This is the I Was a Wheelchair Kid podcast.

It's true stories of people who grew up using wheelchairs after being paralyzed and how they figured out their lives.

I'm your host, Pete Anziano, and I've been using a wheelchair myself for almost 20 years.

Although I wasn't injured as a child, I've spent those 20 years in a job where I help people of all ages adjust to living with paralysis.

And I have learned that being injured as a kid brings a whole different set of problems.

These podcasts are the personal stories about how kids went about finding their own solutions as children.

They're adults now, but their childhood memories are powerful.

In this episode, Rob tells his story.

He was a six-foot, five-inch, 17-year-old star football player about to start his senior year.

On the last day of his summer job, he was driving a truck in rural Wisconsin when it began to rain.

It started to really rain, and then really, really rain.

and I ended up hitting a guardrail and flipping over that guardrail off a bridge, rolled five or six times, and then ended up upside down in my car.

The next thing I remember, it's all spotty of course, but I remember the rain on my face as they're taking me on the spine board.

They took me to UW Health Hospitals and Clinics, and from there it was just a lot of MRIs, chest X-rays, and it was a narrowing of the T4, T5, spinal column, which resulted in a spinal cord injury.

And then eventually, once I actually started coming to getting off my meds a little bit more, I realized I just could not move my legs.

It's just no one knows at that early stage if you are going to be permanently paralyzed.

It's just not something you know.

So I'm in the ICU for a week and a half.

And so when it comes to spinal cord injury rehab, specifically acute spinal cord injury rehab, the one place you can go to is Frederick Hospital in Milwaukee.

I was there for a month and a half.

When I was in inpatient rehab, I was very emotionally numb.

I didn't know how to process.

I was so overwhelmed and so upset, but I remember one day in my room, it was just me and my sister, and I was just, I just cracked.

I let it all out, and I was just bawling.

And I remember asking my sister to grab a Kleenex box.

She said, I'm not going to do that for you.

You're going to do that.

And so I was able to reach up, grab it.

At that point, I didn't know what I could do.

I didn't know what I was capable of.

And that was one of the things that really drove my emotional crisis that I was going through.

And I was able to grab it.

And even though it's that one everyday little task, it was something that I was able to use to be like all right maybe i can do this maybe i can take that one little step and if i can do that one little step maybe i can do another little step the next day and another next step the next day i know she was trying to hide the fact that she was also crying but she said there see you can do it and you can do anything and she's she's right there's a million ways to do one thing what i do might look a little different but i'm going to be able to do it

So his experience with the Kleenex box helped Rob feel normal again.

But the feeling temporarily disappeared once he got home from the hospital, where facing his front door was an entirely new challenge.

I

remember the first day going home.

It was rough.

It was very rough.

And I remember coming home and seeing a ramp outside.

And...

I broke down.

I started crying.

I couldn't handle seeing something that looks so different.

And I did not want anybody to see me get out of the car in a wheelchair and then go up that ramp.

And that was tough.

These moments of things that were so normal now being so different was something I experienced all the time when I was newly injured.

I was in high school in a school that was built in 1857.

It had 16 different floors.

They're all just half floors, no elevator whatsoever.

So there was one floor that had the cafeteria, the gym, and then one classroom, and then one bathroom.

So I stayed in one room the entire day, and everyone just came to me.

The teacher came, everybody came to that one room.

I was still in a fog.

I wasn't really ready to learn.

I wasn't ready to be back in a place that I was so confident in and now feel so unsure of myself.

I didn't love the fact that everyone kind of just was looking at you a little bit.

They're not really sure what to say.

They come up and are just like, hey, how's it going?

Then there are others who just don't talk to you.

I actually had a really good friend who was a very good athlete who moved away and he called when I was in rehab and I said, hey, I'm going to be in town, do you want to hang out?

And I had to tell him the entire story and then I never heard from him again.

That's kind of how it goes.

Great athlete, superstitious.

They don't want bad luck to rub off on them.

The best friends don't treat you any differently.

And the best best friends make fun of you.

And I still have my main group of people that made fun of me when I was in the hospital.

And those are the best people around.

Because they can laugh at you.

And you can laugh at yourself.

It's common for friendships to change after spinal cord injury.

It's also common to be self-conscious about the changes in how you look.

When I came back to school, I was messed up.

I had black eyes still.

I had a neck brace on.

