How Kadeena Cox handled disability to become Paralympic champion as she joins I’m A Celebrity 2021

 

How Kadeena Cox handled disability to become Paralympic champion as she joins I’m A Celebrity 2021

By Jaymi McCann

November 21, 2021

 

After a busy year she could be forgiven for relaxing, but Kadeena Cox is one of the stars joining the I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here next week.

 

The athlete is one of 10 celebrities to brave the Welsh weather at Gwrych Castle, but she will have unique challenges, as the athlete has multiple sclerosis (MS).

 

Here’s everything you need to know about the Paralympic hero’s disability, and what she has said about it.

 

Kadeena Cox, 30, is four-time Paralympic gold medalist and has represented Great Britain in both sprinting and cycling events.

 

The Leeds-born athlete was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2014, after suffering a stroke.

 

Having previously competed as an able-bodied athlete, she excelled on her Paralympics debut two years later and was one of the headline-grabbing stories of Rio, becoming the first Briton to top the podium in two different sports in the same Games since 1984.

 

She then followed her double gold medal glory in Tokyo with another major accolade: being crowned the winner of Celebrity MasterChef.

 

And now, she is heading into the jungle. She said of the challenge: “I am scared of spiders, I don’t like rats, I don’t like snakes, and I don’t like heights.

 

“But I am hoping the athlete in me will want to do it for the team and just get through that tough moment. I will scream afterwards.”

 

Kadeena told the MS Trust that “to begin with it was quite hard” following her diagnosis in September 2014.

 

She explained that as a physio student she had seen MS patients “and it scared me”, adding: “I was horrified that my life was going to be revolving around not being independent.

 

“But I managed to use sport to give me a goal and give me something I could control, and it was kind of what allowed me to get over it in a relatively short period of time.”

 

” You don’t know when things are going to change, you don’t know when your life’s going to end, you don’t know what’s going to come as a challenge,” Cox said.

 

“So if you’ve got an opportunity, I always think take it while it’s there, because you might not ever have the opportunity to do it again.”

 

“And that’s an issue when I’ve got back-to-back days and back-to-back races. But I’m stable. I started a new medication, maybe two years ago, which seems to be doing its job.”

 

She has also been admirably frank about dealing with an eating disorder and says times of competition are when she is most prone to a “wobble” when “hate for my body becomes a little bit more intense.”

 

“It has been up and down. I’m probably in a great place right now, compared to where I’ve ever been at this point before a championships. I’ve worked really well with the psychologist, psychiatrist, and nutritionist. And we’ve got to a really good spot.”

 

She says she can derive strength from her past, from days when she lay in a hospital bed in so much pain that she blacked out: “I wouldn’t have never expected to be living the life that I live.”

 

Cox told the MS Trust: “I get a lot of muscle spasms, so mainly through my right arm and in my right leg, and then when I’m quite fatigued I get them in both legs and arms and that’s when I spend time in my wheelchair.

 

“I also have altered sensations and a lot of pins and needles and burning. And then I also have problems in terms of memory and thinking, and just fatigue in general. A lot of my symptoms come when I’m fatigued.”

 

She explained that many of her symptoms are “quite invisible,” which increased the importance of ” raising awareness so that people understand the symptoms that we have and people know about it, and they’re able to then make adjustments.”