(This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) “For the first time, I began training with swim coaches,” Beth said at 16. “I am one of two swimmers with a disability on GTAC (Greater Toledo Aquatic Club).” Beth drove us in her little blue car to swim practice once a week; the GTAC pool was an hour’s drive away. She was a good driver, and sometimes joked with a quote from Rain Man: “I am an excellent driver.” Even so, when another driver cut her off on the highway, I couldn’t stop myself from crying out. I was instantly transported to the anguish and fear of the accident. I quickly apologized for my reaction and praised her for handling the close call well. During a long morning practice, a coach sometimes jumped in the lane with her to better direct and experiment, since no instructions existed for teaching a quad to swim. They worked on her backstroke. The afternoon of the same day, we drove across town to St. Vincent, the hospital where she had stayed in intensive care. Her idea, not mine. “I volunteered in the outpatient physical therapy department for one afternoon a week,” Beth said. “This was a particularly interesting assignment for me since I was still going to outpatient physical therapy as a patient at a different hospital closer to my home. I liked being busy with bed-making and clerical work, and it was easy to relate to the staff and patients.” Beth initiated visits to the Tiffin YMCA pool with me where she approached every practice on her own with a singular focus: swimming forward, not back. With hands that could not cup the water and useless legs that dragged behind, she tried to propel her arms underwater in front of her body. Not attempting a swim stroke, she concentrated on just forward motion several seconds/inches at a time, undeterred by the sheer difficulty of what looked impossible. When her arms faltered and she couldn’t keep her head above water, she rolled on her back to breathe and to get to the wall where she took a break before trying again...and failing again. And again. After only a handful of GTAC practices, we drove to her first competition as a member of the club. The Ohio Senior Meet in Athens took place one month after Seattle. Still shy, Beth rarely practiced with swimmers her own age, so she stayed close to me at the meet instead of hanging out with the other GTAC teenagers in a designated corner. Swimmers amassed everywhere. Beth took the lead when we had to pass through the crowd. She repeated “excuse me” until she said it loudly enough to pass by. Sometimes she reached up and tapped someone lightly with her fist to get their attention. In the packed bleachers, some of the moms were perfectly coiffed and dressed to a T. Never fancy, I was easily intimidated. I was learning that club membership involved expensive dues, swim gear, meet fees, and a wide range of travel-related costs. The backstroke was Beth’s only option at the Ohio Senior Meet. During a race, she swam the final leg by herself. She didn’t swerve in the lane as she had in Seattle four weeks before. The crowd on the deck and in the bleachers applauded as she finished.
10 Comments
(This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) When I drove to the Seattle pool for the second day, we loved how Mount Rainier seemed to float in a pillow of clouds on the eastern horizon. At the meet, a friendly official introduced herself and two others from her Toledo club team. They extended a warm invitation to join their team. We also heard about the next Paralympics in Greece, held shortly after the summer Olympics in the same venues. “I was hooked," Beth said. "I knew it wasn’t going to be my last national meet." I borrowed a page from Laraine’s book and took on the role of a foil, reflecting and questioning, not encouraging or discouraging. Should we pause and contact a Tiffin swim coach instead of driving an hour each way to swim in Toledo? Were swim coaches like medical specialists in the sense that they tended to be better in big cities compared to small towns? We had no clue. I worried about Beth taking on too much, especially learning new strokes, which seemed like an exercise in futility. Wouldn’t life be easier (better?) if she settled for a leisurely backstroke? Waiting for a race, Beth adjusted her ear buds and turned up her music. One 50-meter length with no turn felt less intimidating, but her time did not qualify for finals, again. That afternoon, we saw Seattle in a different way from a boat in the harbor. We treated ourselves to a fancy ice cream dessert with chocolate shavings and extra whipped cream, the first connection of ice cream to swim meets. The third morning, we tried to sort out a jumble of criteria on the papers posted on the walls of the pool. Unreasonably fast times to make the U.S. National Team. Ludicrous times for World Records—only slightly less ludicrous for American Records. All broken down into strokes, distances, classifications, and genders. For almost every American Record for S3 women, there were blank lines where a name should be, along with a fast, arbitrary time that no one had achieved before. The last evening of the meet, we watched the finals races. Beth also officially enlisted the help of the Toledo coach to find out what she could do in the water. She told him that one year ahead, at the next national championship, her swim times would be fast enough to qualify as an S3 and make the cut for finals. Not stopping there, she also planned to swim all the strokes. Beth had the gift of perpetually underestimating challenges. The World Rankings of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) compared individual swimmers. Beth’s three very slow races in Seattle placed her on the list at 15th, 17th, and 21st in the world, confirming the rarity of S3 swimmers. I arrived back home in Ohio with a missing push handle on the wheelchair, Maria’s unbroken Snow White mirror, and a 16 year old intent on learning how to swim. Occasionally floating across the pool had been a pleasant pastime before Seattle. After the national meet, Beth raised the bar to the sky for her first swimming summer. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.)
