Monica Weidenbach is one of them.
Monica was a high school English teacher in western New York. She and her husband, Ed, shared a passion for golf. “The first time I swung a golf club was in a crowded adult night school class. It was love at first whiff,” she said.
It didn’t take long for her to join in the quest of millions of golfers—take lessons to improve, get a hole in one, and make it to a twelve handicap. Monica’s style was to respect her teacher, work diligently, and apply her never-give-up attitude. By the summer of 1997 she was golfing at every opportunity. She joined a challenging local club and played so often that her Jeep could find the course in the dark.
But later that summer Monica began to feel some back pain after a round of golf. Aging? An illegal bag bursting with wedges? Not so simple. “The reality of my breast cancer in 1993 had returned with a vengeance. It had metastasized extensively throughout my liver, my skeletal system, and even to the marrow of my bones,” she said.
The medical world presented Monica a grave prognosis with little hope. “I desired to live,” she said. “I was forty-five years young, deeply in love with my husband, and filled with dreams, the least of which was to see my golf handicap in the low teens. When you believe you are going to die, it is not far-fetched to review your life, take assessment of more than your golf handicap.”
Monica’s life assessment led to an inward journey toward meaning and found its roots in a deep faith in God. She knew she was in a war. “I put on the whole armor of God and marched into battle and refused to even think retreat. Jesus was going to be my Companion in Courage,” she said. Friends and loved ones helped carry the ammunition. Associates at her club established a fund-raising tournament for financial and emotional support. “It was less the appearance of a generous check and more the love of everyone involved that gave Ed and me the feeling we were not in this war alone.”
Monica proclaimed her faith and believed that through God’s love and his Word she would be healed of her cancer. Her style of playing competitive golf was a perfect fit for her battle with the disease. “I did not underestimate my opponent, but I did not allow his reputation to paralyze me. I knew about playing one shot at a time—now it was conquering one round of chemo drugs at a time, never looking too many holes ahead, and always believing in victory.”
At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, she found a healing environment on the cutting edge of medical treatment and also rooted in hope, compassion, and mercy. For a year and a half Monica traveled from Buffalo to undergo treatments. High doses of chemotherapy and other protocols were in themselves deadly, not to mention the grueling ordeal of a liver biopsy and various other medical tests. Because of a compromised immune system, she suffered through E. coli and blood staph infections that threatened her life.
“The details of what I lived through in those eighteen-plus months is not fit for print,” she said. “That I lived through it is.” And she continued to find solace in golf. “Sometimes, due to the medicine my feet and ankles were so swollen I could not get my shoes on. Ed would cut up my old sneakers and make a way for me to play.”
Monica completed her clinical trial treatments in October 1998. Her faith had overcome the obstacles. Her courage was rewarded. The violent reactions to treatment, the loss of hair, the painful travel while sick, and the constant complications never dampened her faith. In fact, let it be known that she became the cheerleader for others at NIH and many relied on her faith and spirit for their own upbeat attitudes.
The fall of 1999 found Monica playing the game she loved with a renewed passion and outlook. She was golfing better than ever, her temperament milder and her competitive spirit more intense. She earned a spot on the club’s Inter Club Team and enjoyed the sport in a way not possible before this all-out confrontation with a pernicious ailment.
Monica won many battles, but cancer eventually won the war in February 2000. Though she never felt comfortable with the label of “courageous,” I saw it differently. Her faith refocused her life toward the promises of God, and her courage allowed her to follow them. At the funeral service, Monica’s spirit of giving was everywhere. Most descriptive of her love for others were the words of her stepson: “For three days now I have listened to the words of those of you who loved Monica. I would walk around and overhear someone say, ‘She was my best friend.’ I would walk to another corner of the room and hear again, ‘She was my best friend.’ In the midst of her battle she made us all feel special to her.”
SECTION 6
Standing
Tall
30
Aimee Mullins
Memorial Day. Washington, D.C. A Vietnam veteran named Phil Hebert stops Aimee Mullins. He removes his Purple Heart from his jacket and pins it on Aimee. Then he takes her hand and touches his skull, where the shrapnel still lies.
He tells her, “You have more courage than most people I know.”
Aimee tries to refuse the medal but realizes, “This is what it’s all about, this whole idea of being inspirational. This is just what I wanted to do.”
