The Accident

In 1995, the summer before my senior year of high school, I was considering where to go for college. My father came to me and told me I OWED him a college scholarship in gymnastics because of all the money he had spent in the 14 years I had been a gymnast. I was burned out with gymnastics, and I really loved cheerleading, and was hoping to cheer in college. I had just been to a cheerleading camp in San Marcos where I met the University of Texas cheer coach, and he strongly expressed his desire that I apply to UT and try out for cheer. My GPA was good but unfortunately my SAT and ACT scores were not great, and I surely wouldn’t have been able to get into UT.

My father started the process of writing letters and creating a highlight reel of my gymnastics achievements for prospective schools all around the country. I really didn’t feel like I had a choice in what was happening because when my father received his inheritance (when I was about age 5) he blew it on the stock market, oil rights, a card and gift shop that he ran for about 5/6 years that never made money, and any money scheme he could get into. So, by the time I was ready to go to college he hadn’t saved any money for my sister’s or my education. I knew we didn’t have the money to send me to school, so I just went along with what my father wanted.

I received invitations from Texas Woman’s University (TWU), The University of Iowa and the University of Oklahoma (OU) to attend campus visits and meet with the coaches. The visit to TWU was so boring that I don’t even remember much more than touring the campus and the gymnastics gym. I don’t even think I met any of the gymnasts. Iowa was freezing and they invited my mom to come with me. Odd. We had dinner with some bigwigs at the school and they took us to a football game, where my mom and I froze our asses off. The one night I got to hang out with the current gymnasts, all we did was sit in some girls’ dorm room, and watch reruns of Friends. Boring! So, both of those schools were out of the question.

When I went to OU for my recruiting trip, the current gymnasts brought us to one of their apartments and we played drinking games all evening. Then they took us out to a wrestling party (a party put on by the OU wrestling team) where we danced and partied the night away. The next day, I felt awful, and they took us to a football game where I literally looked green from the night before. I had a blast on that trip, and it sealed the deal for me. I could totally see myself hanging out with these girls and it felt like we had already bonded.

In October or November that year I received the official letter of intent from OU, and we had a big celebration the day I signed to commit. I think I was more excited about how it looked to my friends that I got a full ride and wasn’t thinking about the fact that I had just committed to four more years of gymnastics. It’s like that was the furthest thing from my mind, but it got real very soon after.

Shortly after signing, the coach at OU asked me to start doing a double back dismount off the uneven bars which I used to do easily back when I was in club gymnastics. Since I had been doing high school gymnastics, I had watered down most of my routines because those skills were not needed at that level. So, I made the decision to quit cheerleading and started going to a club gymnastics gym in the evenings to work on the skills that I hadn’t been doing the past four years. I quickly got the double back dismount back and was doing it easily but hadn’t yet put it at the end of my bar routine. I was just jumping up on the bars and casting a handstand and coming down and doing the double back flip. It’s totally different when you have to add it to the end of a routine, and you are exhausted.

At the end of March in 1996 I had been doing the dismount at the club gymnastics center but not doing it at my high school gym. Our regional and state meets were coming up and I really wanted to add it to my routine for those two important meets.

On April 1st we were in the gym practicing and the whole team was on the uneven bars taking turns running through our routines. Someone came up with the idea that we should play a prank on our coach, and I was a goof ball back then and decided I would be the one to prank her. At the end of my bar routine, after my dismount I pretended like I rolled my ankle (because sadly that happened often with me), and I fell on the ground and started rolling around holding my ankle and pretended to cry. My coach ran right over and asked if I was ok, all concerned and everything. I promptly jumped up and yelled “April Fools”!! I tell this story because it wasn’t but 3 days later that I had a fall from the uneven bars that would change my life forever.

A couple days later we had a practice meet at our gym and it was a fun night. My fellow senior gymnasts and I had a fun little photo shoot together and everything was great. But the following morning I woke up on April 4, 1996, and didn’t feel very good. I told my mom I was feeling sick. She told me I should stay home from practice if I felt so bad. But I felt like it would look bad to my teammates if right before a big meet I didn’t show up for practice. What kind of teammate and leader would I be if I let a little cold or whatever it was keep me from practicing? So I went to gymnastics that morning against my mom’s wishes. And oh, what I would give to have listened to my mom and stayed home.

