Before November 14th 2007  I was having a good time and life was great. I had been working for about three years at a premier gymnastics training facility in Mesa, AZ  called Desert Devils, where many gymnasts train and compete to be on the U.S, Olympic team.  I was one of the coaches and instructors there. I loved my job, the students and athletes were awesome and a big part of my life. I was also getting ready to start college and looking forward to studying creative marketing and advertising.

 

2007 had been a tough year, My grandfather Don C. Tanner from Gallup, New Mexico  was still trying to recover from a C5 spinal cord injury he sustained in a car accident two years earlier. Well, he experienced a lot of complications from the accident and being paralyzed from his shoulders down, and in April of 2007 he peacefully passed away. One morning he just didn’t wake up. He was 75 when he died and had lived a long, prosperous and successful life. He never complained and did his best to carry on after his injury.

In the U.S. every year 11,000 people suffer spinal cord injuries and are paralyzed to some degree. There are over 250,000 people living in the U.S. that have become paralyzed from a spinal cord injury. When it happened to my grandfather I never dreamed or even worried at all that something like that could happen to me. 

Please click on “The Setback” to read on.