About Sally

Sally was born on the on 22 January 1992. Born two and a half years after her brother, she completed our family and was a happy baby and toddler.

By the time Sally started school she was a confident, popular and outgoing child who excelled at everything she did. She set herself unnecessarily high standards and sometimes worried about getting things wrong.

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Sally was highly organised, self-disciplined, focussed and competitive; she always gave of her very best. She loved music and played the violin, clarinet and piano. Sport was another favourite and over time included hockey, netball, tennis, football, cricket, badminton (at which she played for Yorkshire), ice hockey and later on, running and boxing. Her highly competitive nature and natural ability meant that she was assured of success. Sally was also very creative and she loved drawing, painting, photography and drama.

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As a person, Sally had many diamond-like qualities, in that she was multi-faceted, beautiful, brilliant, sparkling, precious and unique, with diverse facets and reflections. She had a chameleon-like quality and absorbed and adapted to a wide variety of environments. With a lightening wit, hilarious sense of humour and infectious smile, one carefully timed inappropriate joke or comment could make others weep with laughter.

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Tragically, for Sally, life changed dramatically when she was in her mid- teens and began to develop a serious and potentially life-threatening psychiatric condition, an eating disorder.

Following a year in a local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) unit, Sally was transferred to a specialist eating disorder unit in London and then onto another eating disorder unit in Stafford. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, with the additional diagnosis of BPD/EUPD, she was transferred back to our home town to an adult inpatient unit. In total she spent three years as an inpatient and was finally discharged back into the community approaching her nineteenth birthday.

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Living, by choice, alone in her own apartment some positive periods followed most notably when she went to college for two years, gaining a distinction and a place at university. She also held down various part time jobs. However, at times she struggled to cope with the every present shadow her mental health issues presented, frustrating her ambitions, enthusiasm and enjoyment of life.