The Promise: A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship (9 page)

CHAPTER 17

Adjusting at Home

The process of getting out of bed every morning took about
an hour once I refined it. It took up to two hours when I first got home, but we managed to figure out how to make it quicker. The pain and dizziness slowed things down considerably, but on a good day, when my mom dressed me in the morning, we’d get that part down to ten minutes. Since I have some arm use, I could have slid a top on fairly quickly, but pants would have taken me about forty-five minutes to get into. My mother sped that up considerably, so it made sense for her to start helping me dress.

Sleeping was a big challenge, which I hadn’t expected. Like anyone, if I were up all night, which happened with great frequency, the morning would be rough. I couldn’t roll over or change positions. When I first returned home, my mother and Chris would turn me over in the middle of the night. There was initial concern I’d get bedsores from not being able to move. Chris would go to work wiped out from not getting continuous rest, so they eventually switched off and let him turn me only on weekends. After a few months they weaned me off of this process and I didn’t get pressure sores at all. I missed being able to roll over and wrap myself around Chris. I compensated for that by cherishing his touch. Sometimes, when I was awake at night, I’d look down to see his hand on my hip. It made me feel safe seeing it, knowing he was embracing me, even if I couldn’t feel it.

The entire situation was exhausting for everyone, especially my mom. We had to figure out how to dress me, book and keep track of appointments, and transport me to those appointments. It was an enormous undertaking, and we didn’t know what we were doing. One morning, after my mother helped me out of bed, dressed me, and everything else, at a time when we were still getting our routine down, she was styling my hair for me. I asked her to spray hairspray on me, and she was so tired and frazzled that she sprayed Pine-Sol on my hair instead. She had my hair perfect, too. She was so distracted that she soaked it in cleaning supplies. We had to redo it, but we laughed so hard at what had happened, we cried.

It was difficult to keep up with the clutter, too. I loved a clean house, and I was frustrated at first with all the medical supplies stacked up in my bedroom. I think that impacted my sleeping a little.

My friends were so amazing during this time. They all wanted to help and give my mother a reprieve. Carly used to make it over twice a month to hang out and keep me company. While she was there she helped take some of the responsibility off of my mom by cathing me. It had to be done four times a day. I threw the bag away as it filled. This duty had the potential to be upsetting, but it was mostly humorous when she took the first couple of shots at it. We laughed about it a lot, about how we couldn’t imagine two years ago that one of us would be seeing me from this angle. She also knew how to transfer me, lifting me up onto my chair. She was great company and gave my mother some much-needed relief.

My brother, Aaron, was a big help as well. For the first six months, he moved from Virginia Beach to North Carolina to live with me. He was able to pick me up and put me on the couch, and it relieved my mom a bit from having to do everything.

We wound up actually making a crazy connection through some serious talks, which became fairly deep. Once when we were sitting up at night on the couch, he said, “I thought the world was kind of a cruel place. I thought it was filled with only selfish people. I have a different outlook now, after seeing so many people who care about you, stepping up.”

He saw my friends, my parents, Chris, even strangers who donated time and energy and goods and money that changed my life, and he was moved. He hadn’t realized people could be like that. He was jaded before I was injured. The accident had actually restored his faith in people. When I heard things like that, it made the injury feel easier, as if there was an upside to it. I had pain and suffering, sure, but I grabbed hold of moments like this with my brother, these little enlightening revelations, and it kept me going.

Aaron stayed with us until we managed to restore a sense of order, and then he moved in with our friend Tom, who was close by. It was really nice to have Aaron near us. One time he was over at the house hanging out, and my mom stepped out for a little while. I was still in bed. I can’t remember what I dropped, but whatever it was it must have made him think I had fallen out of bed. Three seconds later, he threw open the door.

Startled, I said, “Well, hello there.”

He said, “That was so loud I thought you fell.”

We laughed so hard. He must have hit only three steps of the full staircase, he moved so quickly.

I felt like I didn’t really know him very well before the accident. Maybe my entire life. He was eight years older, so we never hung out. But after the accident we became extremely close. He lived down the street and came over for dinner, and I saw him much more than when we were young. I was grateful for renewing that connection. It was awesome just to be able to chill with him in a way that I hadn’t expected.

CHAPTER 18

The Ugly Reality

Unfortunately, while I was getting used to things inside of
my home, factors I couldn’t control outside of my home painted an unexpected picture of how people with spinal cord injuries are sometimes treated. Ugly truths began to reveal themselves to me, and I was shocked by some of my experiences.

