The Love of My Life.

Two and a half years ago, I adopted the love of my life: my beautiful girl, Winter.

For someone who’d been terrified of animals for most of my life, the idea of getting a dog would have seemed ridiculous. If you’d asked anyone who knew me even two years earlier, they probably would have laughed.

In my twenties, I found myself wanting a pet more than almost anything else.

There were always concerns. What if I ran over my new best friend with my wheelchair? How would I look after it? What would happen when I wanted to go away? Those questions always seemed enough to end the conversation.

As a twenty-something, I’d already spent the last few years watching my friends and peers build lives. They were building careers, coupling off, buying houses, getting married and starting to have children. My life was taking a very different path from the one I’d imagined.

I’d also just spent most of the previous year recovering from brain surgery. My life had been turned upside down more than once, and I knew it would never be the same.

But for the first time, I also had the time and space to build my own version of a family.

For years, I’d discussed what sort of pet I could get if I ever chose to. My dad kept returning to the idea of a greyhound. They were the right height for a power chair and, according to him, lazy enough that I might actually keep up with one.

Eventually, I stopped treating it as a hypothetical.

My support workers and I spent weeks searching adoption websites and rescue organisations. We found and applied for a few dogs, including one I really wanted, but they all fell through for one reason or another.

I met with someone from one of the more prominent greyhound rescue organisations, and things seemed to be going well. Then they suggested I ask someone else to adopt a dog on my behalf so that person’s name, not mine, would be on the paperwork.

Eventually, one of my support workers gave up on the rescue organisations altogether and started scrolling through Facebook instead.

That’s where we found Winter.

She was a young greyhound who’d never raced because she’d broken her leg as a puppy. If she hadn’t broken that leg, we probably never would have crossed paths. The person advertising her had also put Winter’s sister, Summer, up for adoption.

When I went to the property to meet Winter, I first met a few other dogs, including Summer. One of them wasn’t up for adoption, and although Summer was gorgeous, she was frightened of my wheelchair. Then it was finally time to meet the girl of the hour.

People say that an animal chooses their human, and this girl proved there might actually be something to that.

I don’t know what I expected when I met her. Maybe a nervous greyhound who’d politely tolerate me while someone decided whether I was suitable.

Instead, within minutes she was leaning into my wheelchair, completely uninterested in all the reasons people had spent years telling me this couldn’t work.

I knew almost immediately that this was my dog. She’d already made up her mind, and somewhere along the way, so had I.

She still needed to be desexed, so I had to wait another three weeks before bringing her home for what was supposed to be a three-week trial. Despite a few early toileting issues that needed help from her previous owner, none of us needed that long to know how it would end. Within two weeks, I knew this girl wasn’t going anywhere.

I was fairly sure my parents would tell me not to do it, so I waited until Winter was already home before telling them.

Looking back, they both agree that was probably the only way it was ever going to happen.

Now they love her just as much as I do.

Within the first few days, she’d ripped apart the cheap bed I’d bought her, peed everywhere she shouldn’t have been and decided that my bed was where she belonged.

Since then, life has taken us places neither of us could have imagined, but she has been my constant through it all.

Winter arrived as my dog, but she quickly became part of the whole family. My parents, who’d once worried about me getting a dog at all, now ask about her before they ask about me. Somewhere along the way, she became everyone’s girl.

Before Winter, other people kept asking whether I could look after a dog. They saw my wheelchair and imagined everything that could go wrong.

Winter never asked me to prove any of that. She needed someone to choose her, care for her, and make difficult decisions when she couldn’t make them for herself.

I thought adopting her would be my way of building a family that made sense for my life.

I didn’t realise how completely she would become the centre of it.

Two and a half years ago, I adopted the love of my life.

By now, nobody who knows us would think I was exaggerating.