The Seattle meet officially opened with the beeps and buzzes of back-to-back events. Most swimmers dove off the blocks from a standing or sitting position with no assistance. Those with impaired hands usually started races in the water. One coach reached over the edge to hold a swimmer’s feet to the wall. Another coach held an arm before the buzzer sounded. A man with no arms floated on his back, with his feet touching the wall and a cord in his teeth. The coach at the other end of the taut cord dropped it at the start. The only people we recognized had been at the Michigan Games: Shawn and his wife, as well as another teenager and her mom. There were a few more wheelchairs in use compared to the night before; a girl minus a prosthetic leg pushed a manual wheelchair with strong arms, instead of using crutches on the wet deck. We clapped for the first American Record of the meet, a neck and neck race. It quickly became evident that I had misunderstood Shawn from the start. Beth had no innate swimming talent. His invitation had been based on the fact that a tiny percentage of quads around the world could be alone in a pool without drowning. Even more rare: quads who could swim. Beth had the dubious honor of being the only S3 female from the United States at the meet, a distinction that would reoccur again and again. The fastest athletes during prelims would return to race in the early evening, if they beat the cut times for the finals races. The humidity of the chlorine air saturated my skin, but Beth couldn’t sweat if she wanted to because of her spinal cord injury. I rushed back and forth to the concession stand for cold drinks. For Beth’s first race at her first nationals, swimmers on both sides entered the water without a mother’s help and surged ahead at the start. My daughter merely sought to prevail over the seemingly endless distance of the 50-meter pool—twice. The only one weaving down the lane in the last stretch, she did not make the cut for finals, as expected. In the women’s locker room, swimmers showered and changed on their own. Beth chose an out of the way spot by the back lockers because she needed my help. Our hotel had no accessible rooms available, so instead of being lifted in and out of a bathtub, she decided to shower at the pool in her wheelchair for the first time. I took off the cushion ahead of time, adjusted the tight water handle, and picked up the soap when it slipped from her lap. I squeezed out the shampoo and her arms trembled slightly as she moved it around in her hair. The wheelchair left drips of water on the concrete on the way to the rental car. After a quick lunch and a nap at the hotel, it was time to explore. I had a stack of printed Google map directions that Beth read while I drove to the fisherman’s wharf and the Space Needle. After riding the elevator to see the panoramic vista, we found an unusual store. I bought Maria a small but elaborate Snow White mirror for her upcoming birthday, hoping I could get it home in one piece. My girls would always be Snow White and Cinderella, princesses who believed in happy endings. At five, Maria decreed that we would live together forever in our Tiffin home, in our tiny corner of a big world. “The trip was truly amazing,” Beth said. “Seattle was beautiful. My mom and I were able to tour the city in the afternoons and evenings after I swam.” We didn’t know that the Seattle swim meet would be the first and the only one where she would not qualify for finals. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) Parallel to the Olympics, U.S. Paralympics supports athletes with impairments. Classification compares the absence of function between those with limb differences, spinal cord injuries, spina bifida, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and more. To complicate matters, individuals with the same diagnosis often have different motor abilities. The specific criteria to classify a swimmer usually leaves little room for debate or error—except for the most severe physical disabilities (S1 to S4), catchall categories with less precise guidelines. On the wide deck of the nearly empty pool in Seattle, classifiers asked Beth questions. Her sincere answers minimized her quadriplegia. I thought about interrupting, but with muscle testing next, they would get a more accurate picture. For the last assessment, I lowered Beth from her chair to the pool deck. She positioned herself at the edge before falling into the water. Classifiers observed closely as she did her best to comply with their requests. When asked to swim the breaststroke, she kept her arms in front of her in a variation of treading water. Her head dipped underwater after a few seconds. Swimming forward on her stomach for the butterfly, freestyle, and breaststroke looked impossible. The classifiers openly debated between S2 and S3 before settling on S3. Beth looked down and paused before thanking them. If they had said