I’d never really given parking much thought, but when my mother started driving me around, we soon realized that accessible spaces were scarce and that few people respected the law. I even began to think about the name
handicap parking
and why it was still socially acceptable. The term
handicap
originated in a time when people who were in wheelchairs and couldn’t work would have to put a hat out for money, or a “handi-cap.” Many people don’t know that history, and when they say that word, they don’t mean anything by it.

My first run-in with the issue was when I still had a neck brace on, and at that point I had no idea that people abuse handicap parking spots the way they do. A guy on a motorcycle had parked between the lines of two handicap spots; usually that space is reserved for a ramp to come out. Regardless, I don’t know why anyone would park there; obviously someone could come out of their car in a wheelchair, and anyone thinking logically would know that they needed space to do so.

I was in my mother’s car, and I had to be slide-boarded out of it. My mom had to get in front of me to slide me out of the car. The guy had parked so close. Now, I was a confident person, but I did not want to be dragged out of a car like a ragdoll with a neck brace right in front of some idiot because he was too stubborn to move. It just was not a comfortable situation. I remember my mom asking him very nicely to move. He said, “All right,” and then all he did was bring his leg around to the other side of his motorcycle. This guy didn’t even look me in the eye, didn’t make any space for me to get out. He was such an asshole. He just sat there, right next to our car—one foot away from my wheelchair. A waitress came out, and he sat there flirting with her while I was struggling with my mom to get out of the car and into my chair. I said to my mother out loud, “Is this really happening?” We were boiling mad, since it was so soon after the accident and we hadn’t encountered anyone quite so obnoxious and selfish. I should have said more. I wasn’t afraid of him or even nervous, but until that point, I just had not known people acted like that. He could clearly see I was sitting in the car with a neck brace and a wheelchair, and he needed to get out of the way and he wouldn’t. I thought,
Just get out of the way.
Period.
It boggled my mind. Of course, just as I was out and in the chair, he took off, revving up the bike really loudly and speeding away. He couldn’t even walk his motorcycle out four feet. He had to start it next to us like that.

The next time that happened, I had more smarts and awareness. We went back to the same restaurant, which attracts a lot of sporty people and people with motorcycles. A man had parked his motorcycle
on the lines of
the handicap spot. So I waited. I knew I couldn’t walk away from everyone who abused these things; otherwise I was not doing anything to better the situation. If I spoke up, maybe an able-bodied driver wouldn’t do it again, and maybe the next injured person wouldn’t have a hard time coming out of his or her car. I realized that the more people I could educate, the fewer injured people would face what I was facing right then.

So we waited and waited for this one guy; it was a frustrating experience. I eventually called the cops this time, and the cop was totally on my side. The guy finally emerged from the restaurant, and he noticed the cop by his motorcycle.

He said, “I was only there for one minute.” That’s everyone’s excuse, by the way.

I said, “That’s not true. I called the cops twenty minutes ago.”

The cop said I was right.

So the cop made the guy come over and apologize to me, but then the cop apologized to me because he couldn’t write the guy a ticket. The guy wasn’t technically
in
the handicap spot. He was in the wide space between the two painted lines that separated it from another parking space, the space to create room for people in wheelchairs to get out between the cars. I tried to argue that parking on the line made the handicap spot inaccessible and invalid, essentially. The lines are part of the spot and illegal to park on. I was happy the cop wanted to stand up for me, but clearly he didn’t understand the law. The cop said to me, “I will get him for something else.” And he did. The guy didn’t have the correct helmet and so he couldn’t ride off. He was livid and had to walk his bike home. Still, it wasn’t enough.

CHAPTER 19

The Pact

In November Chris and I gradually began receiving a lot
of
press about our love story and the accident. While some incredible things emerged from that exposure, it was a doubled-edged sword. It exposed the friend who had playfully pushed me to some unexpected nastiness and brought all of the feelings from that night bubbling up to the surface. The unexpected bad part happened over the use of one word, really rocking her world. It was a report that used the word
prank.
This headline changed everything for my friend:
Worst Bridesmaid Prank Ever Leaves Bride Paraplegic and Unmarried.
It almost seemed as if some outlets were only interested in overdramatizing my story and not concerned about getting the facts straight. It’s not as if the story required any more drama. In the same news broadcast that called it a prank, they said the pool was two feet deep. They had even called to clarify with me before airing the story, and I had told them the shallow end was four feet deep. By making it worse than it already was, it just gave people more negative things to say about her and the entire situation. Some stories even said I was thrown in. What a big difference one word made.

