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It was a very nice hospital, with very nice students, but trying to condense everything they might need to know about disability sport into just an hour had to be one of the toughest tests of my life - not least because I can easily make three sentences turn in to a sixty minute-long conversation.

The talk went off without a hitch, until one of the questions at the end nearly made me laugh out loud. I always think of doctors as such confident people, being mostly scared of them myself and avoiding them if at all possible (bad news and all that), but this student actually wanted to know how they, as doctors, should talk to disabled people. Something inside me wanted to shout: 'Loudly, three inches from their face, and if you treat them like they're stupid then all the better!' but I didn't because, as much as anything else, I am boring.

I could have added: how about just talking to people as if they are people, dropping the poncey language, and looking them in the eye - whether or not they happen to be blind? But then, when I thought about it, I realised that for all doctors' bravado they are probably quite often more scared than us patients. To the poor, newly qualified doctor who, at a loss to make conversation with me, enquired how I 'caught' Spina Bifida, I now realise that 'with a butterfly net' was possibly not the best answer (he then looked at me strangely and I had to say: 'It's congenital, you can't CATCH it' - after which he was too embarrassed to look at me again).

And most of my experience of hospitals has been good - even, in some cases, great. The doctor I saw when I was expecting Carys was an angel and didn't laugh at me when I asked whether having a baby naturally would be worse than doing a gruelling marathon and, if so, whether I could have as many drugs as possible).

Perhaps my positive experiences come from the fact that my mum always made me ask doctors lots of questions about what they were doing to me, and practically wouldn't let me leave the room until I had asked them something (when she got ill, however, she did no such thing and just wanted to pretend her illness wasn't there - if I'd realised that at the time, I would have damn well gone to the hospital and made her!)

But when one young athlete recently asked me whether doctors ever treated me like I was stupid, I found I had to say yes. I remember a time when I was offered the 'opportunity' to have my legs made the same length. After a simple procedure involving taking a piece of bone out of one leg, inserting it in to the other, putting me on traction for weeks, making me miss about six months of school and leaving me with scars, my legs would be the same length, I was told.

The doctor in question looked surprised when I didn't do a loud 'whoop' of joy and said no to the idea. To be honest, the fact that one leg (can't even remember which) is about two inches longer than the other has never been a problem to me, and if I was going to have surgery to improve my looks then other body parts would be higher up the list.

I was removed from the room and my mum was duly 'chatted to', in order to encourage her to make me change my mind. Luckily, Mum ascertained that I wasn't going to walk again, it wouldn't improve my quality of life, and as I was going to miss out on the education they had fought hard for me to have, it wasn't going to happen.

About five years ago, the same operation was launched as a major new medical initiative. Coming fifteen years after I'd been offered it, I couldn't help but wonder whether the doctors had planned to use me as an 'experiment' - not being the only one of my disabled friends who suspected they may have been used in this way by the medical profession. After all, if the goods are already damaged, it's not so bad if things go wrong!

I told this story to the medical students at my talk, and they looked duly horrified. I don't care if they didn't remember anything at all about inclusion and British sport after my lecture, as long as they remembered that.

To be fair, there have been lots of people who have treated me like I am stupid throughout my life, so blaming just one profession is hardly rational. But either way, my advice is: if you find a good doctor, hang onto them. Never let them go, and follow them, wherever they move to.