S2, her unofficial classification from the wheelchair games, her swim times rocked. The same times would not qualify for the Seattle meet as an S3; however, newly classified swimmers could race regardless. It made sense that a novice who had never worked with a swim coach would need to improve before ranking among the best. After her appointment, Beth and I stayed at the pool complex for the picnic dinner to kick off the meet. We sat out of the way and watched the friendly crowd. Amazingly few athletes used a wheelchair. In street clothes, many had invisible disabilities. “There were about 200 athletes from eight different countries,” Beth said. “The entire Australian and Mexican National Teams were there.” We returned to the pool early the next morning for the first of the three day meet. A wide span of physical differences were apparent, but no one stared or judged. Paralympic rules banned artificial limbs and other supports in the water. Prosthetic legs propped casually on the bleachers underscored the unspoken acceptance of disability. Swimmers warmed up in the pool before the morning’s preliminary races (prelims) to the beat of pop music. An announcement informed us that those classified S1, S2, and S3 should use a specific end lane to warm up. No explanation was given because it was obvious: to avoid collisions with those who streaked down the right side of the lane, flipped to change direction, pushed off the wall with their feet, and swam back on the right side, completing a circle. Beth shared the designated lane with a few others for the first time and spent more time hanging on the wall than warming up. The other lanes teemed with fast, circling swimmers watched by attentive coaches. We only had each other, small fish in a big pond. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) After my youngest daughter's spinal cord injury (C6-7), no one thought she could be in the water without someone holding her up — no one except Beth. “I really didn’t expect to ever be able to compete, so that surprised me,” Beth said. Seattle was a trip of firsts. At the Detroit airport, an agent asked about Beth’s wheelchair. No, she could not walk to her seat on the plane. No, she could not stand. What was an aisle chair? I moved Beth into one of the airport’s clunky wheelchairs. I folded her blue chair, duct taped it together, and watched it disappear on the conveyer belt with the luggage. Not my best idea. We should have kept her blue wheelchair until she boarded the plane, where it would be “gate-checked” with the baby strollers. The chair could still be damaged, but the odds were in our favor when it was on top of the pile as opposed to underneath. Less than a year after 9/11, heightened security reminded us of the threat of terrorism as we made our way to the gate. We found out that we would board first. Down the jet bridge, near the open door of the plane, I transferred Beth to an aisle chair, an odd seat with a width of about 15 inches that rolls on four tiny wheels. An employee fastened an abundance of straps before he pulled her backwards down the middle of the plane. We lifted her over the armrest to her seat. Things that don’t matter until they do: worrying about autonomic dysreflexia triggered by cabin pressure, bruising her lower leg from spasms hitting the bottom of the seat in front of her, apologizing to the passenger who had to crawl over Beth to get to their window seat, and staying seated for five hours. She held my hand while the plane took off. Neither one of us thought to lift and move her legs to reduce the threat of blood clots on that first long flight. Deboarding in Seattle, the procedure reversed. We waited for an aisle chair after the other passengers left. On the jet bridge, we borrowed another airline wheelchair to get to baggage claim. I grabbed Beth’s blue wheelchair off the conveyor, the chair that had traveled cross-country with luggage piled on top of it. The travel gods smiled on us: no major damage, just one bent brake lever. And no blood clots. The shuttle to get to our cheap rental car was not accessible. Instead of being lifted into the shuttle or taking a taxi with me to the rental car, Beth chose to stay in the airport while I left with the luggage and rushed back to pick her up. I took off the big wheels of her chair and put them in the backseat. The rest barely fit in the trunk of the economy car. With no GPS, I handed Beth printed Google map directions to help me navigate, nervous about my first rental car. She pointed out a striking sign. “I saw a billboard with a girl in a power chair and a Harvard graduation cap on,” Beth said. The caption simply said, “Quadriplegia at Harvard: A+.” We arrived at the pool in the afternoon for her classification appointment that attempted to even the playing field. Theoretically, competition would approach fairness by grouping those with similar physical function. The devil was in the details. