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Legcapped
This is a truly moving account of Daran, a little boy diagnosed not to live beyond the age of two due to a particularly severe form of spinal muscular atrophy known as Werdnig-Hoffman disease.
Ian and his wife June were determined to challenge the prognosis and fight to extend their son’s life regardless of the odds stacked against them. How they were able to do this and enable Daran to live life to the full is the basis of Legcapped: a title taken from Daran’s own thoughts that he was ‘legcapped’ not ‘handicapped’.
Told with honesty and frankness, which often leads to exceptional depths of emotion, the account of how this family remained strong and faced the challenges involved in Daran’s education and upbringing is actually exceptionally uplifting. By following their own determined path to care for Daran, Ian and June are rewarded with a huge amount of happiness and an intelligent son who combined a real lust for life with a great sense of humour.
From beginning to end, this is a book which will leave readers both moved and inspired by the resilience of Daran and his parents.
About the author:
Ian J. Heading
Lancashire author Ian Heading has spent much of his life as a planning officer working in local and county councils. He spent two years in National Service in the late 1950s.
He originally wrote the story of Daran’s life in longhand as an attempt to record their life together whilst the memories were still fresh, and found that this helped his grieving process. Some years later, following illness of his own, he decided that this could make the basis of a book and it is from those original pencil written pages that Legcapped was produced.
