This week a group of young people enjoyed a day out at Lodge Hill Activity Centre thanks to funding from Rockinghorse
If you’re a young person with a long -term health condition, it can often feel like you’re the odd one out at school or with your friends.
Having to learn how to manage the appointments, treatment, and anxiety that can come with a diagnosis or epilepsy, diabetes or even cancer, can really affect your day-to-day life, not to mention your mental health.
And all this at the same time as you’re trying to negotiate your teenage years. It’s a lot.
It can feel like you’re on your own with no-one who knows how you feel.
This is something that Youth Worker Paul Peacock often hears from the young people he works with in West Sussex. He said, “A lot of these young people feel so isolated out in the community and in their schools.
“They feel like they’re the only ones going through what they’re going through.”
And this is why Paul approached Rockinghorse, to see if we could help fund activities for some of the young people he works with. So, on a beautiful late summer day, a group of young people arrived at Lodge Hill, ready for a day of activities including crate stacking, go-karting, archery and sno-tubing.
Paul, who organised the event with the help of the specialist nursing team, consultants and phycologist from Worthing and Chichester hospitals, explained why the event is so important. He said, “The idea is, we come along to a place a lot of Lodge Hill, we do a range of activities, and this helps the young people start to talk to each other.
“And before long, they start making friends, they start realising they’re not alone. Most of the conversations are normally just friendly, but sometimes you do hear the odd comments of like, ‘oh, so how do you cope with this at school?’ Or ‘what happens when a teacher does this?’ So, they learn from each other as well.”
The first activity of the day at Lodge Hill was crate stacking where the group work as a team to build towers of milk crates that two people climb, seeing how high up they can get before the tower topples!
It was a great way to start the day as everyone had a role to play, whether that was holding the ropes, stacking the crates, or climbing the tower.
While this activity was going on, Nina was watching with her 13-year-old son Jessie. Whilst Jessie didn’t feel able to join in, for Nina this was a really huge step for him.
Nina explained, “Jessie was diagnosed with Leukaemia when he was six, and at one point he was away from school for two years, so he did miss out on a lot of the social side and now he’s very, very anxious all the time.
“Because I was with him so much and he relies on me so much, I wasn’t able to leave today. If I hadn’t stayed, he wouldn’t have been able to stay. But he’s here which is a massive step for him.
“I think this is amazing, and it gives him a chance to integrate with other kids that are going through similar experiences.
“Not everyone at school knows what he has been through or what he’s had to deal with. So it’s nice for me to know that they are here, that he’s OK, and that everyone knows the situation. He doesn’t have to explain himself all the time.”
Eventually everyone had a chance to have a go at the crate stacking challenge and afterwards, two of the group, Amelia and Agnes, told us what they were enjoying about the day.
Amelia is 15 years old and has had epilepsy for 12 years. She has been to days like this before and really enjoyed them. She said, “I think they’re really useful to connect people with epilepsy because in school, you never really meet anyone with the condition, and it can sometimes feel quite lonely.
“So, when these days bring different people together, it can really feel like you’re included in the community.”
Sixteen-year-old Agnes was diagnosed at the start of COVID with a type of epilepsy that’s medication resistant so she is currently on the path for brain surgery which she is hoping will stop her seizures.
She told us that she really likes the fact that everyone who comes along has similar things going on in their lives. She said, “I haven’t done a full term at school since year 7 because of my epilepsy and I’ve lost loads of my friends because of it as they don’t really understand.
“But here, you can just be yourself, even though I’m one of the oldest, and I don’t really know many people here, it’s still really nice.”
After their crate stacking the group went on to do lots of other fun things during the day including archery and the zip line, all of which the whole group really enjoyed and got stuck in to.
And despite feeling unable to get involved at the beginning of the day, Jessie eventually felt more comfortable and Nina was able to leave him with the group towards the end of the afternoon session. He then decided to have a go at the zip line, walking up the tower, attaching to the line, and speeding off down the route – reaching the bottom with a big smile on his face! A real demonstration of how the participants can feel more confident as the sessions progress.
And for Paul, it’s just great to see how these sessions impact on the young people involved.
“The group we’ve got here today includes some people that have been before, which is lovely. They might be doing similar activities but they still want to come back because they’ve enjoyed it so much. We’ve even had some young people come back as volunteers. So, the impact’s huge.” he said.
“But you can see for parents as well, they really appreciate that their children have something like this. Often these sessions are the first thing they have been able to find for them and they’re really keen to have more things for them to go to like this.”
But it’s only thanks to your funding that we have been able to support young people like this. Without your donations, these events simply wouldn’t happen, so if you’d like to help us run more of these, please consider making a donation to us here.
