“How did you land yourself in the motorized wheelchair,” I asked. “I was asleep on a bridge and I fell off one night,” he told me with sorrow in his eyes.
Brent, 61, is a paraplegic because of the accident on the bridge while homeless in a year that is now behind him. He heads to the Nashville Rescue Mission early each day to ensure that he will have a bed at night. He gets his bed ticket and carefully tucks it into his ID pouch that he wears around his neck. “Would you like a blanket,” I question. He quietly replies with a chuckle, “Well, we are not allowed to have one, but I guess I could sit on it and they would never know.” I then tell him my last blanket is pink. I laugh and I tell him, “That may get you beat up.” He laughs and says, “I better pass on that one.”
X Games mono skier Sam Danniels became a paraplegic at age 19 while mountain biking. In an interview with Elise Ballard in 2012 he stated, “While I was recovering, obviously, I had a lot of time to just lie there and think. I’d met other paraplegics before my injury, and I knew they weren’t doomed to a horrible life—not necessarily. So I almost had this eagerness to go out and see what the world had in store for me.”
The only problem is that we are not all made the same way. Not all of us have the same drive and our backgrounds are often filled with sorrow.