Cerebral palsy sufferer Amie Lamont has had her fair share of difficulties in her 29 years.
"I was born dead," she said.
"That's why I'm like this."
Miss Lamont is a twin, and said she didn't have enough oxygen when she was born.
"My brother had the oxygen, he didn't die when he was born. He came out alive and I came out dead."
Doctors were able to revive her, but Miss Lamont was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Despite this, she's bright and bubbly, working a few hours each week at the Pet Dog School in Springvale, occasionally going camping with her favourite helper, and once even trying to crash the set of Home and Away.
Miss Lamont said she wrote a letter asking to visit the set, but never heard back, so she and her helper, Shona, boarded a flight to Palm Beach, Australia, where the show is filmed.
"Me and my helper had to gatecrash the beach, I've got a T-shirt to prove it," she said.
Miss Lamont watches Home and Away every weekend.
"It's because I love the boys."
Her work at the pet dog school involves keeping dogs out of trouble.
"I make sure they behave themselves and, if they don't, I toot at them and go very close to them to break them up." Miss Lamont said she liked dogs because "they don't answer back".
She has six helpers working in shifts to assist her with day-to-day tasks, but was still able to do some things on her own, such as go out and meet friends.
Even a simple task such as that can be difficult though - her electric wheelchair has stopped working in the middle of the road more than once.
"It happened not in this chair," she said, adding the old one was "always breaking down".
Miss Lamont will be attending this year's May Day (Disability May Affect You Day) on Friday, which paralympian cyclist Chris Ross will address.
Despite an increasingly progressive society, Miss Lamont says she has still experienced discrimination for her disability.
In her school years, she was often teased.
"I got tipped out of my chair by the boys," she said.
"I had to have stitches in my head."
These days people still threw insults at her in public.
"I don't think it's the attitude," said Miss Lamont's helper, Dee. "It's how they approach the disability themselves.
"I don't call it a disability, I call it an ability. We're no different from anybody else," said Dee, who is partially deaf in one ear and totally deaf in the other.
Miss Lamont thought people needed to stop being afraid of asking questions.
"If it's little kids I don't mind saying what's wrong with me, but then their parents say 'oh, no, you can't talk to that person'. Well excuse me. They let them go away and they don't understand what it is."
She said parents told their children she was "scary".
Amie Lamont, though, who loves playing with dogs, watching Home and Away and Mcleod's Daughters, and swimming with friends, is anything but scary.