She had come to watch me play at a quad rugby tournament, along with two other girls from the pool that night. After the match they were in my hotel room, and we knew the story would be on, so we watched on the computer. That was the start of her really having to confront what had happened that night. She couldn’t deny her feelings anymore because everything about that night was now public knowledge, and she was a central character in the entire ordeal. The denial she was perhaps using to cope ultimately only masked her true heartache, which none of us had seen fully up to that point.

As soon as she heard it, I knew immediately that the word
prank
would bother her. It was a terrible, dumb word, but I didn’t know what kind of impact it would have. It was a really poor choice that left me feeling rubbed the wrong way. I was unaware how much it would dig into her. We talked about it. She told me that the moment she heard it, she was upset, and that the next day she still couldn’t shake it. She said, “They called it a prank. It wasn’t a prank.” She was extremely upset. She obviously had lost sleep over this report. We all knew this was going to be a problem for her and that it was going to snowball from there.

I received a hard lesson in the importance of language. After hearing
prank,
which I never would have said myself, I was much more aware of my word choice and how what I said would be portrayed. I made it a point then to start using the term
playfully pushed,
and some of the media actually caught on.

Unfortunately, others began doing stories and the word
prank
gathered momentum. It became the more frequently used word to describe the night. My friend broke down. That word crushed her. She tried to hold on, but once the national media latched on to the story, her pain escalated.

Just as the story started to spread, she came to me. It was like she was falling off a cliff in front of me, and I couldn’t stop her.

“I can see that you’re hurting,” she said. “I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy and I don’t deserve to have a good life.” The floodgates had been holding back all of her emotion, but that one word opened them up, and it all rushed out in front of us at once. I was saddened and surprised she’d been holding on to the guilt and anxiety.

I begged her to really understand that I wasn’t hurting. I was having bad days and good ones, sure, but a bad event didn’t take over my life, and I was making more than the most of it. I was rising above the challenge, and I was strong and happy as a result.

All of the girls from that night by the pool were athletic. They ran, played sports, swam. That was part of our bond. She said, “When I’m out doing something active, using my legs, I feel guilty.”

I told her not to even think about it, just to enjoy it, that it was okay. I told her, “Be active for me.” I wanted all of my friends to live life like it was their last day. Most tried, but with her it just wouldn’t sink in, and that word wouldn’t go away.
Prank.
It was the most evil trigger for her.

The media attention that followed overwhelmed me and became a part of my everyday life. In all of this, I was never really angry about my situation, but one thing did infuriate me: the way people spoke of my poor friend. It was awful and unrelenting. People would comment on stories, saying horrible things. Nonstop.

Forget how insulting it was to me; my friend was devastated because the word
prank
made it sound like she had planned the push and it was on purpose, and that really wasn’t how it happened at all. Notice that whoever wrote the original headline and story didn’t even get the simple facts correct—I’m a quadriplegic, not a paraplegic.

Then there were the thousands of comments in the thread of that particular story. People said terrible things about Chris and sometimes about me, such as, “Don’t have children with her because you’ll have to raise them yourself.” But we let it slide. My friend couldn’t let it go so easily. One person commented, “I’m sure the friend feels terrible and she should. She crippled this woman because she didn’t think.” Aside from the fact that the word
crippled
was incredibly offensive and demonstrated tremendous ignorance, the writer of such scathing statements had no idea how my friend or any of us felt.

I wanted to scream, really, at the stupidity of it all. It could have happened to absolutely anyone. It’s not uncommon to put a light hand on someone and give them a tender shove into the pool. I’ve done it. The people writing these comments, they must have led some seriously perfect lives and had really good luck. There were of course multiple supportive comments, but they didn’t even cause a blip on my friend’s radar. They were eclipsed by the nasty, evil ones that had so much impact.

The accident just happened. It was scary and random, but to write that she should be crippled, too? It was just plain insanity and judgmental, and I hoped none of these people ever had to deal with this situation, because that was no way to find peace. No one is immune to an accident. All of us have done things in our lives that could have caused injury.

People asked me all of the time if I was angry about the accident. The only time I felt anger about this accident was when I read crap like this. It was never-ending. I knew I shouldn’t read it all, but I couldn’t help myself.

My friend started reading it all, too, more and more. I don’t know why. But then she began believing it. Even after I was long out of the hospital and on the road to figuring out my life, she kept getting stuck on the negativity, and with every story she felt worse and worse. People wrote that she should hurt herself, or she should be paralyzed, too, and indebted to me. They got inside her head. These evil, rotten people really messed with her.