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) The second anniversary of the accident came and went on May 20th, but meant little to Beth other than a reminder of progress made. She wheeled herself—on easy surfaces and low inclines. She moved from the higher bed to the lower wheelchair seat on her own—sometimes. She completed the easiest steps of getting dressed in bed—when she had extra time. In her wheelchair, she hooked one elbow under a push handle to anchor her body while reaching down with the opposite hand to pick items up from the floor—easy to grip, light things. She tried to get in and out of the car—with help always needed over the threshold. She attempted to put on a swim cap—before handing it to me. Beth started to think of herself as a swimmer after the Michigan and Ohio Wheelchair Games. I could not—should not, would not—dampen her enthusiasm, even though we knew nothing about competitive swimming or traveling with a wheelchair. I booked flights, a hotel, and a rental car for the USA Swimming Disability Championships in Seattle. To save money, only Beth and I would go. Her wheelchair games classification and swim times would not count, so I requested the needed classification appointment on the day before the national swim meet. However, she also needed qualifying times in right away. We drove to our first USA Swimming meet in early June, two years after Beth’s injury. It was a wholly different kind of competition compared to the swim meets at the wheelchair games. The sheer size of the complex intimidated us. The 50-meter pool at Oakland University in Michigan stretched on and on. Able-bodied teenagers packed the large deck. In the upper level bleachers, the audience filled every seat with others standing. A deck pass on a cord dangled from my neck, giving me access with the other adults, all coaches or officials. The elevated deck by the blocks added significant distance to the water. I literally dropped her into her lane. Any stroke could be used during a freestyle race. Beth had one option, the backstroke. The other girls in the same race swam the forward freestyle, the fastest for most everyone else. They finished and waited at the ending wall while Beth swam the last 50 meters by herself. The extra 60 seconds abruptly stopped the fast pace of the meet. Teenagers in the next race waited impatiently, ready to show how easy it was to step up on the blocks and dive in. Swimming 100 meters without rest breaks for the first time, Beth swerved from side to side through the last long length of the pool, sometimes hitting a lane divider with her hand or arm. With circling arms faltering, Beth’s head tipped and her body turned to find and touch the ending wall, making it obvious that she had never been coached. In front of several hundred spectators and swimmers, I bent forward very low from the elevated deck to reach her shoulders, with the deck pass dangling in my face. I lost my balance and almost fell on top of her. Staring continued as Shawn and I each grabbed a shoulder to lift Beth out of the water and into the wheelchair with her legs straight out and bouncing. I broke the spasms since I could do it faster. The electronic timing system clocked her at a plodding three and a half minutes, enough to qualify for nationals as an S2 swimmer. On the horizon, Seattle waited for us, the place where our course would change. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) A week after the Michigan games, Beth, John, and I met the Toledo Raptors in Columbus for the Ohio Wheelchair Games, a much larger event. Our team stayed two nights in a hotel close to the OSU campus. In the lobby, one of the teenage boys showed off with extreme wheelies. When his manual chair tipped backwards to the floor, the front desk staff rushed over while Beth and her friends laughed to tears. (When his chair toppled back, the boy tipped his head safely forward, chin to chest.) Karaoke in the hotel lounge turned a bit wild. Returning to the Jesse Owens stadium as a participant, Beth sat with her friends near the track while they waited for their turns. I watched the races from the stands with other family members. She also tried outdoor field events and threw a discus for the first time. She laughed when it plopped near her wheelchair. For the weightlifting competition in a gym, I helped Beth recline face up on a narrow elevated bench with a barbell suspended over her chest. For quads, the officials started with no weight added to the barbell. Beth’s arms were not strong enough to budge it from the rack. At all. Despite nearly two years of intense physical therapy and pushing herself in a manual wheelchair. It was a reality check, a reminder of the severity of her disability. Beth quickly moved on to her favorite sport with her slow backstroke. Ben joined us to watch the meet at an OSU pool. Swimmers with a wide range of abilities and ages gathered for their races, with most