David Hayes was told he was 'crippled. Fifty years later, doctors discovered there had been a mistake "My view is a strange one," he says. We are where we are. I don't believe in the blame culture. I believe in the NHS. I never let the condition I thought I had hold me back, but I accepted that I would always be in pain and there was no cure. The NHS has mended me and now I want to start again. What happened to me was not a rare event. This will give hope to thousands of people who have been wrongly diagnosed. David, from Acomb near York, was formerly national vice-chairman of the charity Scope, the organisation once known as the Spastics Society, and has spent his adult life trying to get a better deal for the disabled, unaware that he need not have been one of them. Despite the odds, he ran his own electrical business until chronic pain forced him to give it up. Now, he expects to work again. His story is as uplifting as it is shocking. David was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was five years old and still unable to walk. His mother, Doreen, was told brutally: "This child is a spastic. He will never be able to walk or to go to school or do anything at all. The only thing you can do is take him home and love him. "This was 1961," he says. In those days, almost any disabled child who did not obviously have Down's Syndrome got that label. What a doctor said was gospel. You couldn't challenge it. My mother was totally devastated by the news. She thought the world had come to an end. She had three other children under the age of 10 and now there was this fourth child whom a doctor said was an absolute write-off and would never achieve anything. She didn't know which way to turn. She was rescued by a couple called Jean and Peter Day, who had a child with genuine cerebral palsy and who helped get me into a centre for disabled children. There, for the first time, she had the support of others. Cerebral palsy is usually caused by injury to the brain during pregnancy or shortly after birth. "Tragically, my mother was made to feel that my condition had something to do with the fact that I was born at home, a sudden birth with no medical assistance," says Mr Hayes. She carried all that blame around in her head for years. When doctors can't cure things, they blame anybody but themselves - or did then. She would never be blamed now. The family of six lived in a three-bedroomed council house in Dringhouses, York. David wore iron callipers on both legs. He had to be carried upstairs to bed and into school. After three years in a special school, he was transferred to a mainstream school because his intelligence was deemed normal but, as the only physically impaired child there, he was bullied. The headmaster warned pupils at a special assembly that if the bullying continued, offenders would get the stick or be expelled. Other children seemed to resent David's hard-won achievements. When the local paper reported that he had passed his cycling proficiency test or got a swimming award, they mocked him as "that crippled boy" who should be in a school for cripples. Classmates who had seen John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks on television tormented him. I watched it and laughed at it but I didn't expect the abuse. No matter what, David refused to let his spirit be broken. "The strength I learnt at school stood me in good stead for some of the work I've done," he says. I had the inner strength to keep going. I had a plan to beat this and it worked. He accepted that he could never realise his ambition to be a engine driver like his father, Charlie, ("because I needed to be able to run down the platform") but when he was told he would not make it as an electrical engineer either, he pestered the local job centre to send him to a training college for the disabled in Durham to learn the trade. There, he demonstrated the power of determination over handicap by climbing into his girlfriend's bedroom at night using a short ladder. I was a bit like a disabled version of the SAS. He passed his driving test first time at the age of 17, bought a van and was soon making a good living repairing washing machines despite his crumpled body. That same year, he married and had two children, Anne-Marie, now 33, and Philip, 31. That marriage ended in divorce, as did a second one, but he does not believe his marital history has been affected by his illness - and is now in a steady relationship. David had the first of five hip replacements in 1985, but it was not until 1999 that he realised his deformities might not have anything to do with cerebral palsy. Struck by the fluency of his movements, an expert at a disability conference at Hammersmith Hospital doubted the diagnosis. When David mentioned that both his children also suffered from intermittent joint pain and stiffness, she became even more convinced that his condition was genetic. I did not pursue it. I should have gone for a brain scan," he says. By 2010, he was in excruciating pain and went for an X-ray of his wrecked left knee. The knee was successfully replaced, followed by his right hip - yet again - and most recently he had an operation on his shoulder, which had been damaged by his contorted efforts to propel his body to walk. After surgery, his pain gradually vanished. It was finally clear that he had been suffering from congenital deformity all along. "If they had taken a holistic view of my body they could have sorted it long ago," he says. They never got to the root cause. They even once operated on the back of my knee but never looked at the front. I would have paid for an expert if I had had the money. It had got to the point where my life wasn't worth anything. I couldn't work, or sleep, or function. It was only a picture of my daughter and two-year-old granddaughter that kept me going. It took me almost to the end of my sanity. I understand why people take their lives. Since his story made headlines this week, David's fortunes have turned around. He has taken heart from scores of online messages of support. Up to now there has not been one malicious comment. It's been massively positive. He produces four old photographs from his shirt pocket. One shows his mother holding him clamped onto the back of a seaside donkey at Bridlington in 1962. In another, he is trying to play football with his young children, a goalie almost rooted to the spot with absurdly bent legs. David Hayes riding a pony Yet David is without rancour that it took so long to fix him - and prefers to look forward, not back. He used to chair the North Yorkshire Police Independent Advice Group and, since his successful surgery, has written to every police commissioner and chief constable in the country offering his services. "I need to go back to work to pay the NHS back," he says. There's no point in sitting at home on disability benefits when I'm quite capable of earning money. I've got great expectations for myself still.