Miriam Dove

Well, when you talk about people going beyond their best I think my mum really says it all. She is a teacher in a behaviour school which she would always put her students before herself. She would sit all night and prepare lesson plans just to give these young people a chance who would normally be frowned upon in society. She tries every day to get to work even though she regularly suffers from migraines, I haven't ever known her to be off, on the one exception of the extreme snow in which she still spent her money on 6 or 7 buses in the freezing cold just to get to work. You will probably here a lot of soppy stories about death and illness but this story really takes the biscuit, in 2006 my brother was diagnosed with meningitis in its extremist form and had to be hospitalised for weeks and is still being monitored now as his imune system completely crashed, we were told there was a high chance he would die and definitely lose limbs. This shook our family particularly my mum who would stay in the hospital with my brother and change shifts with my dad to be with him. As luck would have it, the marvellous team at the Queen Elizabeth hospital killed of the illness with no limbs lost and we`re so grateful to the team. A year after, my parents divorced leaving my mother a single parent with 2 children to support and huge debts to pay off as well as supporting my grandparents with jobs. Nevertheless she is undoubtedly the kindest person I have ever met this is why she should be a torchbearer.