The tears won't come

WHO ever said life was fair? In the sitting room of her comfortable home in Fulford, Yasmin Heesom is watching the Olympics. Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman is crouched in the blocks, ready for the women's 400 metres final.

As the starter's gun cracks, Yasmin can no longer contain her excitement: "Go on, Cathy! Go on!" she urges, her face twisting with emotion.

If ever there were a woman who seemed to have everything, it was Yasmin. Young, attractive, a gifted athlete and dancer with a beautiful baby girl, a degree from Cambridge and a promising radio career opening up before her, she seemed to have the world at her feet.

Then, just over ten years ago, her world crumbled. Yasmin, now 38 but looking years younger, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

It must have been a stunning blow. Even today, she can scarcely bear to talk about it.

"I want to cry, but the tears just won't come out," she admits.

As a teenager at a comprehensive school in Hampshire, Yasmin had excelled at athletics: the 400 metres - Freeman's distance - the long jump, the shot putt. She was coached for a while by an Olympic coach in London.

She wasn't just a gifted athlete, though: she was intelligent and ambitious, too. After sixth form college, she took a degree in social anthropology at Cambridge. She continued with her athletics, but excelled at dancing and drama.

Towards the end of her degree, Yasmin visited Jamaica to research rastafarian women. It's a memory she still cherishes. "I met Rita Marley the wife of Bob Marley," she says proudly. "I danced with her. They asked me to be in a dance troupe."

Back in the UK, she answered an ad in a local newspaper. "Are you black?" it asked. "What do you think of the Press and media? Do you feel they talk to you?"

Clearly, it struck a chord. Yasmin went for an interview, and found herself enrolled as a trainee reporter with Radio 4. She had a piece on inter-racial adoption aired on Women's Hour, and was being groomed as a radio producer when the devastating news about her illness struck.

Actually, she admits, she had been unwell for some time. As a teenager, she had suffered problems with her vision; and while at university had been prone to periods of extreme weakness: training hard at athletics one day, confined to bed the next. People thought it was probably glandular fever.

Then one day when she was working at Radio 4, she rang in to say she had a cold. Except it wasn't a cold at all.

Now, Yasmin is confined to a wheelchair. She has the mobile, expressive face of an intelligent, successful woman: but her limbs are helpless, twisted with painful spasms.

The strength and determination that carried her to those early successes, though, is still there. Yasmin was, says her carer Debbie Walker gently, the sort of person who always wanted to achieve something great. "She wanted to be the top at everything she did," she says. Yasmin nods agreement.

Now, she has set herself new goals: to walk again (she hasn't walked for two and a half years) and to dance.

First, though, she wants to find some way of tackling the constant pain. Thanks to the generosity of friend and former coach Dave Curwell, who has given her £3,500 out of his own pocket to help meet the cost of complementary therapy at New York's Schachter Centre, she is hoping to fly out to New York at the end of the year for treatment to relieve the pain. Her 15-year-old daughter Bella and carer Debbie will both go with her.

"It's Bella's birthday in December," Yasmin says. "We'll celebrate her birthday in New York."

On the screen, the women's 400 metres is in full flow. To the rising excitement of the crowds, Cathy Freeman strides to her expected Olympic gold, her face lighting up with delight. The roar of the crowds fills the comfortable sitting room.

Yasmin is silent, her face turned away.

Why does it mean so much to you that Cathy won?, I ask.

"Because she's aboriginal," she says. "Because I'm mixed race." Words fail her. Words fail me, too.