dissipated, fractured by the searing pain up into my hip. I thought of E, how she felt when the most normal of noises made her cower, and cry in pain. How she felt when the carnival approached and all she felt was fear. How she felt when she wanted to tell me something but didn't have the words to say it. I put my head down, gritted my teeth and carried on.

Who knows if the pain settled because psychologically I was managing it, or if the slower pace made it manageable, but I carried on. I smiled at passers by with a false confidence. Maybe if I could convince them that I was invincible, then maybe I could convince myself too. I passed by several opportunities to turn home; the feeling of being free and out was worth the discomfort in my leg.

As I jogged up the hill to home, I could see the silhouettes of two familiar figures at the end of my drive. A proud but concerned husband holding up a jiggling two year old calling me on. Their faces becoming clearer as I grew closer, filling my heart with love and pride. I had made it.

As the day progressed, my knee objected louder and louder to the morning run. My head wants to go for 10 miles tomorrow, my knee is belly-chuckling at such a ridiculous plan. The question mark over the half marathon looms larger and darker as the pain intensifies and now I need to decide. Head down, teeth gritted and deal with it, take the risk that 13.2 miles in two weeks could seriously negate my chances of being a part of the marathon, or stand back and watch the successes of others?

I need a crystal ball.

"The only disability in life is a bad attitude"

I came across a picture of a child with Down's Syndrome on Facebook the other day. The child is laughing, looking very happy, and across the top of the picture in a swirly font it says "The only disability in life is a bad attitude". I looked at it and initially thought 'Ah, how sweet', but after giving it some thought it didn't sit well with me. I couldn't at that point however, put my finger on why.

Over 1.2 million people had liked the image, with another 600,000+ people sharing it. Looking through the 12,500 comments I found that I wasn't the only one who hadn't taken well to the image, and reading some of those made me begin to understand my own feelings. I took to my Facebook page 1000 Mile Running Challenge, and wrote:

"I've read a really interesting Facebook thread on using people with SEND as inspiration. Many of them expressed disdain at social media posts using images of 'disability' as a way of promoting acceptance and equality. The part of the post of the young woman who responded to one of the images which really got me thinking was:

"These pictures, which have become known as "inspiration porn" to us, are irritating and untrue. We use the term "porn" because it objectifies us. It objectifies us in that you, the "normal" people, are using us, the "disabled" people, as a source of inspiration so that you can not feel so bad about what life's circumstances have thrown at you."

It got me thinking about E; she inspires me to keep going and when the going gets tough when I'm on a run I think about how tough her days are and then I think I've got nothing to moan about. My thoughts turned to acceptance and equality - she is accepted by her peers at school and has good friendships. Equality is harder to measure. She is as important as the rest of the students in school, and her teachers work hard to ensure she has an equal opportunity to access the curriculum and to reach her potential. All of the things that we, as her parents, and her school have the ability to change or influence are done in order to make her as happy and fulfilled as possible.

What we can't do though, is change her disability. It can't be taken away, fixed or healed. No amount of acceptance or equality will change her disability. It might make her world a nicer place to live in, but I think that the issue of acceptance and equality affects further and wider than just people with SEND.

I wonder if Eloise will grow into a person who wants to be accepted and equal, or if she would simply want to be able to talk without having to think so hard that it makes her head hurt.

Food for thought."

I then came across a blog written a while ago, addressing the same issue. The image challenged was a child with Down Syndrome, wearing bilateral leg prosthesis and running alongside Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius. The blog stated that 'Bad attitudes do not cause disability any more than good attitudes guarantee health', and while I agreed with many aspects of the writer's opinion it still didn't quite explain how I felt. I don't think that the creators of these images are trying to dismiss disability as a matter of attitude, but I still don't quite get their point either. The image of Oscar Pistorius surely challenges this in a new way; here is a man once hailed as a role model and used to promote ability and where is he now? In jail for shooting his girlfriend.

The best I have heard disability described is by a friend of mine who has a daughter with cerebal palsy who uses a wheelchair. Rather than describing her daughter as 'disabled', she told me how the wheelchair enabled her daughter's mobility in the same way as someone would wear glasses to enable them to see properly, or how someone with diabetes has insulin to enable them to properly metabolise carbohydrates and fats. Perhaps E's learning disabilities aren't the problem; the problem lies with us not yet knowing how to fully enable her...

When I started this blog and the running challenge, one of my aims was to try and get people talking about invisible disabilities. When I was training to be a nurse, I had a placement in the community to learn about caring for people in their own homes. We regularly saw a young gentleman who had a spinal cord injury and therefore he used a wheelchair. You could be forgiven for thinking that his biggest problem was that his legs didn't work but for him the worst part of his disability was invisible. Not being able to walk was one thing, but his bowel didn't work properly either. The health care professionals providing his care had to enable him to have his bowels open regularly. Even those with the most visible injuries and disabilities have invisible problems too; it isn't just confined to learning difficulties.

Maybe I can challenge bad attitudes and try to open the eyes of the ignorant. I will never be able to remove E's disabilities, but I will carry on pushing the doctors to help me enable her to learn, to understand and to communicate well.