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ASKFor all those fighting the good fight let me share my story of overcoming one of the greatest adversities I’ve ever endured: coming back from a spinal injury that very nearly ended my skiing career. Less than two years after this challenging injury, I went on to win America’s first gold medal in the sport.
Continued from last week’s blog entitled "Fighting the Fight to Win Olympic Gold Part I"
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As the months progressed, none of the pain subsided. In fact, despite numerous doctors’ visits and countless exercises and procedures, the only thing I was losing was hope. After months of lying on a mattress in my living room, I started to doubt if I would ever come back from this injury. In addition to my physical and mental state, my relationships were starting to crumble. I was snapping at my parents, my friends stopped coming by, and my boyfriend and I were constantly fighting. No one wanted to be around a depressed individual.
The truth was, no one was going to pry me out of my depression until I somehow faced it myself.
The man who forced me to face it was someone I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me. I was flipping through a magazine one day and saw a picture of Joe Frazier, a legendary boxer who won a gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The caption under his picture revealed something many people don’t know: that Joe had won his gold medal with a broken wrist. I figured this man needed his wrist for boxing as much as I needed my back for jumping. If he could come back from his injury, why couldn’t I come back from mine?
Around the same time I came across the picture of Joe, I also stumbled upon an old, familiar poem. I was rifling through a draw and found a little orange card that I had wrapped Scotch tape around many years before. It was the poem “You Mustn’t Quit,” the one given to me by my role model, Cassandra Wheeler, when I was a young, struggling gymnast. I reread the poem, hoping it would offer me the same wisdom it had fifteen years earlier:
YOU MUSTN’T QUIT
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
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