I was wearing sweatpants.

That was a disaster.

I wanted to be cool.

I didn't want to be different.

I still didn't really have an understanding of how my bladder worked.

So there were still some times when you had to bring a change of clothes to school.

I'm 6'5".

I was 280 pounds when I first got hurt.

And now I'm...

My wife jokes I'm like four feet tall now.

You feel diminished.

You feel smaller.

And I didn't like that.

I was always this big guy.

And I had to confront that.

I was never really into relationships all that much in high school.

I was also a very awkward teenager.

So after I got hurt, I just don't know if anybody will want to be with me.

No one really wanted to be with me when I was walking.

Why would they want to be with me when I wasn't?

And that turned out to be the opposite, the exact opposite.

My dating life was extremely healthy, especially once I really came into myself or came into my understanding of who I was.

I just took to just being myself because that's all I could be.

I could be myself.

I could talk to people.

When it comes to dating, it's not necessarily about the way you look.

It's about how you...

make those people feel.

And for me, being able to really focus on the emotional side, I was able to connect with people on a much, much deeper level so that I had no problem in the dating world.

After graduation, Rob spent a year doing physical therapy at Shepherd Center in Atlanta.

While he was there, he watched a wheelchair racing team from the University of Illinois.

the school he was planning to attend that fall.

It was an experience that would change his life.

Every 4th of July, they have a race.

It's a Peachtree Road race.

And all of the patients come out and watch.

I was a big football player.

And after I got hurt, I didn't want to have anything to do with sports.

But I watched these guys coming up the hill, and I was like, oh my God.

These guys are jacked.

They're athletic.

They are crushing it.

I don't know how they're propelling themselves uphill.

But it was awesome.

It was eye-opening.

And afterwards, the wheelchair racing coach, Adam Bleakney, he's like, oh yeah, come and see us when you're up at school.

And then I got to school and I didn't want to have anything to do with sports for a little bit because I wanted to be a college student.

I kind of wanted to separate myself from that disability community.

It kind of felt like two separate worlds.

And then I started working out at the Disability Resource Center, which is where they train.

I was lifting weights, but I asked Adam one day, I was like, hey, I just want a way to do some light cardio.

Do you have any suggestions around here?

And he said, I have this really old racing chair that you can try out.

And he had me doing this really tiny hill in Illinois.

He had me just doing repeats.

I'm going down this hill.

And it was hard.

It was very difficult.

And they took me back.

And they looked down.

He's like, what the hell were you doing?

I had broken all the spokes off the wheel.

And I had wrapped it around the axle.

I was like, oh, that's probably why it was so hard.

So he gave me carbon fiber wheels this next time around.

Didn't break those.

But...

I went out the next day, and I did a few more miles the next day after that, a few more miles after that.

Then he had me doing the routes that the team does, and then he signed me up for a half marathon.

And then after the half marathon, he's like, all right, you're doing Chicago.

And I did Chicago for the first time, and I was hooked.

Oh, man, I was hooked.

What I had thought was a huge separation between college student and disability community was a complete fabrication.

It's...

Some of the best college times I've had were with my friends in wheelchairs, and I had to learn that not only am I not any different than anybody else, but these guys aren't any different than anybody else either.

So I did the Chicago Marathon, and after that, I was in.

I qualified for Boston.

And then I was on the team.

So I raced for six years, 16 full marathons, many more half marathons.

I've done most of the majors at the very least.

I've raced in Korea, Japan.

I've done Chicago six or seven times, Boston six or seven times, New York three or four times.

Loved every minute of it.

It turns out Rob's wheelchair racing successes predicted a chain of wins in a business career focused on medical devices for people with disabilities.

He is also a mentor to people facing paralysis.

As a personal project, Rob led a successful effort to fully adapt his old high school to ADA standards.

He and his wife live in Madison, Wisconsin.

This episode was produced by Thea Flaum, Stephanie Lollino, and Anne Hambleton.

Directed and edited by Dan Lombardi.

Music by Cayman Klaas.

And I'm your host, Pete Anziano.

I Was a Wheelchair Kid is a joint project of FacingDisability.com and the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab.

It's funded in part by a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.

and co-branded by the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center.

Grant directors are Dr.

Allen Heinemann and Dr.

David Chen.

You can find more wheelchair kid stories on facingdisability.com / podcasts and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.