Anna, OR paraplegic
Anna lives in Bend, Oregon and absolutely loves the outdoors and spends every chance she gets outside and being active. Anna was home in Portland for Christmas in 2015. Due to the rainy weather, she went to a climbing gym. “I was climbing in the gym solo… my last lap of the day I totally spaced and didn’t clip in and didn’t realize until I kicked off the top of the wall and free fell about 30-35 feet… that pressure resulted in a burst fracture of T12.” She became paralyzed from the waist down and had no idea if she would ever be able to walk again. Fortunately, after the first couple of weeks some feeling and function returned to her legs. At the time of the accident, Anna had been working in the field full time as a wildlife biology field tech tracking mountain lion, hiking and camping out of a backpack and a work truck. She expressed to me the importance of needing to get back outside and remain active, “my entire world revolved around movement and getting out and being in vast open spaces.” Through Anna’s journey and facing her new reality, she met some other young active female paraplegics and through them she discovered the world of adaptive sports and eventually got a grant for her own off-road three-wheel adaptive mountain bike. She said, “that was a pivotal moment, where I felt like I got my freedom and independence… having the ability to go out again without depending on someone else.” The young females she met often joke with her calling her a ‘para-poser’ because she is not fully paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, arm crutches, or leg braces. Some of Anna’s pet peeves with the built environment is when a house has 1-2 steps to get into the front door. She emphasized, “it drives me nuts… why isn’t it just flush, or a little ramp?” Another thing that bothers her is when waste baskets in restrooms require your foot to push it open. It is not uncommon for little kids to be surprised or point and stare at someone in a wheelchair. Sometimes parents will pull their kids the opposite way and tell them to not say anything, but Anna says, “telling them not to talk about it just reinforces this idea that we are a subset of people, and we are not the same, rather than teaching them that we are people, but we just move in a different way.” I think this is an excellent point. Not only are there things we need to improve regarding the design of the built world, but we can work on how we approach certain situations. We can work on making people who are disabled not feel like they are so different than able bodied people. That all starts with how we treat them.
