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Keira Key Shepherd is a British Parathlete swimmer. She competed the British Gas Youth and MC Nationals and won Gold in both of this events.

Personal life
She has always been considered to be the water baby of the family, at any given opportunity she would be in the water. At the age of two she used to have her granddad in tears by throwing herself off the side of the pool into his arms, swimming back, wriggling her way out and not-so delicately correcting her wedgie and repeating this time and time again!

She cruised through her swimming lessons with ease, and by the age of seven was beating sixteen and seventeen year olds in the pool, however, despite her love of swimming she never competed at club level. In fact, her only experience of competitive swimming was in school galas. This inexperience was a result of an already busy schedule comprising of: football, basketball, hockey, horse-riding, and athletics, not to mention playing the saxophone in three award winning bands.

This busy lifestyle carried on right through school and into college, where she completed a BTEC National Diploma in Health Sciences and secured a place at St Georges Medical School in London, to studying paramedic science. Unfortunately her time at St Georges was limited due to contracting a virus that resulted in NMDA encephalitis.

As the encephalitis started to take hold she can remember not having a clue what was happening, she had taken painkillers for a headache and flu-like symptoms, but the pain in her head started to escalate quickly, her head felt as though it was crushing her neck and she couldn’t get comfortable in any position. For months after she had all sorts of ‘neurological’ symptoms, from burning skin to complete numbness, even experiencing instances where her left arm would contract, her left leg would turn in and her foot would drag before returning to normal. These episodes would happen periodically increasing in duration each time.

After a year and a half of diagnostic tests, scans, numerous hospitals and specialists, it was confirmed that the episode in November ’09 was NMDA encephalitis which led to abnormalities on both temporal regions of her brain and the cerebellum, resulting in a rare NMDA movement disorder affecting her entire left side.

Diagnosis brought a mixture of devastation and relief following a tough year and a half of no answers. However, these answers meant new questions; what sports can she still do? What about work? Being a paramedic? After a brief spell in para-showjumping she became determined to rekindle her love for swimming and in the early stages, focused solely on using her arms with the aid of a pull buoy to enhance her streamline position without the use of her legs.

2012
In September 2012, after being encouraged by a friend, she attended her first training session with West Midlands Disability Swimming Squad. After a few sessions, coach Karen Watson talked her into swimming the 50m and 100m freestyle at a regional competition. It was there that she met Dave Marsh, head coach of Perry Beeches and Sutton Swimming Squad, who invited her to train regularly with them and Venezuelan coach, Amaro Viloria Living in Shropshire, the journey to Birmingham for sessions was a long one, but worth it as my only option for regular high quality training and by January 2013 she was training 3-4 nights per week. Later that year Amaro was due to leave Beeches for a coaching role at Boldmere SC, before doing so he approached her with the opportunity to train one-to-one with him, for five days a week.

2013
In September 2013 the hard work started, training twice a day for six days per week. Just two months later she qualified for her first ever National competition, winning two golds and one silver. After a year with Beeches she decided to join Amaro at Boldmere SC so that he could control her training regime.

2014
By April 2014 she had qualified for the British Gas Championships (Commonwealth Trials), and the British Para-swimming Internationals in Glasgow and came away from these ranked second fastest S8 in the UK for both of her events. In August, she became National Champion in both 50m and 100m freestyle. Amaro and she are still working hard with the aim of reaching the 2016 Paralympics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Without his belief, passion and hard work she would not have reached the level she have already, nor could she entertain the thought of competing for her country, which she hope to do in the very near future.