Seventeen-year-old Teri Farthing tells MARION SAUVEBOIS how she feels about heading to university, having grown up caring for her mum

BLUSHING to a cherry red, Teri Farthing timidly reveals her plans to study biology at “any university that will have” her.

Unlike most teenagers, ebulliently harping on about their grand scheme to put the humdrum of college firmly behind for the freedom of fresher’s life, there is a distinct reserve about the 17-year-old.

As a young carer, her decision to leave the mother she has anxiously watched over for close to 14 years is far more loaded than any of her classmates’ and her obvious eagerness is tinged with trepidation.

“There is a little bit of guilt,” she admits. “My mum has ongoing illnesses and it’s still up and down. The ups can be brilliant and the downs can be really bad and it can be anything in between. That’s what makes it worse. It’s completely unpredictable. She’s getting better but she will never be properly better. It’s something that we will have to deal with. It’s how it is.”

“It will good to get away for a bit, live on my own and get a bit of independence,” muses the student at St Joseph’s Catholic College.

“I’ve got extended family and if there’s a problem I can get straight back anyway. But I’m ready to go. I think being a carer has made me a lot stronger as a person.”

She relishes the prospect of a fresh start and the chance to finally shake off the “carer” label she has worn since the car accident which left her mother wheelchair-bound for years and brought her carefree childhood to a grinding halt in 2002.

“There are other parts of me that I would prefer people to know me as,” explains the teenager from Greenmeadow. “I am a carer, that’s what I do but I don’t want it to be the focus. Sometimes it can take over. People only know you as the carer.”

Teri was just shy of her third birthday when she and her parents were involved in a serious accident on their way home from Cotswolds Wildlife Park. Their car flipped over three times leaving Teri’s mother Vicki with a broken back and internal bleeding. She was placed in an induced coma and later contracted MRSA, a superbug, which resulted in most of her stomach muscles being removed.

Her health remains tentative to this day and although she is no longer confined to a wheelchair, she is still prone to unpredictable setbacks, which inevitably take their toll on her daughter.

Teri’s father Steve suffered a concussion and broken shoulder - his health has never quite been the same since the crash.

Teri escaped relatively unscathed - physically anyway - but was left picking up the pieces of their shattered lives. Despite her incredibly young age, she stepped up without hesitation, throwing herself into the role of little helper to her ailing parents, all the while wrangling with the crippling side-effects of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. By the age of five she had become a registered young carer.

“The accident is my first memory,” she says candidly. “So when I started helping I didn’t know any different and I never really picked up that I was doing anything out of the ordinary until primary school and I realised that my friends didn’t have to deal with all these things or do what I did.

“As soon as I could I was pushing my mum round in the wheelchair. A lot of it was becoming more independent for myself. Before my dad gave up work to help my mum when I was six, I was cooking my own microwave meals for dinner, I was dressing myself. There were times when my mum would ask me to get her a drink or help with something. It becomes instinct. You know she’s not able to do it so you do it for her. You don’t think, ‘Why do I have to do it?’ You just do it.” But her mental strength and fortitude were relentlessly tested over the following years.

While to the rest of the world she seemed to cope remarkably, inside she started to unravel. She became plagued - and still is - with nightmares, flashbacks and frightening panic attacks. Eventually at the age of six she was diagnosed with PTSD.

She muddled along with the support and love of her parents but her best friend’s death to cancer that year sent her reeling once more.

Determined to spare others the heartache of losing someone to cancer, at 11 the single-minded child took part in her first of many sponsored swims and raised £800.

Her unparalleled drive did not go unnoticed and at 12 years old, she became the youngest recipient of a Pride of Swindon Award.

But two years later, the burden of her responsibilities and difficulty balancing her caring role and schoolwork caught up with her and she suffered a breakdown.

Were it not for the ongoing support she received from the Swindon Carers Centre, she doubts she could have pushed on as she did.

“I think it would have been a very big struggle without the support of the young carers. I would have felt a lot more isolated. When I was a child it was a chance to get away,” recalls Teri, who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body, at the age of 14. “You have to grow a little quicker than you should and a lot of it was going away on trips and being a child again. And when I got older it was good to have other young carers I could talk to, other people who know what you’re going through. And the general support you get from Swindon Carers is brilliant.”

While she is extremely close to her parents, guilt weighs heavily on all of them. Protective by nature, she is often reluctant to discuss her frustrations and fears openly, dredge up painful memories or seem to blame them for circumstances out of their control.

“I’m very open with them, but there’s always a stage where you don’t really want to tell them you’re having a bad day because you just feel guilty and you don’t want them to feel bad about it,” she confesses. “My mum sometimes says she feels bad I’ve had to do all these things over the years. If you’re having a bad day about your caring role you don’t want to upset them or them to blame themselves. It’s no-one’s fault. And my parents have given me everything I needed.”

She would have every right to resent her situation. But the unmistakable warmth and protective edge in her voice at every mention of her parents only betray gratitude, in the wake of a crash which so narrowly claimed her mother’s life.

“There’s nothing you can’t do, just things that you won’t do,” she says firmly. “You just have to look back and think, ‘If I can overcome that, I can overcome anything’. Then you can face the next problem.

“There are always times when you get a bit depressed but you’ve got to try to be positive and stay strong. You have to keep thinking that things are going to get better.”

To find out more about the help provided by Swindon Carers Centre go to swindoncarers.org.uk, call 01793 531133 or email carers@swindoncarers.org.uk.