5 minute read
Changing lives through fostering
Tania Seddon has worked for the ambulance service for 27 years, starting in patient transport service before moving over to the emergency operations centre handling 999 calls, and progressing to education and training. Her roles have been more than just ‘jobs’ to Tania; the ambulance service has been her family, her ‘flesh and blood’, and she takes the time to share her story and tell us why.
Tania was born in the early 70s into a very unstable family. At 10 months old, her three older brothers were taken away and put into a children’s home. She can’t remember much from her early life, but sadly, she too was taken away from the family at just age four. Tania stayed in the home for ten years until she struck up a friendship with a girl who changed her life forever.
“Most children in children’s home were only there temporarily; they came for a few months then went back to their families. I could not see my parents; there was a court order that stopped them from contacting me. This wasn’t easy to come to terms with as a child, especially as other children’s parents would visit them regularly. As the only ‘long term’ child, it was not unusual to be the only child left in the home on a weekend while the other children went home.
“At the age of 12 while attending Girl Guides, I was befriended by one of the helpers; she was 18 years old and took care of me. When she found out that I was often on my own at weekends, she felt sorry for me, and unbeknown to me, she had asked her parents if I could stay with them at the weekends and holidays. They had kindly agreed and went through social services to be approved. So, during holidays and weekends I had a family. I called my friend’s parents my mum and dad straight away, they didn’t mind.
“At the age of 13, my new family moved from their home around 250 miles away. Soon after, I started going to their new home for holidays but remained in the home at the weekends as it was just too far to go.
“Again unbeknown to me, they had approached the social services to start fostering proceedings. At 14 the day finally came for me to leave the children’s home after 10 years. It wasn’t easy at first, as my new foster sister had started university, so I was without her.
“I soon made friends at my new school, and I’d see my foster sister during school holidays and loved it when she came home - I was so grateful. However, just over a year of living with my new mum and dad, three days before Christmas, my sister had come home and had gone to visit a friend one night when she was hit head-on in her car by a drunk driver. She was killed instantly. I will never forget that day, we were utterly devastated.
“I struggled to come to terms with the fact that I was now taking her place in the family, if it wasn’t for her I would still be living in the children’s home. It was tough, and I felt that somehow it was my fault. Times were hard, but with friends and family, we got through it. Now on the anniversary of her death, she is still fondly remembered.”
On Tania’s eighteenth birthday, her mum and dad gave her a book with a cheque inside for a lot of money and a card which read ‘The future is yours, this was the money we got for you which we have been saving for you.’ This meant the world to Tania and she asked could she change her name and take their surname, which she did.
When Tania was 20 things were going well, she moved down south to live with her foster brother, who got her an auxiliary nurse job. It wasn’t long before she found her own flat and started dating an old boyfriend. When Tania got pregnant, she moved back to her foster parents, who helped her find a home and vowed to help her raise her baby, which they did. It wasn’t long after this that Tania found the ambulance service, a place where she has met so many friends she calls family, and she has been with us ever since.
“Painfully, both my parents have passed away, but I managed to tell them that before they did, fostering was something I was going to do to carry on their legacy and make a difference to children’s lives – just as they did for me. “My husband, Andrew, also works in NWAS as an emergency medical technician and we have both always talked about fostering as it is something we wanted to do. We were approved in January 2020 as foster parents and I was going to focus on it full-time but then the pandemic hit, I was asked to stay working until July 2020 to train the influx of emergency call takers we recruited to cope with the increase in demand, which I willingly did.”
Tania is still working part-time for NWAS and in July 2020 she and Andrew got their first ‘fosterling’ - an endearing term Tania now names her foster children - and since then have gone on to care for more children. They chose to be ‘emergency, short term’ foster parents, as due to both their jobs, they have come across situations in which children have needed emergency care for short periods. They want to be the foster parents who provide a safe house for those children for as long as they need. They both want to make a difference to as many children’s lives as they can.
