Mar 14, 2022
Grace Spence Green - Radical acceptance, internalised ableism and how to ‘take up space’
Grace Spence Green is a junior doctor and a wheelchair user. Growing up, she had her heart set on becoming a doctor from the age of eight and was a keen competitive climber. In an extraordinary incident in 2018, while she studying at medical school, a man jumped from a height and fell on her, causing her to break her back and sustain a spinal cord injury, becoming a wheelchair user. Choosing not to dwell on the incident, or indeed the man (who has since served time for GBH), Grace returned to medical school and has since started working as a junior doctor in London.
Grace and I speak about the incident and her feelings around it, the man, and she tells me why she isn’t angry about the situation. She shares how others, and the tabloids, reacted to what happened and her feelings around that.
We speak about Grace’s experience of being a patient at the rehab centre and about her frustrations about that time and the spinal rehab set up. She tells me about how it was for her, returning…