That morning our coach had us all huddle in the locker room and watch a clip from Rocky IV. It was the part where Rocky was training for the fight in the snow. We often watched clips like this to get us motivated for our workouts. My coach, Coach Haney, was a very inspirational leader and she taught us a lot about perseverance and working hard. Coach Haney gave us our instructions for what we needed to complete that day and I decided to start off on my least favorite event, the uneven bars, so I could get it over with. I was determined to do that double back at the end of my routine and this was the morning I was going to do it.

I started my routine and was at the very end and while I was in my handstand, I told myself I could do it and I swung down to go for the double back, but in the middle of it I tried to stop and just do one. There is this thing in gymnastics called air awareness, and no matter how many times you’re flipping or twisting you always know where you are. If you’re not going to make the flip and land short, you know it. You can somehow see around you and you just know if you won’t make the twist all the way around or you know you’re going to land on your face if you didn’t get your flip completed. But this was different. I had no clue where I was, and in that split second, I closed my eyes (which you NEVER do in gymnastics) and I thought to myself “I’m going to land bad and it’s going to hurt”. When I finally landed, I had fallen on my back with my legs over my head. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see my legs and feet in the air because that is what it felt like. But I opened my eyes, and my legs weren’t there. I quickly realized that I couldn’t feel them, and I had a very sharp pain in my back.

At that moment I started yelling “I can’t feel my legs!” My coach and teammates rushed over, and I knew something was really wrong. Somehow, I just knew I had been paralyzed because I had a friend and fellow gymnast who had broken his neck in gymnastics just one year before my accident, and he was now a quadriplegic. A lot of the time I was lying on the mat was a blur. The pain was creeping up my back and I was so scared that somehow, I was going to be a quadriplegic and not be able to use my arms.

I know Coach Haney immediately ran to the phone and called our campus athletic trainer, because he had to see all athletes before an ambulance was called. He got there pretty quickly, but for some reason it felt like time was standing still and everything was taking forever. When he saw me lying there, he felt my legs in different places and kept asking me if I could feel anything. Obviously, I couldn’t and kept telling him so. Then he finally called 911 and that felt like it took forever as well. When the paramedics got there, they also started feeling all over my legs and asking me if I could feel anything. At this point I got frustrated and just pointed to where I started to have feeling. The whole team of paramedics and firefighters worked on getting me stabilized and onto the stretcher, and at this point my parents arrived at the gym. My mom was white as a ghost and asking all sorts of questions, and I don’t quite remember what my dad was doing. As the paramedics were taking me to the ambulance, I told my mom not to cry and that everything was going to be ok.

Students had started to arrive at the school while I was being tended to in the gym. The ambulance parked outside caused a bit of a stir and students were milling around outside of the gym, trying to get a glimpse of what was going on. When the paramedics wheeled me out to the ambulance, the students made a pathway and cheered me on. I believe I gave everyone a thumbs up, in a gesture meant to give hope to the onlookers, while I had lost all hope myself.

The ride to the hospital also felt like it took forever. I’m guessing because there was morning rush hour traffic, and they were taking me to a trauma hospital called Brackenridge in downtown Austin. Our po-dunk city hospital in Round Rock couldn’t handle a traumatic injury like mine. I was hooked up to an IV of pain meds when we got in the ambulance, but it didn’t help any as we went over the speed bumps in our school’s parking lot. Each one we went over I could feel the pain radiating through my back. I don’t remember any talking during the ride to the hospital but I’m sure they were asking me about my age and weight and stuff like that. I have since ridden in an ambulance and know that these are the types of questions they ask during the ride.

When I got to the hospital it was a flurry of activity. I remember watching the ceiling tiles go by as they wheeled me into the ER. I was given a larger than normal room and there were a ton of doctors surrounding me. The pain meds had kicked in at this point and when one of the doctors asked me if I watched the show ER, I said I did and asked which one of them was George Clooney! They all got a kick out of that. After they did the “can you feel this” test AGAIN, I was taken in for X-Rays and MRI’s and probably a CT scan. I can’t remember all of the different scans they did but it felt like a lot.

I was then taken back to the large ER room and my parents, my principal from my school, and my coach came to visit me. We were waiting for the spine specialist to get to the hospital so that I could go in for surgery. A lot of this part is blurry, but I think I already knew I was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, and I was so loopy I think I was saying I wanted a forest green chair. Like who accepts their fate like that and just starts looking forward?! It had to be the drugs. I eventually was taken back to the Operating Room where the surgeon repaired my spine in a 4+ hour surgery and put two metal rods on either side of my spine to stabilize it. I was officially diagnosed with paralysis at the T10 level and would be a paraplegic for the rest of my life.