“It's absolutely amazing that someone wanted to help us in that way, because life is hard.”
Rachel and Isabelle's Story
Mum-of-two Rachel has really been through the mill in the last four years or so. A full-time hair stylist, she has had to give up her job to be able to tackle two big curveballs that came her way.
“My husband had a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis four years ago,” she recounts, “and that was very sudden. He went from being perfectly fine to perfectly not fine. He has a lot of falls and infections; he has to lie down a lot.”
As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, her five-year-old son Jacob is nonverbal and autistic.
And that was all at the same time. It was really difficult.
Her eleven-year-old daughter Isabelle nods. She knows better than anyone the toll that both setbacks have taken on the whole family. Due to her dad and brother’s conditions, she’s classed as a young carer and the one-on-one time that she used to get with her mum has shrunk to almost nothing.
It turned out that Isabelle’s dad actually has a rare neurological disorder and not Parkinson’s. Rachel was only able to obtain a final diagnosis after months of being ignored by healthcare professionals when she tried to tell them that something else was wrong.
So the chance to put everything behind them, even if only for a few days, was almost too good to be true when the idea of a holiday was put to Rachel.
She was waiting to pick her son up from the specialist provision that he attends when she got the call to ask would they all like to go away somewhere.
I didn’t know where we were going, but it was absolutely amazing that someone wanted to help us in that way and make it as easy as possible for us because life is hard.
The family stayed at a holiday park in Great Yarmouth in an adapted caravan that could accommodate Rachel’s husband in his wheelchair. Not somewhere she’d ever been before, Isabelle took to the beach instantly.
And because her grandmother went with them to be an extra pair of hands, it meant that Isabelle and her mum got some much-needed quality time together.
We really valued that because we did things we don’t get time to do anymore. There’s so many pressures always put upon us, there’s always something that we have to deal with. But we keep our chins up, that’s what we do. We bumble on, we do our very best.
With the pandemic in the mix as well, the last couple of years have felt particularly restrictive for Rachel and Isabelle. The opportunity to swap the confinement of their four walls at home for the Norfolk sea air did them the world of good and they both feel reinvigorated now to deal with whatever comes next in their lives.