Swimming the Channel is an incredible feat in itself, but when 40-year-old Verity Green achieved this milestone in August she had even more to contend with, as she has damage to two of her senses – hearing and what is a relatively unknown seventh one – the vestibular system. We rarely think about it, but our senses play a key role in our swimming experiences. The salty taste on our lips when in the sea, the smell of chlorine in a pool, the contrast from skylight to the murkiness of a deep lake or reservoir and the feel of the water as we glide through it. When it comes to our hearing, it’s the sound of the waves, poolside commands from a coach, or even warnings of danger. Our vestibular system involves movement and balance and gives us information about where our head and body are in space; and when swimming means we don’t get disorientated and can understand which way up is the water and how we are lying in it. Limitations to any of our senses will hugely impact how a person deals with being in the water.
Verity has been deaf from birth, but a keen swimmer from an early age and even before reaching her teens she represented Great Britain at a senior level in the pool at the World Deaf Games. But around the same time she was diagnosed with Ménière’s Disease, which is a vestibular disorder of the inner ear that causes recurring episodes of vertigo and tinnitus. She was still able to swim and by the age of 16 was ranked world number three for deaf women in her main event, the 200m backstroke. But she was missing school and swim training on a regular basis due to chronic dizzy spells. With her day to day life so affected by Meniere’s, Verity’s consultant recommended she undergo extreme treatment which would destroy her inner ear semicircular canals, and effectively destroy her vestibular system. The bilateral chemical labyrinthectomy would give her a better quality of life once she had retrained her brain to learn how to walk again – but the killer blow was she was told it would mean she could never swim again. Verity was struggling so much she had no choice, and went ahead with the treatment.
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