The word ‘inspirational’ does not come close to doing justice to Dr Margo Whiteford, but then it is hard to think of a word that does. SHEILA HAMILTON meets the Evening Times 2009 Scotswoman Of The Year...

The young parents were told to take their baby daughter home and let nature take its course. It was a harsh verdict, but half a century ago there was little that could be done for babies born with spina bifida and Margo Whiteford was expected to die.

A lifetime later, on their daughter’s 50th birthday, Ron and Mae Whiteford cheered her on as she completed the London Marathon.

Her hands were blistering under the boxing gloves she wore to turn the wheels of her chair, but Dr Margo Whiteford was triumphant.

She had raised more than £12,000 for the Scottish Spina Bifida Association to add to the hundreds of thousands she has helped raise for the charity over the years.

And she had surmounted yet another hurdle in a lifetime of fighting against the odds and winning.

Margo, a consultant geneticist at Yorkhill Hospital, Glasgow, has always been a bit of a bolshie character, refusing to accept the limitations of her physical disability.

Ron, 80, originally from Carntyne, a retired general manager, and Mae, 77, brought up in Glasgow’s South Side, have long since given up being surprised at anything their remarkable daughter does.

“Like all parents of disabled children, they were over-protective, but I had a stubborn personality and they weren’t going to hold me back,” said Margo. “And they supported me in everything I wanted to do though it might have seemed hare-brained at the time.”

She persuaded celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to become the SSBA’s patron and to launch the Buy a Brick appeal that built its new centre in Cumbernauld – and he paid her back by trying to coax her into taking part in the London Marathon.

She was already a veteran of half-marathons such as the Great North Run and the Great Scottish Run, but fended him off until she realised last year’s run was on April 26, the date of her 50th birthday.

“I thought maybe I was meant to do it, so I signed up for it,” she said.

“But to get into the wheelchair race, you have to have a record of doing well in at least half marathons, so I had to get back out and start getting results again, training in all weathers.”

She will never forget the day of the race. She said: “Gordon and I were interviewed by TV presenter Sue Barker before the start of the race and on the way, people were shouting ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.

“Gordon always has a party at his house afterwards and we were invited to that and he paid for the dinner at his restaurant at Claridges, where mum and dad and I were staying.”

All through her childhood, Margo was determined to be a doctor. That is not surprising really when she spent such a lot of time in hospital and outpatient clinics herself.

Most people nodded indulgently and expected her to forget all about it.

Margo produces a photograph of herself as a young patient at the Royal Hospital For Sick Children at Yorkhill. “And this is me as a junior doctor at Yorkhill about 25 years later.”

When she was 26, Margo qualified as a doctor at Dundee University, certainly the first person in Scotland with spina bifida to do so and possibly the UK to do so.

She admits she is one of the lucky ones. Lucky that although she would describe herself as moderately to severely physically disabled and now needs a wheelchair most of the time, she escaped hydrocephalus (excess fluid on the brain), which can lead to learning difficulties.

“Back then,” Margo explained, “there was no chance of detecting spina bifida in pregancy and it was just a case of them realising something was wrong when the baby was born.”

She added: “Basically, it is like having a spinal injury before you are born. The spine forms flat and curves round and should meet in the middle. With spina bifida, it doesn’t.”

At the time she was born, she points out, 90% of children with spina bifida had hydrocephalus and didn’t survive – shunts now inserted to drain away the fluid had not yet been invented.

By the time she was three, Margo had four major operations on her back and legs at what was then the neurosurgical unit at Killearn Hospital.

Early photographs show a cheerful little girl, who never felt any different from anyone else.

It probably helped that her parents insisted she go to a mainstream school.

“The head at Milngavie Primary agreed to take me and my mother would walk the mile there and back so she could lift me up and down the steps of the school.

“I think it’s in the teenage years that it hits you that you’re different. You’re aware of it when you’re younger, but in all the story books, they would get up and walk in the end – they are more realistic these days – and you think this is what is going to happen to you.

“And then in your teenage years, you realise this is for keeps.

“If I’m honest, I would have liked to have been married and have had children, but it has just never happened. But I have certainly not sat at home moping about it.

“I never met the right person at the right time and once you’re older and single you become a bit set in your ways.”

It’s just her and the two cats in a spacious house in Strathblane, north of Glasgow, which she designed herself, although it took her about three years to find

a plot big enough in an area close enough to commute to work.

She wheels quickly through the vast hall - apparently there were 90 here at the last party – proudly showing off the four public rooms, four bedrooms with en-suites, a kitchen that you could throw a separate party in, and the conservatory overlooking a spacious garden.

She wanted all this space to house her clothes, she joked. At least, I think she was joking. “But I do have friends to visit quite a lot.”

Apart from a gardener, she looks after it all on her own. “I would only have to tidy up for the cleaner,” she said.

Her work in genetics is dedicated to preventing the causes of babies being born with birth defects.

“You would like to think that with something like spina bifida, we can find ways of preventing it happening in the first place.”