of them not aiming for a specific time. With no announcer, there was no easy way of evaluating the races, but it didn’t matter. Encouragement reigned. Before the table tennis competition, Beth practiced at an open table with me for the first time since her spinal cord injury. She held the paddle with the tenodesis grip, using her wrist to move her left hand up, perpendicular to her forearm. Other quads strapped the paddle to their hand. She depended on the armrests of her wheelchair as she reached from side to side. Her balance as she sat in her wheelchair was not solid; if she leaned over to pick something up off the floor, she would fall down—unless she first hooked the opposite elbow on a push handle. During the competition, she dropped the paddle twice, and picked it up herself. Some watched closely, perhaps to try the same thing later on their own. Another Raptors mom enthusiastically congratulated Beth for winning several ping-pong games. All three of my kids learned ping-pong from my mom, the first woman in Lorain County, Ohio to teach physical education back in the early 1950’s. My mom also played field hockey and basketball at OSU where she met my dad. My dad liked to point out Beth’s double dimples and blue eyes, both of which she shared with him—along with a stubborn streak. A banquet in a large ballroom ended the Ohio Wheelchair Games. I joined in the applause when Beth was surprised with the Rookie of the Year award. Our Seattle trip was approaching fast. (This blog tells my family's story. To see more, click "blog" at the top of this webpage.) The Michigan Wheelchair Games took place in May at an old high school complex with several dozen participants, plus family members. Since Beth was a first-timer, officials measured her muscle strength, tested her in the water, and assigned her the S2 classification on a scale of S1 to S14. Those labeled S1 and S2 had the most severe disabilities and the least physical function. The track events were first. Beth didn't have a racing chair and her friends' chairs didn't fit, so she stayed in her own wheelchair and pushed herself around the track. I joined a small group of enthusiastic, cheering spectators. The atmosphere at the pool could barely be called competitive. Races included both sexes with any classification. Beth's times would be compared with other S2 female teenagers. Since there weren’t any others at the meet, she would automatically take first place in her races. That was our first hint that few quads could move independently in the water. I lowered Beth to the deck first, and then into the water at the side of the pool where a gym mat had been placed. Minutes before, we had to ask how the lane numbers corresponded to the lanes. For the first time, she treaded water longer than usual to dunk under lane dividers with effort to get to her assigned lane. For the first race of her first meet, Beth swam a very slow, sloppy backstroke for 50 yards, two lengths of the pool, not knowing how to push off at the start, how to turn at the wall, or how to approach the finish. It also was the first race for another teenager who had never been alone in the water before and could not swim any strokes. It was painful to watch her unhappy struggle. She zigzagged in her lane before gently bumping her head on the ending wall, panicking, and going under. Her father immediately jumped in with his clothes on, when he could have reached her easily from the deck. I wondered if parents of a child born with a disability tended to be overprotective? Though I had no right to judge after failing to protect Beth the night of her spinal cord injury. “At my first swim meet, I met Cheryl, a Paralympic swimmer, and her husband Shawn, a Paralympic coach,” Beth said. “They encouraged me to compete nationally.” We learned from Shawn and Cheryl that just five weeks ahead, the annual USA Swimming Disability Championships would be held in Seattle. When another swimmer, a para, asked if she should go, too, Shawn hedged a bit. I jumped to the conclusion that Beth possessed some kind of exceptional swimming skill that wasn’t apparent to me. (She didn't.) Shawn told her to go to Seattle and “see the possibilities,” a clear invitation to adventure. Our world shifted, again, as it had the night of the car accident. During the two and a half hour drive home from the Michigan games, Beth played John Mayer’s new CD, and sang along with her new favorite tune, No Such Thing. It became her buoyant anthem to the future, replayed again and again, the lyrics etched in our memories — infused with the essence of vague but powerful anticipation. “I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world,” Beth sang. “Just a lie you got to rise above. ...I am invincible, as long as I’m alive!” I wished that were true. |
Cindy KolbeSign up for my Just Keep Swimming Newsletter by typing your email address in the box. Thanks!Categories
All
Archives
November 2022
|