Stars say happy 50th birthday to racing fan living with locked-in syndrome

For one man in an Eastbourne care home 'the new normal' started not with the coronavirus shutdown but in August 2014. Since then, the new and old normal have been light years apart for Stevie Fisher, who on Saturday reaches his 50th birthday trapped inside his own body but cheered by the stars of the sport he adores.

Fisher was a brilliant farrier, a far from brilliant point-to-point jockey and a countryside-loving man who lived life to its fullest – by his own admission, far fuller than was good for his health.

Then he suffered a massive stroke, one that came with the most awful consequences.

Fisher was left with locked-in syndrome. He could hardly be more locked in. The avid racing fan is completely paralysed, except for being able to blink with his left eyelid. Thanks to a special eye gaze computer that turns his gazes and blinks into writing, he has almost finished his autobiography, using that single eye to eke out each and every one of the 33,000 words.

The book will be published later this year, by which time there will hopefully have been an easing of the coronavirus shutdown restrictions that prevent Fisher's wife, Geraldine, from visiting her husband, once pictured in a Channel 4 poster advertising coverage of the 2015 Cheltenham Festival.

Dressed in trilby and tweed, Fisher was shown punching the air, a packed Cheltenham grandstand behind him. By the time the photograph was plastered across Britain, its central figure was already facing up to a new future, one in which his only way of communicating has been through fixing his gaze on a computer that emits a flat, deadpan voice, similar to the one we associate with Stephen Hawking, another victim of locked-in syndrome.

One of his releases continues to be racing, from within whose community a host of familiar faces will send birthday wishes to a man who once regularly shod Queen Mother Champion Chase hero Sire De Grugy.

Stevie Fisher, celebrating a point-to-point success

"He is not an average human being by any stretch of the imagination," says Injured Jockeys Fund almoner Lucy Charnock.

"Stevie has lived an incredible life and has some genuinely funny stories to tell. Fun was everything to him. He was the life and soul of any party – and if there wasn't a party he made a party. He was a really big personality and, to be fair, he still is. Stevie is still in there."

Charnock adds: "The most difficult thing now is he is stuck in a room in a nursing home. He can't leave it and he can't have any visitors because his vulnerability to infection is so high. It's tough for Stevie but also incredibly tough for Geraldine.

"The birthday plan was Geraldine's idea. She explained she was thinking of trying to get some people to wish him happy birthday on video and that one of her friends could edit them all together. I got going with the racing names, and we've had so many, including AP McCoy, John Francome, Mick Fitzgerald, Davy Russell, Ruby Walsh, all the Moores and Ed Chamberlin, who was amazing and got all the ITV team to do it. Stevie is a big cricket fan and Jonny Bairstow is on the video, too."

Also featured is Jim Crowley, who was humbled when in 2016 Fisher made it to Ascot to see his good friend crowned champion jockey. Crowley dedicated the title to Fisher.

"He is an absolute legend of a fella," says Crowley, adding: "Anybody who has ever met Stevie Fisher knows they have met him."

One of those to have made his acquaintance is Brough Scott, who has helped to organise the book and wrote the foreword, in which he says: "Stevie Fisher always knew the risks of burning the candle at both ends. That’s why he wanted to call this book 'I Told You It Would End In Tears'. What follows is both a celebration of life and a cautionary tale, but above all it's a miracle in its making. What it absolutely is not is any plunge into self-pity."

Indeed, there is an abundance of humour across the pages, in which Fisher describes past japes and scrapes (often linked to an abundance of alcohol), casts his mind back to being sent soaring over the head of a point-to-pointer and brings humour to his desperate predicament.

"Brushing my teeth is quite a skill," he explains. "As the roof and tongue need to be cleaned with wipes, the best way is to wrap the wipe round your finger. I have bitten a few people. I don't mean to – or do I? Only I will know the answer! Most people only get bitten once. They are a bit sharper the second time."

He compares writing using eye gaze technology to sending a text – "but a ****ing long one" – yet he is also incredibly upfront about the misery of a situation into which some light will be shone on his 50th birthday.

"A day off would be nice from this stroke and wheelchair – and to drink a nice bottle of red – but that is not going to happen," he says.

"I have always thought that I am just waiting for a box really. I did not think I would last this long, given how big the stroke was and the amount of drugs I was on. I know at my funeral they will say that he is better off now because it can't have been any kind of life for him."

That life, the good and the bad, has been told in a most extraordinary book that required a herculean effort to write.

To its author, we say, happy birthday Stevie.

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