Ameera copped a life-changing diagnosis. Eight words inspired her

PARIS: Ameera Lee was walking to work when numbness she’d felt in her face for a week escalated. She began to feel like she was dribbling, although a few wipes with a tissue assured the mother-of-one it was merely a sensation. She hadn’t ever had a stroke, but felt that if she was to suffer one, it’d feel something like that.
Instead of settling in for another day at work, the Brisbane-born Australian, 38 at the time and living in Dubai, headed to hospital.
Within a few days, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
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Fourteen years after learning she was living with an incurable neurological disorder, Lee is a 50-year-old archer set to make her Paralympic debut.
She didn’t pick up a bow and arrow until she was 42, but as her immediate reaction to her MS diagnosis tends to indicate, she was a straight shooter well before taking aim at bullseyes.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got MS. I have symptoms. What do we do from here?’,” Lee tells Wide World of Sports.
“I’m a type of person where if there’s a problem I go, ‘Let’s find a solution, and we can think about the emotion later’, and that’s how it ran. That’s the same thing with shooting and everything I do; if there’s an issue, a problem, I find a solution rationally and logically, and worry about the emotion side of things later.”
Ameera Lee practising ahead of the Paris Games, at which the 50-year-old will make her Paralympic debut. Paralympics Australia
Lee will compete in Paris this week in the women’s individual compound and mixed team compound events.
The Sydney-based archer will do so seated in a wheelchair. She originally shot her arrows standing, but became a seated archer after a series of falls.
She started using a wheelchair for everyday life in 2018. Prior to that, she would go shopping with her son Huthaifa, who’s now 15, and sleep for hours upon her return home, exhausted by walking around so much.
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She struggles with fatigue, numbness, balance, coordination, nerve pain and cognitive issues.
Light exacerbates her symptoms, as does heat, and she needs “a lot of ice packs” when it’s hot.
“There’s not one minute of one day that I don’t have a symptom,” Lee says, before revealing it’s been that way every day since her diagnosis 12 years ago.
Ameera Lee was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an incurable neurological disorder, at the age of 38. He Canling/Xinhua via Getty Images
Although she was all but entirely able to block out emotion when the news was delivered to her, she found herself in a rut about a year on.
“When things started to settle down and I was into a routine, I guess that’s where it hit,” Lee recalls.
“I didn’t take it all that well, to be honest, the realisation that I have an incurable illness … I wasn’t in a good place, my mental space wasn’t great.”
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But within a few months, a change of mindset had lifted her spirits.
“I was on a downhill slide and I thought, ‘I can’t stay in this state. I need to get up, I need to keep moving, I need to get self-motivated and problem solve’,” she says.
“I thought, ‘How would I normally do it? Take the emotion out of it, let’s have a look at options and solutions, work on what you can do, focus on the positives, make a plan’.
“I came up with the saying: ‘Be creative, get inspired and never give up’.”
Lee wants to inspire people by competing at the Paralympics. Paralympics Australia
She keeps another saying close to her heart.
“You win,” she begins, “or you learn.”
As fate would have it, Lee discovered archery after sending her son on a summer camp at the Sydney Olympic Park Archers.
Parents were also encouraged to fire off some arrows, and Lee was hooked.
“I got the bug,” she smiles.
She’s emphatic when asked if she wants to inspire people by competing at the Paralympics.
“Absolutely,” she says.
“If there’s any platform I have, I want to use it for something positive.”
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