The thought sticks with her through the evening.
“That night at dinner I cried and cried. This guy gives me a medal that is the symbol of courage and I look at us. Him, a guy who got shot in the head at nineteen, and me. And I think, We didn’t ask for this. So is it because of courage that we go on? What else are we supposed to do? Give up? No. No. You don’t give up till your heart stops beating.”
Cool, confident, charming, and talented, Aimee might well have been viewed as another golden child, born to privilege and success. Today we know the qualities within her, but at the beginning the issue was what she was born without.
Legs have two weight-bearing bones, the tibia and fibula. Aimee, of Laurys Station, Pennsylvania, was born without fibulas.
For her parents, Brendan and Bernadette, the options were dire and direct opposites. They could let their little girl spend her life with deformed legs and webbed toes, or they could elect surgery to amputate their baby’s legs just below the knees and replace them with prostheses. Even with the operation, there was no guarantee she would ever walk.
On her first birthday Aimee had surgery. At two she learned to walk with heavy, wooden artificial legs. She underwent several more surgical procedures when she was three and five and endured her last one at eight. She would stay in the hospital for weeks at a time, then undergo five to six months of physical therapy after each visit.
In this hard soil, the seeds of Aimee’s spirit and uniqueness began to grow.
“The doctor would bring his medical students to my room just to see me do all the things they said I’d never be able to do and to tell them, ‘Keep an open mind.’” She would have added, “And keep an active body.” It was difficult to keep her in her wheelchair even during the months of her physical therapy because, as she puts it, “I hated that feeling of being confined.”
As a kid she played kickball and tag with her brothers and some thirty cousins. Later she swam, played soccer, skied, and biked each morning to deliver the paper. “When she got up and started to go, there was no holding her back,” her mom says.
The family loves to remember her first visit to the beach at age seven. Aimee, in her usual full-of-life spirit, charged right into the surf. A crashing wave sent her flying and she was driven underwater. When she surfaced, she had removed her wooden legs and tucked them under her arm. “I just kinda hung out that way, just floating,” she says with a laugh.
Aimee never had time to think of herself as a victim. She would roughhouse with her brothers, take her licks with the rest. There was no coddling. Those artificial legs took an awful beating. “My parents didn’t try to shield me from physical and emotional scars, which is why I’m not afraid of being wounded now,” she remembers. “One thing I love my parents for was that I was never segregated or sat down as a little kid and told I couldn’t do something. I’d just go.”
While the world outside her home was no
t as understanding, Aimee was taught to turn setbacks into personal victories. In elementary school a teacher recommended home schooling because Aimee’s presence was “improper” and “a distraction to the other kids.” She was asked to have a monitor on a biking trip because they were afraid she might slow down the class and not finish. An elementary school gym teacher wanted Aimee taken out of her class because one day, as Aimee danced with a friend, her leg snapped in half and the other kids screamed. And, of course, she was teased about her “wooden leg.” But Aimee always showed them what she was really made of. She finished the bike trip with the others, and one day for show and tell she just took off her legs, held them up, and said, “See, they’re not wooden.”
All of this made Aimee stronger. Her sense of humor and perky spirit helped her acceptance of the prostheses, and her attitude made things easier for others. “I used to enjoy jolting my substitute teachers by flipping a bolt and turning my feet backwards when they weren’t looking,” she recalls with a laugh.
To this day Aimee sparkles with fun and fantasy. “I want to be a Bond girl. Think about it—I have metal components in my legs, so when I go through airport security I set off the alarms. But when they realize why I’m beeping, they let me through. What if I had weapons in my legs? I could take one off and pull out an Uzi! Legs Galore—that would be me!”
In 1993 Aimee was awarded one of three full-ride college scholarships from the U.S. Defense Department and matriculated at George Washington University. She had never formally participated in track and field, but she became aware that just a few blocks from campus was one of the most renowned coaches in collegiate track, Georgetown’s Frank Gagliano.
Says Gagliano, “I received this call out of the blue and frankly, I don’t remember the details. I field a lot of calls, but this was different.” In his thick New York accent, “Gags” recalls that twenty-fifth day of August 1995. “Aimee said that she was a double below-the-knee amputee and that she wanted to run track.” He was deeply touched. “Fine. Meet me at the track at noon.”
