Meet Quinn

In October of 2017, I was climbing on El Cap in Yosemite National Park. Climbing a route that I'd been on a dozen times or so, the nose, one of the more famous routes on that mountain, about 20 or 30 feet at the end of my block, so my section of climbing. I'd already climbed 1,000 feet as the leader, and I only had 20 or 30 feet left. I fell, and I fell about 100 feet or so, it's estimated, and I hit a section of rock on my way down and then tumbled into another little bit of debris and broke my T-12 vertebrae, shattered it, and immediately lost feeling and volition of movement in my legs. I was climbing with a good girlfriend at the time, so she was able to come down to me and make a phone call off the mountain, and Yosemite Search and Rescue crews came and helicoptered and got me off the mountain.

Some vague things about the fall that I remember. I remember some of the random thoughts leading up to the seconds before the fall, how my mind had shifted from climbing and being quite positive, and then the last 10 seconds or so having some negative thoughts or just more rushed feelings, and fell, I remember the swooping of the granite before my eyes, and then I have vague memories of being awake right after I fell and commenting to my partner as she came down to me that I couldn't feel my legs, and vague moments of memory in the next maybe a week of being in pain and being in the hospital and asking people, who will I be? As my healing progresses, I don't know that I, part of me died, yes. For a long time I kind of felt like I was in an in-between world. I didn't die as we know death to be, but I'm not alive or me.

My mornings, they're pretty simple. I usually turn the alarm off, it's time or two, and then turn on NPR, get out of bed, and then I go to the bathroom, and I get dressed, I usually go swimming or have an engagement. I was the girl that would keep turning off the alarm, have 15 minutes to get somewhere, jump out of bed, brush my teeth, grab my pre-made snack, so I was usually like out the door in 15 minutes, and now for me to get out the door in an hour, hour and a half, but for me it's a change of pace. When I have high nerve pain, physically it feels like some sort of like burning giant refrigerator sitting on my limbs, and particularly around, like just below my navel, all the way around, like really right here in the hips. My butt feels like it's asleep and there's a heavy weight on it.

It's mild, like a sleep feeling, tingling down the legs, but then heavier tingling in the arches of the feet and in the feet that is consistent, so some days it's, for me it's every other day, it's like a seven out of ten and a three out of ten and a seven out of ten and a three out of ten. Sleep is hard because of that, I think in the day we can, I can do other things and distract myself from the pain a little bit, and in sleep you're just there with it. My bladder doesn't work, my bowels don't work the same, and sexual function, orgasm, is not the same. So knowing that there's a lot of secondary injuries with this, like we have to shift a lot, you see me fidgeting a lot, one because it's a high nerve pain day, but two because of sitting in the same position, we're at risk of pressure sores which can lead to infection. Christopher Reeves died of an infection that, he had a pressure sore and it turned into an infection which then turned into sepsis.

So he didn't die necessarily from a spinal cord injury, he died from his immobility. I have 30% bone density loss already after just a year of this injury, and as an athlete having an unhealthy body has been a really big frustration for me knowing that I'm, my body isn't nearly as up on this pedestal that I was trying to put it on. I am fairly new at this, I'm only just a year in, so my acceptance level of me in this form, and my patients level with me in this form, and therefore my patients level with others I think is shorter than friends who have been in this injury for a long time. They seem to have let those barriers down of, yeah, people can help me and it's no big deal, and they don't feel embarrassed or burdened or any of those things. Ready for help, ready for help now?

So for me, it's my ownership of it. I think if we can just have a more dialogue of communication, like how can I help you right now, rather than do you need help? And I think our tendency as society is either to ask for help or just swoop in without asking, and how often do we like help without consent? Usually we don't, usually we like to have a, hey, I would like your help, but in this way. I get a lot of folks asking me who takes care of me, I don't know, just no awareness of that we are able to drive and go outside and go biking and go skiing and go swimming, and do things.

In my attempts to understand this, it's definitely, it definitely digs deeper of who I am, why do I communicate the way I communicate, or why do I not communicate, in certain ways? What do I hold back and what do I give out? Sometimes with others, I think I am holding back certain emotions, I'm definitely more expressive as this new Quinn, and willing to share, but I find that I come back to this more stoic nature of, I got this, no big deal, there's pain, but you don't need to know about it, or my heart is lonely, but you don't need to know about it, those kind of actions. It's been a really neat journey in this body to just find some other ways to open up, to find more, again, more space, to be more expansive with this body that feels so restricted. This practice was really hard for me initially to do a meditation in my seat, to be comfortable in this chair, but I think it is continued importance for me to recognize that I'm doing this together with my world, and I don't always need to get out of it, to just be comfortable in it sometimes.

I feel like in education, it grows by collaborating, it's a touchy subject for me, I feel like I struggled with social media before, but now I feel like I have a little bit of a voice and a platform, and spinal cord injuries don't mean we just have to keep sitting, and paralysis in whatever form doesn't mean that there isn't a way to overcome that, either be with athletics or with science, there's other ways to keep moving, and I don't want to be sitting forever. My passion before was moving, and my passion now is moving. Thank you.