Does this wheelchair make me look fat?
Welcome to my first blog post!!! As I was trying to write the 'About Me' section of my blog I began to write what you are about to read, and half way through I realized this would be more appropriate for my first post. So, here we go!
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Suzanne, I'm 39 years old (and dreading 40), recently engaged to an amazing man (Johnny), have a dog named Dot, a cat named Buddy, and we just bought our first house together in Frisco, TX (#adulting). As I wrote in the 'About Me' section, the first thing I assume people notice about me is that I'm in a wheelchair. It's kind of hard to miss! Although I am much more than some girl in a wheelchair, it has shaped my life and the way I see the world, and a lot of this blog will focus on my struggles and the everyday challenges I face when out in public, or even in my own home.
This blog will hopefully help educate able bodied people on why accessibility is so important and I will share my life experiences to provide context. In 2015 the CDC published a study that stated 22% of the American population has a disability - that's 1 in 5! The same study concluded that 13% of the population has a disability that impairs their mobility, and this is the category I fall into. I will focus mainly on issues with regards to physical disabilities, and it's not because other types of disabilities are not important, but this is what I know and can speak to. So, please don't get upset if you don't hear about the struggles of living with mental or emotional disabilities. They are just as important but I couldn't write about them in a personal matter, and this blog will be VERY personal.
As I've met new people over the past 21 years, I've begun to realize that most people have never interacted on a personal level with someone who has a physical disability, and there is a lot they learn when we become friends. They start to notice things they've never noticed before - like people parking in handicap spots without disabled plates or placards, or whether or not I could access a public place they recently visited. I get a lot of "wow, I never thought about these things until I met you". And why should they? I sure as heck didn't think about these things or even care about them before I ended up in a wheelchair, and that is why I started this blog - to be open about my life and hopefully help others to try and look at life through a different lens.
My blog won't be all about advocacy or education. I will also write about some of the amazingly hilarious experiences I've had. I truly believe that laughter is the best medicine and no matter how bad things get, I can usually find something funny about the situation (once of course I've survived and calmed down). I've actually been pressed by friends and family for years to start a blog about all the crazy things that happen in my life, and I FINALLY decided to take their advice. My writing is not the best, so please forgive me and hopefully the more I write, the better it will get.
So what in the world happened to me? I still ask this question to myself every now an then. I'll be wheeling by a a building with reflective windows and all of a sudden think 'holy crap, how in the hell did I end up like this?' It's jarring and can rock me to my core when that happens. It's not something I think about on a daily basis. Just like you, I go about my day and deal with the challenges of everyday life.
When I have these moments (and thankfully it's not that often) I'm transported back to the morning of April 4, 1996. I was 17 years old, a little over a month from turning 18, and almost 2 months from graduating from high school. I was a gymnast, and my team and I were preparing for our regional
meet, which would qualify us for the state competition. I woke up that morning and felt like I was getting sick - I have this allergy thing where I get a sinus infection every Fall and Spring, like clockwork. My mom told me I should stay home from practice, but I was 1 of 5 seniors on the team and we were the leaders. How would it look to my teammates if I decided not to show for practice a week or so before one of our biggest meets? I told her I'd be fine and hopped in my little black Isuzu truck to head to the high school for practice.
I had one of the most amazing and inspirational coaches who, before every practice, would read to us from books about winning and overcoming diversity. Every year before our season started we would watch the movie Hoosiers, and would imagine ourselves as the underdogs who take the state championship. It was real to us because we had won the Texas state championship the past 2 years and we were going for our 3-peat. I'll toot my horn and say we were kind of bad ass!!! Anyway, this morning my coach decided to show us a clip from Rocky IV when Sylvester Stallone is training in Russia - very powerful and motivating stuff. After we watched the clip, we were given our number of routines we needed to complete on each event (apparatus), and we got to work.
At this point I have to flashback to the Fall of 1995 when I was trying to determine what I was going to do with myself after high school. I'd been in gymnastics since I was 14 but I also became a cheerleader my sophomore year and was fortunate to participate in both sports. I was burnt out on gymnastics, and I couldn't imagine 4 more years of beating up my body, when I all I wanted to do was cheer in college. The cheer coach at the University of Texas told me he wanted me to try out for the squad the next year but couldn't offer me a scholarship, and my SAT and ACT scores WERE NOT going to get me into UT. I wasn't dumb. I was in honors classes and graduated in the top 25% of my class, but I tested badly and if you weren't in the top 5 or 10% of your class, you weren't getting into UT.
