I was twenty-six years old, and I hadn’t walked since I was four. All my life, I had been told the same simple story: there had been a terrible car accident, my parents died instantly, I survived, and my spine didn’t. I remembered almost nothing from before it—only fragments of my mother singing too loudly in the kitchen, my father smelling faintly of motor oil and peppermint gum, and a pair of light-up sneakers I apparently refused to take off.
After the crash, the state began discussing foster placement. Then my mother’s brother, Gus, walked into my hospital room, heard a social worker explain that they would find me “a loving home,” and answered with one word.
“No.”
Gus was single, childless, rough around the edges, and completely unprepared to raise a paralyzed four-year-old. But he took me home anyway.
He learned everything. He watched nurses teach him how to move me without hurting my spine, how to check my skin for pressure sores, how to bathe me safely. For months, his alarm rang every two hours through the night so he could reposition me in bed. He fought insurance companies for wheelchairs and shower chairs, built a plywood ramp with his own hands, washed my hair over the kitchen sink, and learned how to braid it by practicing on an old chair in the garage.
