Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. the My cast away this week is Baroness Jane Campbell. A contrary character, she seems to have

spent her life proving people wrong. The doctors who when she was an infant gave her less than a year to live,

the disability charity which told her she was too disabled to work for them,

and the medics who believed her life wasn't worth saving.

A pioneering disabilities campaigner, she says,

You take the hand you were dealt and believe me, if you said to me that I could be born

tomorrow without my condition I'd say no thanks I am me because of my condition

not despite it and so Jane that seems curious to me because on the one hand I can

imagine that you may be the sort of character who doesn't want to be defined by your

condition but at the same time it has defined who you are.

Explain a bit of that to me.

But I think as we're all defined by our experiences, It's the nature argument and I think in my case all of my life

I have learned through experience I have learned through watching and observing and

feeling how the world fits together so for me my life has taken the course that he has because I am a disabled person who basically needs another person to live.

And that, for me, has been a really, really interesting,

sometimes difficult, sometimes frustrating journey.

The condition you have is spinal muscular atrophy and in order for you just to go about your business every day,

you need somebody there to help you because it's a degenerative condition that

means that you're not able to do the things with your arms that most of us would need to

...