Olivia Giles interview: Going the extra mile

WALKING along a leafy Edinburgh street, I see Olivia Giles before she sees me. She's getting out of the car outside her house. She's just been to the Scottish Parliament – I know this because she told me when I was trying to grab a slot in her busy day to meet her – and she looks smart in black trousers and a fitted black waistcoat over a striped shirt. She also looks busy, like she's making lists in her head of all the things she's got to do in the day ahead.

There are three things you notice about Olivia Giles. The first is her smile – it's broad and generous. The second is her eyes, which are cornflower blue and large. And the third is that she says "I'm lucky" a lot.

The fact that Olivia Giles is a quadruple amputee is probably the least noticeable thing about her. Bustling around her kitchen as she's having her hair done, talking to me and planning the launch event of Miles for Smiles, the latest fundraising initiative to raise money to support 500 Miles, the charity Giles founded and runs which provides prosthetic services, limbs and orthotic devices, as well as funding the education and training of prosthetists.

She's a one-woman dynamo, a powerhouse. At one time, it was the legal profession that benefited from her drive – she was a senior partner at Edinburgh law firm Maclay, Murray & Spens. Now it's the people of Malawi and Zambia, where the projects Giles's charity funds are based.

On 22 February, 2002, Giles slipped into a coma and didn't wake up for four weeks. In only 24 hours, her life had changed for ever. Feeling like she had the flu, she had left work early and crawled into bed to get warm. However, what she had was not flu but meningococcal septicaemia, a vicious infection that causes the blood vessels to haemorrhage, stopping the circulation from working properly and allowing gangrene to set in. Large, itchy, purple splotches appeared on Giles's hands and feet, but the GP she had seen missed the signs and crucial treatment time was lost as the condition rapidly worsened.

When Giles awoke a month later, both her hands and feet had been amputated. She remained in hospital for a further eight months, including five weeks in a specialist plastics ward and six months in rehabilitation.

Fast-forward several years, several awards, several hundreds of thousands of pounds raised for charity, as well as heightened awareness of the dangers of meningitis, and here we are in Giles's kitchen. Her charity has three projects on the go at the moment, one in Malawi and two in Zambia. It's been quite an adventure.

"I knew I wasn't going to do something in the UK, because basically our NHS is pretty fabulous in terms of prosthetics and orthotics," she says. "I know there might be individual experiences that were not 100 per cent perfect, but, on the whole, particularly in Scotland, we're incredibly lucky. If you (need and] can use a prosthetic or orthotic device, you will get one. And it will basically be state-of-the-art."

That's not the case elsewhere in the world. It's estimated there are some four million people in need of lower-limb prostheses as a result of illness or accident. Worldwide, a lower-limb amputation is carried out every 30 seconds, but only about a third of amputees who lose a lower limb will walk again. This is partly because of a shortage of prosthetic limbs. In the UK, the NHS provides prostheses, orthoses and surgery, free to anyone in need. In Malawi and Zambia, that's not so.

"I only went to Malawi and Zambia for the first time in 2008 so, really, 500 Miles has only been doing something (about this] since then," Giles says. "When I went, it was just to reconnoitre and to think about what I might do to help."

But it's clear Giles is not the kind of woman to hang around. When she first went, she found a project that was making prosthetic limbs, but she didn't find a business set-up she felt she could work with.

"That was in January (2008] and I was quite depressed about it. I was thinking I'd have to start again and build my own. Knowing what I know now, I was quite naive – but I was also very, very, very lucky. I assumed it would be easier than it was and went ahead on that basis," she says.

A conversation she had a few months later with a contact in Glasgow with whom she was working to send second-hand shoes to Malawi secured an offer of a building funded by Glasgow City Council. By June, the building (constructed from three sea-going containers that were carrying other aid from Glasgow to Malawi) that would act as the workshop for limbs to be made and fitted was on a ship, and on its way.

"The workshop opened the week before Easter and in the first six weeks, we had made 65 devices, fitted them and given them to 43 patients, mainly children who have not walked for the want of very cheap, simple devices."