Now, I don't want to sound harsh or mean but I also want to be truthful, so this part might sound really bad, and well, it kind of was. See, my dad had inherited a lot of money when I was younger and we had a beautiful house with a pool and went on awesome family vacations. My sister and I never lacked for anything. Unfortunately, my dad made some bad investments and never decided to put money away for our college tuition. So when it came time to look at colleges my dad looked at me and told me I owed him a full college scholarship in gymnastics for all of the money and time he spent on me over the past 14 years. That hurt...and it still does. Sadly, my choices were to go to community college and work and pay my own tuition until I could get into UT, or get a scholarship in gymnastics. I think a bit of ego played a part in my decision, and I relented and let my dad start the process of sending out letters and videos to colleges gymnastic programs throughout the US. Long story short (or maybe short story long - surprisingly I've left out a lot) I got a full scholarship to the University of Oklahoma for gymnastics. After I signed my letter of intent, I quit cheerleading and started attending practice at a local gymnastics club because the coach at OU wanted me to add more difficult tricks/moves before I started college the next Fall. One of those tricks was a double back dismount on the uneven bars. I had not attempted it in almost 4 years but had successfully completed it multiple times after a few months of practice and was hoping to end my bar routine with it at the regional meet.
Back to the morning of April 4th. I was really eager to add the dismount to my bar routine but had only completed the trick in one-offs, not at the end of a routine when I was tired. That morning I decided I was going to do it and headed straight to the uneven bars to accomplish my goal. I remember this part so vividly and can almost feel my body and mind going through the motions again. At the end of my routine as I was in my handstand I made the decision to go for it and swung down and let go of the bar and something felt off. In gymnastics you have this air awareness where no matter how many times or how fast your flipping or twisting, you always have a sense of where you are in relation to the floor. But this one time, I had no clue. In a split second I decided to bail out and do only one flip, but I was already screwed and I knew it. You never close your eyes in gymnastics but this time I did. I closed them and thought 'this is going to be bad and it's going to hurt'. Never in 14 years had I felt this way. I squeezed my eyes shut, waited...and BAM!! Floor meet Suzanne, Suzanne meet floor.
As I laid there on the floor it felt like my legs were sticking straight up in the air. I opened my eyes and there were no legs. I had fallen on my back with my legs over my head but they had fallen back to the floor. I started screaming and asking where my legs were and saying that I couldn't feel them. It didn't take long for me to come to the realization that I was paralyzed. I knew it before the paramedics even came. The rest is a blur and I have memories of bits and pieces over the next few weeks and maybe I will share some of them with you someday. I had broken my spine at the 10th thoracic vertebrae, and underwent a surgery where they took bone from my hip to fuse my spine together and inserted metal rods to stabilize my spine, and I was told I'd never walk again.
Ugh! When people ask me what happened I give them a MUCH shorter version like "I broke my back in a gymnastics accident when I was 17 and I've been paralyzed ever since". After I finish there is always this awkward silence. I feel weird, they feel weird. It sucks. In 21 years I still haven't learned the trick to making it not sound so off-putting. I usually break the silence with "but all is good now". And then I get "I'm so sorry" or a "that's horrible, I'm so sorry". I wish there was some way to soften the blow when I tell the story and not make people feel funky. It's something I'll keep working on. But luckily for both of us, you're reading this right now and we don't have to have that awkward silence thing and we can go about our day.
So now that I've totally bummed you out, here is a picture of my dog Dot to make you happy.
I hope you'll come back to hear less crummy stories in the future. I promise they won't all be so damn sad. And honestly, I'm not sad, so you shouldn't be either. What happened to me can be looked at as a blessing and a curse. I don't think I was all that great of a person before this happened (not saying I'm a saint now) and it's helped me to really look at myself and determine the type of person I want to be. I don't have life figured out and never will, but I can say that the life I have made for myself is a happy one (most of the time) and I don't think I'd change it for anything.