Sophie Morgan shared her empowering journey after becoming paralysed in a car crash at 18.
The TV presenter and Loose Women panellist is paralysed from the chest down after suffering a spinal cord injury in 2003, when she and four friends were involved in a car accident in Scotland.
Sophie has used a wheelchair ever since, and has become an outspoken disability advocate, even leading the coverage of the Paralympic Games for Channel 4 last summer.
In a new episode of Fearne Cotton’s podcast Happy Place, Sophie spoke about the aftermath of her life-changing accident.
“I was paralysed. I didn’t know what I could do. Nobody told me what was possible for a woman with high-level paralysis,” she said.
“I had no idea people could do all that much,” Sophie added, confessing she was the “first disabled person I’d ever met”.
Later in the interview, Fearne addressed the discrimination and abuse Sophie received when she became paralysed, as the presenter said students would point and laugh at her in college following her accident.
The presenter also said she was confronted with physical discrimination, as she would be left struggling to get around campus because it wasn’t accessible with a wheelchair.
She said she tried to “fight back” against the discrimination but that became “exhausting”, so decided to use her platform as a TV presenter to highlight solutions that will help other disabled people.
Sophie said she wanted to dispel myths surrounding disability, and wanted to “tell the truth” about her journey from paralysis to TV star.
She said she was “frightened” of her body after being paralysed, and said she had no idea how to cope in the aftermath of the life-changing accident.
“I was frightened of my body., I was frightened of other people’s perceptions of me. I was frightened of the wheelchair… I had a lot of fear,” she shared.
“I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t know what to do with all the fear,” Sophie added.
She said she became fed up with relying on other people to help her, and wanted to be more independent and ditch the fear.
“If you’re going to let yourself feel fear, you’re going to be more paralysed than you already are,” Sophie stated.
She said she began to break her own barriers, and went swimming, on a motorbike, and to busy, crowded places to prove to herself she was strong enough to beat the fear.
Fearne also asked Sophie about an incident she wrote about in her new book, in which she had to lie on her front for three years after a splinter in her bottom got infected, and she was unable to sit down as it needed to heal.
“It was just tortuous on every level,” Sophie shared, as she revealed “an ice cream scoop” sized hole was left in her bum cheek following an operation.
