A disabled poet from Aberangell, who is “clinging to life by the skin of her teeth”, has published a poetry collection to raise vital funds for the life saving surgery she needs.

Jenny Rowbory, 35, is publishing her poetry collection, We Are The Winter People, a “diverse range of poetry dealing with love, loss and the poet’s ever-changing relationship with faith”.

Jenny was diagnosed with EDS in 2015. She was diagnosed with CFS/ME in 2005, after the sudden, severe viral illness at university in 2004.

Since, Jenny has been bedridden, suffering from faulty connective tissue causing her skull to dislocate itself, and her vertebrae to snap out of place.

This became life-threatening and in January 2020 Jenny had an operation to try and fuse her neck in place. Following the unsuccessful surgery, Jenny became “more disabled” and it became dangerous to move her neck or head.

Now Jenny and her parents, and carers, Ian and Ann, are trying to raise £750,000 to get her to the only neurosurgeon who specialises in the special type of fusion required, in the United States.

Ann said: “Jenny is clinging to life by the skin of her teeth and has been trying to hang on for over a year while trying to fundraise enough money for the three surgeries that this neurosurgeon has said Jenny needs to have a hope of staying alive and regaining some sort of quality of life.”

All the proceeds from We Are The Winter People will go toward raising these vital funds.

Jenny said she has only been able to write one poem a year for the past five years due to the severity of the illness: “My subconscious does a lot of the work for me. Various things that I’ve been thinking about, separately over a period of time, suddenly all come together at once in a moment of epiphany.

“The first draft of a poem pours out very quickly, almost fully-formed. I then tweak, refine and distil it.”

“Other times, a specific event, experience or person may inspire a poem. For example, with my poem For Right Now, the first lockdown in the UK had just been announced.

“Over and over again I saw many people online saying ‘I’m so scared’, ‘I feel lost’ or ‘my anxiety is bad’. My initial reaction was a thought to God asking: ‘is there anything I can do to help them? Is there anything I could say, given my experience, that would make them feel even a tiny bit better in this situation?’.

“That night, words and phrases started echoing around my brain and wouldn’t relent. In the morning, For Right Now was the poem that streamed out of me as a result.”

We Are The Winter People will be published on 8 September, and available as an ebook or print book on Amazon. It will also be available as an audiobook from Jenny’s website and usual distributors.

To donate to Jenny’s fundraising effort, please go to www.GoFundMe.com/SaveJenny

And for more information on Jenny and her poetry, go to www.jkrowbory.co.uk