A prosthetic leg costs only £60, so if Giles can persuade as many people as possible to walk a mile on 3 October and raise sponsorship money for this project, it has the potential to make a profound difference to many lives.

"It's not about big pressure to raise a lot of sponsorship money," she says, all too aware that the last fundraising effort she made, a ball held for the Meningitis Trust in 2004, raised £475,000. "£60 buys a leg, so if the majority of people taking part manage to raise £60, that'll be quite a few legs. It's about (getting] an awful lot from very little. That's what it's all about, really."

Giles knows from personal experience just how much these limbs can mean.

"I found the process of getting my legs and learning to walk the real watershed in my rehabilitation," she says. "Regaining consciousness, being able to feed yourself, go to the toilet by yourself (are all important], but that was the thing for me. It was standing up, standing up and letting go of the wall, and then taking those first steps.

"I was only ever allowed (to keep] my legs on for the odd hour at a time in the beginning, and it took forever to be allowed them on in the ward – just being able to decide that you're going to do something and get up and do it.

"Also, being able to look at people at eye level, noticing the different response that people have towards you when you can stand up. That patronising 'are you OK?' (response] just disappeared. The day I first did that is like the day you first ride a bike. I knew there was no going back: that was it, I was going to be OK. Not to sound fake or emotional about it, but every time I remember it, I remember thinking… I'm fine. I am going to walk out of this place and I'm going to have a life."

She says it with such conviction, it's palpable. It's obvious why she's been so successful in her charity work. For Giles, it's real and personal; she understands exactly what a difference she can make. And then she qualifies it. She says that whenever she's doing a talk and she explains that's how she felt, she then looks round the room to see if there's anyone there in a wheelchair. "I'm not trying to say that life in a wheelchair isn't worthwhile, but show me the person who wouldn't get out of it if they could."

The other reason it's clear that Giles is so good at what she does is because of what she calls her "old life" as a busy lawyer.

"There are similarities," she says. "It's completely round-the-clock and there are the same timescales. I do find myself sitting at the computer at two in the morning, thinking, 'I thought things were supposed to be different – and they're not'.

"This is much more public, though, and I never had that before. If it doesn't work, it'll be embarrassing and that, honestly, is different. Whereas before, I might've thought, 'I'm not putting myself out there, in case that happens', now I really, genuinely do think 'why not?' – because otherwise all you're ever going to think is 'I had the chance to do that'. OK, it might not work, but at least I'll have tried. We'll be dead soon and we've got a chance to do it now."

Mug of coffee drained, Giles looks calm, given what she's still got to do today, but it's time for me to let her get on. I garble a final question, which is something about how, when fundraising is a very particular profession that people are paid very well to do, she's managed to teach herself. Kindly, she answers a more interesting question, which is how she can persuade people to give to her charity.

"I think the appeal of 500 Miles is that it's small and I'm completely accountable," she says. "The costs – such as travel and administration – I fund myself, so every pound that comes in goes directly to the projects. I want to be accountable. I need to be. It drives me to say, 'this is what happened to your money'.

"I can't solve Aids, I can't do anything about malaria, clean water or infant mortality. That takes millions and it takes very clever people with a lot of assistance.

"But I can do this. It's really small and, for the individual person, it transforms their life."

&149 For more information on 500 Miles, log on to www.500miles.co.uk

MILES for Smiles will take place on 3 October. To take part, all you have to do is register and be willing to travel one mile (that's just two laps of Conference Square and Festival Square) between 11:20am and 7:30pm, as each mile will start every minute between those times.

There will be pipers and cheerleaders and more than one or two famous faces.

You don't have to do it alone; you can share your mile and the course is completely off-road and wheelchair-friendly.

The best bit is that you can do it any way you want – even fancy dress, juggling or hula-hooping. The staff from Centotre Italian restaurant will be doing it while tossing pizza dough, and there's bound to be someone on a pogo stick (for inspiration you can check out www.milesforsmiles09.co.uk).

You don't have to raise sponsorship to enter, but remember, a prosthetic leg costs as little as £60, so it wouldn't take very much to properly change someone's life. www.milesforsmiles09.co.uk