‘Negative feelings are good feelings’ - Joanne O’Riordan talks growing with Total Amelia
JOANNE O’Riordan, activist and sports journalist from Cork, is only one of seven people in the world born with a syndrome known as Total Amelia (no limbs).
Joanne’s parents didn’t know she was going to be born with no limbs until her mother, Ann’s, 20-week scan.
“My mother brought me home from hospital after a couple of days. She was rather insistent on it and within a week she was pawning me off on everyone who wanted to hold this cool, limbless baby,” Joanne said.
“I was treated the exact same as everyone else, there was no difference in me whatsoever. I suppose they knew I couldn’t do the things my siblings could do in the traditional way that they do it, but they still encouraged me to go out and kick a football with them.
“My eldest brother, Denis, his nickname was Drought because he was a forward, so that shows you how talented he is. My other brother told him ‘if you can’t score on Joanne, you really have problems’,” she laughed.
The Cork activist who famously confronted former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny when he cut disability funding in 2011 said her parents found another girl called Tina in the UK, born the same way as Joanne. They met, and Joanne learned a lot from mimicking Tina.
“The traditional way of learning to eat or drink, they [Joanne’s parents] couldn’t teach me to do… So I can feed myself, drink and I was a journalist there for the last six years so I learned how to type 42 words a minute with a pen in my mouth because people want their match reports very quickly,” she said.
According to Joanne an important factor for her resilience is letting your down days be down days.
“It can be a bit toxic to be positive all the time. Negative feelings are good feelings. It’s just how we channel them is what’s important,” she said.