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Valentine’s Day 2012: Meet the couple who prove love really can conquer all
HAPPY FAMILY: Jimmy Gittins with his wife Lucy and children Annie and Jed at their home in Sandal, near Wakefield.
When Jimmy Gittins was paralysed he thought his life was over. In the first of a week of stories to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Grant Woodward meets a couple who prove love really can conquer all.
ON Jimmy and Lucy Gittins’ wedding day, the groom walked down the aisle.
While that may not be unusual for most couples, in Jimmy’s case it was little short of a miracle.
Five years earlier he had snapped his neck in two places playing for a local amateur rugby league side.
For a time there were fears the former Hunslet, Wakefield, Castleford and Dewsbury centre might die.
Even when he pulled through he was left a quadriplegic and unable to move all four limbs. The grim news from doctors was that it was likely he would never walk again.
Emotional
So Lucy was understandably emotional when the couple were able to walk together arm-in-arm on their big day.
“We still had a bit of banter though,” she laughs. “He kept standing on my dress, so I said to him, ‘Do you know how hard it is walking in this dress?’ to which he replied, ‘Do you know how hard it is to walk?’”
Humour plays a big part in Jimmy and Lucy’s relationship. It has done ever since they first got together.
She admits to having had a crush on him years ago when he played for Dewsbury Rams and she used to go and watch the games with her dad. But at the time she was 14 and he was 21 so she never really spoke to him.
When she read about his injury in the paper she didn’t feel she knew him well enough to go and visit him in hospital.
Then Lucy, a paramedic based at Morley, saw him one day at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield and they exchanged a quick hello, but it was only later when they bumped into each other on a night out – when Jimmy was still in a wheelchair – that romance really began to blossom.
“My friends have told me my first words to Jimmy were, ‘Do you never give your chair up for a lady?’ which helped break the ice,” she says.
“At first I didn’t really think of his injury because he was no different to how I remembered him. He was just Jimmy.”
Jimmy remembers asking her ‘How do I get your phone number in my phone?’
“She said, ‘You don’t’. So I bet her that by the next pub I would and, sure enough, I managed to get one of her friends to give it to me.
“I decided I was going to propose a long time before I actually did. I must have had the ring under my dad’s bed for about 18 months.
“Luce had seen this ring she liked when we were on holiday in Majorca and like a Norm I went in and got it, then hid it. I kept the receipt though, just in case.”
Jimmy says Lucy has been a great source of strength and support on his long road to recovery, the couple sharing a determination to lead as normal a life as possible.
“I think what Jimmy’s gone through has made us stronger,” says Lucy. “We have to understand each other more.”
A breakthrough came around four months after his injury when Jimmy regained partial use of his arms following intensive rehabilitation at Pinderfields.
After leaving hospital he teamed up with private physio and good friend Natasha Green along with another mate, Steve Johnson, to form Tops Fitness and Rehabilitation.
He works there a couple of days a week and continues to undergo two days’ worth of rehabilitation in his bid to walk again.
“It’s still really slow, almost annoyingly so. But every day is a step in the right direction and that’s the way you have to look at it.
“I can amble around a bit using furniture but I still mostly rely on my sticks because balance is an issue.”
Jimmy had been told another legacy of his injury was that he would never be able to have children, certainly none that could be conceived naturally.
He admits it left him feeling vulnerable and scared of where his future was heading. He thought love and marriage were out of the question.
Believe
But Lucy’s attitude, the fact she didn’t see anything different in him, made him believe he could still have the sort of life he had always hoped for.
“When Lucy and I got serious and started talking about stuff we realised that the things we always wanted were still possible,” he says.
“I had been told I probably wouldn’t be able to have children, but we went to see a lady at a clinic in Leeds and ended up conceiving naturally. My daughter Annie being born was obviously a very special moment for me.”
Annie turns two next month, while last December the couple welcomed their second child, a son named Jed, into the world.
“To be sitting here now with two beautiful kids and my beautiful wife, I couldn’t be happier,” beams Jimmy as we chat in the kitchen of the couple’s home in Sandal near Wakefield. “I can’t even put it into words.
“I had all but resigned myself to the fact that for me that part of life wasn’t going to happen.”
As well as his kids, Jimmy’s time is also taken up with his work as an ambassador for the Rugby Football League Benevolent Fund.
He’s involved with the RFL’s State of Mind programme, which helps ex-players adjust to life outside the game, and works alongside other charities, such as the Steve Prescott foundation which raises awareness for spinal injuries and people suffering with cancer.
Then there are the regular fundraising stunts which have seen him take part in a sponsored skydive and travel to three countries in three days on a quad bike with fellow quadriplegic Pete Stephenson, who was injured playing for West Hull.
Later this year the pair will launch an attempt to canoe the waterways of Britain.
“I’m not the easiest person to live with by any means,” Jimmy admits. “I get narky if I can’t succeed in things. I probably give myself a bigger hill to climb than I should but I can’t help it, it’s just in my nature.
“I think it takes a big person to understand that, Lucy has to have a lot of time for me and a lot of patience.
“I push myself harder than I did before the injury which means she and the rest of my family and friends have to tread on eggshells at times.
“But touch wood, we make it work.”
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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