Mira is like any other child
She enjoys watching Peppa Pig, train rides and going to the park with her family.
The eight-year-old can be heard most days shouting ‘Faster, faster’ as she zooms up and down a ramp into the garden at her home.
Mira has very complex needs. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and has no use of her legs at all. She is tube fed and has an internal medicine pump fitted, one just under her ribs, which sends medicine via a tube into her spine. She can’t sit up or walk and her vocabulary is limited to about 100 words.
Despite this, Mira shares her enthusiasm for life with her adoptive parents, Revd Simon and Kate, as well as her brothers Sam (21) and Isaac (17), and her sisters Hannah (19) and Cola (10).
Until recently, days out or even simple trips to the shops were pretty much out of bounds for the whole family as they balanced Mira’s mobility needs.
All this changed when a new, specially-built bike arrived.
When Kate approached Clergy Support Trust about a health grant for the wheelchair bike, the Grants and Services Officer arranged for an occupational therapist to visit and see if the bike was the best option for Mira’s needs.
Following this assessment, Clergy Support Trust subsequently provided a generous Health Grant of £5,000 towards the cost of the wheelchair adapted bike, with other charities and Mira’s family paying contributions to bring it up to the total cost of £7,658.
Kate continues:
Once we’ve practised more with the bike, we’re really looking forward to being able to use many of the cycle paths around where we live.
We might even get as far as the local railway station, where Mira’s favourite thing in the world is to ride up and down in the disabled lift. She calls it an ‘up one, down one’ and she loves pressing the button to operate it and watching the trains coming in and out of the platforms.
You’re never going to be able to get something like Mira’s bike on the NHS. We made a decision to live on a stipend, and so we were never going to be able to afford such things.
But the bike is such a blessing for us. God doesn’t just know what we need to get by, but also what will help our family life. As part of Simon’s calling and as part of remembering that God has got our backs, he’s also got the best interests of all our children as well.
Thanks to the bike and the help from Clergy Support Trust, we can now access some really brilliant places, in a way that everybody genuinely enjoys and that also benefits our physical and mental health. The whole thing is amazing.
*Due to Mira being adopted, her parents have requested that we do not share her identity online.
If you're serving or retired Anglican clergy or their household, and you would benefit from similar support to Mira, Kate and her family: