Award Winning Journalist Stephanie Scawen has spent the past three plus decades intrepidly reporting from far flung corners of the earth. For a good part of that time, she also explored the world beneath the ocean, deep sea scuba diving in all sorts of exotic locales.
I met Stephanie when we were 18 and 19 years old, fellow students enrolled in the UK National Council For the Training of Journalists course at Harlow Tertiary College, Essex.
We became fast friends, along with a group of likeminded youngsters with inquisitive minds and a shared taste for adventure.
Stephanie's career took her to Hong Kong after a stint on the national daily press in London. There she reported on the former crown colony of the British Empire's historic revert to Chinese rule in 1997.
I kept in touch with my friend while she worked for several major global organizations in media, film and television fields around the world. As a senior producer for the Al Jazeera English network, Stephanie reported from almost every country in east and south east Asia.
This warm and witty, always razor sharp woman of the world, now spends her days confined to a wheel chair, suffering from the auto immune disease Multiple Sclerosis.
Follow Stephanie on her compelling blog — Diabled.com.
After more than 20 years of managing and living with MS, the disease has now taken hold to such an extent that this inspiring woman is fighting with all her might to contain it and be able to thrive once more.
Back in 2013, Stephanie started using a cane and by the end of the year was in a chair. Even then, she forged ahead, producing a documentary about the plight of the disabled in Kenya. She also produced an excellent documentary MS & Me for the Al Jazeera Network. But in 2016, she was forced to return to her native Britain for what she thought would be affordable medical care.
To quote a newly launched YouCaring crowdfunding page for Steph, she was, sadly wrong. Stephanie has been denied access to proper rehabilitation facilities by the National Health Service’s because MS is considered a degenerative condition and there isn’t enough money to fund cases considered to be hopeless. She can’t get insurance for private health care because she has a pre existing condition. And her condition has rapidly deteriorated.
Today, Stephanie cannot stand on her own, nor can she transfer herself independently between her chair, her bed and her commode. She relies on caregivers for nearly every move.
She desperately needs to go to a proper rehabilitation facility to regain her strength.
Friends have launched a campaign to share around the world in the hopes that many caring people will contribute whatever they're able to donate to help this amazing woman make it into the rehabilitation facilities she so desperately needs.
I'm thinking back to the late 1980s and picturing us as teenagers, at the start of our careers. I'll never think of Stephanie Scawen as any one other than the bright, beautiful, spirited, bolshie broad who had and continues to have more courage than most anyone else I've met since.
Keep fighting, dear Stephanie.
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