Early on she was so consumed by it all, worried that people would figure out who she was, that she stopped using Facebook and shut down in other ways, too. We all sort of closed out of Facebook for a while. She decided if she posted anything to me, she was giving it away that she’d pushed me, even by posting a picture. She didn’t want anyone to know anything. I respected that fear and never talked about it at all, not a word.

At one point
In Touch
magazine became really aggressive, trying to figure out who was there that night and who had pushed me into the pool. They actually went so far as to contact about one hundred people on Facebook who were friends with me, trying to put the pieces together. I had casually spoken with the other girls all along about how protective we needed to be of our friend’s feelings. We all agreed that had the situation been reversed, it would be painful to feel responsible, and in an unspoken way, we all respected and protected that. But the
In Touch
situation was upsetting. It meant it was time to draw a line in the sand. We had to formalize things. I phoned each girl individually and said, “That’s it. We aren’t going to talk about it.” No one argued, that’s for sure, and we made a promise to protect ourselves as a group and to protect our friend who had been the most emotionally devastated by the traumatic event. It was a pivotal moment. The pact had been unspoken until that point, but we knew we were stronger as a whole than we were on our own, so we all agreed it was us against them. I called her, too, and told her that we promised this secret would never get out.

After that, my friend who was having a hard time with the accident began to call me daily, and during our talks she would always apologize profusely. The media blitz intensified, and she appeared to sink deeply during the day. During every call I’d tell her about all the great things that were happening. By the time we hung up, it felt like she was hearing it and it was sinking in. I soon realized that the lift was always temporary, and that by the next day, her despair would reemerge. I felt so sad for her and was deeply concerned. I could tell that a one-second event had really bled into her being. I think she distracted herself at work, but in quiet moments it was harder on her. I could relate; it was like that for me in rehab.

Eventually, I began to worry our friendship might never be the same. I did not want the accident to get in the way of what would have been a fun-filled girly visit, like the ones we had shared before the accident, but it did. The accident loomed large. Up until then I really thought each and every day she’d turned the corner. One afternoon, seeing me in the wheelchair at my home really upset her. It was before we had had the place remodeled and was the first time she’d visited me there, when it was more difficult for me to get around. Someone had carried me upstairs before her arrival, but I had no way to get down on my own. That meant that she and I would have to stay up there together for the entire day. She hadn’t seen how limited I was before that day. She had to experience what I was living, and she really felt it.

At first we tried to make casual conversation, but it was strained. It was awkward and forced. I wouldn’t say the visit was fun; it was uncomfortable. Not that I was uncomfortable being around her—it just felt sucky being with a great friend with this accident looming there between us. She was hiding what she was feeling, I think for both our sakes. She didn’t want me to feel bad for her, and she didn’t want to face all that was happening. I feared she hadn’t even admitted to herself how much pain she was in. She was a pretty strong-willed person; she and I were alike in that sense. She was putting on a brave face for me, but there had been a lot of denial. I think she just pushed it all down at the beginning. I knew she had guilt, but I thought she could manage it. Maybe she even ignored the stress of what it was doing to her and just thought it would go away.

So at the end of this long, weird day, Chris, my mom, his parents, my friend, and I were going to a restaurant for dinner. It was the Lone Star Steakhouse near my house. It was my favorite restaurant, and I was excited we were all going. I loved steak, and their rolls were so good. But that night, I became so cold from the air-conditioning that I began shivering, and it actually made me feel dizzy. I felt so awful that I had to leave before dinner was over. Chris put me in my friend’s car and went back in to finish eating, and my friend and I sat there for a while so I could feel better. Then we decided to go to Burger King. She didn’t say much. She just experienced it with me but didn’t really know what to do. I remember feeling so bad at the time that she had to see how it all played out. I didn’t want to show her the weakness of the injury. I didn’t want her to see it in my everyday life. But I knew it had hurt her.

One very intense conversation between us was laced with both positive and negative.
Today
had been great about getting my story out there, and
Headline News
had, too. After my appearances on these programs, some wonderful things were sent in that really helped me. People sent money through a special-needs trust I had set up, and it was enough to pay for a monthly insurance premium for a year or two. A team from the show
George to the Rescue
remodeled my home, making it wheelchair friendly, and Lulus.com donated some clothes to help me feel beautiful. But there was a flip side to the publicity.