A few weeks before the call, Aimee had run in her first track meet. It was an event for disabled athletes in Boston. She signed up for the long jump and the 100- and 200-meter races. To her astonishment, she won all three.
While at GW she would run to Georgetown to work out on the track and take a cab back to class. In January 1996, Aimee transferred to Georgetown and became a walk-on on the track team.
She competed in the 100- and 200-meter races in meets where minimum times were not required to enter. At first her times were slow and her stamina restricted by the extra energy needed as an amputee. But Aimee was committed to success.
“I really admire her,” Gagliano says. “We worked her hard. She wanted to work and to be good. When she came to practice I saw a young lady who had a heart of gold.”
Further help came from Van Phillips, a single-amputee athlete who designs artificial limbs for athletes. He worked with Aimee to fit a pair of legs called “flex-sprint2s,” made of extra-light carbon graphite that lock into the stumps just below the knees. Her feet, made of the same material, would hit the ground on just the toes. For traction, Aimee attached the spikes of running shoes onto the tips of her feet.
In April, her first meet with the new legs was the Duke Invitational. She lowered her personal best in the 100 to 16.7 seconds. A few weeks later at Villanova, Aimee confronted a different kind of challenge. The thick silicone sleeves that held her new sprint legs to the stump had slipped off because she was sweating. She begged Gagliano to scratch her from the 200. “What if one of my legs flies off during the deuce? The crowd would freak out,” she pleaded.
She parodies her coach’s response by tilting her mouth sideways and, in her toughest voice, saying, “Ya gotta run da deuce. Ya can’t be afraida da deuce! If your leg flies off during the deuce, hey, it flies off. So what! You fall down. Put it back on. Then you finish the race. What the hell.”
Privately, Gags always knew her goals and her desire to succeed. He often says, “You know, she’s not like everyone else.” That she isn’t. She is the only disabled athlete to compete in NCAA Division I track and field. She competed in the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta and holds records for the 100-meter and the long jump. She has been awarded the D.C. sports-woman of the year award for an athlete with a physical disability. She graduated with a degree in history and diplomacy from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.
Aimee’s life took a fascinating turn when she met Heather Mills, a competitive skier who had lost a leg in an accident. Mills was wearing a specially designed cosmetic leg, and Aimee’s first response was, “I’ve got to have those.” Until then, Aimee’s legs were rudimentary leg-shaped foam pads. She would spray-paint them to match her skin.
She could hardly contain herself when the technicians brought out her new legs. The lifelike silicone skin and the streamlined fit were almost real. Because she was getting a complete set, she could create a body design of her liking. She chose to be five foot nine with a seven shoe size and French toenails. That night Aimee painted her toenails for the first time, went out shopping, did a fashion shoot, and danced the night away.
Aimee’s new legs also launched a modeling career. Two years ago she debuted in a fashion show for designer Alexander McQueen, and a year later modeled for Anne Klein, appearing in ads in Vogue and Elle magazines. “I didn’t need these legs to feel complete, because I felt that before,” she says. “One reason I want to model is to do projects that challenge people’s idea of beauty and the myth that disabled people are less capable, less interesting. That we’re asexual. I want to expose people to disability as something that they can’t pity or fear or closet, but something that they accept and maybe want to emulate.”
While modeling and preparing for the 2000 Paralympics, Aimee cofounded HOPE (Helping Other People Excel), a nonprofit organization that helps disabled athletes receive training and a chance to compete. She hopes to establish an organization to help amputees get artificial limbs, as well as to speak to women, host a kid’s TV show, and on and on and on. As her recognition grows, so does the influence of her courage.
“Beauty,” she says, “is when people radiate that they like themselves. You wouldn’t want praise for having blue eyes, since you had nothing to do with it. Not having legs is a lot like having blue eyes. I’m not amazing.”
31
Sam Paneno
Sam Paneno had found his place, his role. He had transferred to the University of California at Davis from Hawaii to play on the Aggies Division II football team, becoming the starting running back in 1999. He couldn’t know his career would not last long.
The second game of the season, against Western Oregon, showcased his skills all too briefly. He scored twice and piled up more than 100 yards through regulation time, but the scoreboard showed a 33–33 tie at the end of four quarters.
The Aggies got the ball in overtime, and the first play from scrimmage was a routine call, one that had worked well all game. Paneno took the handoff and ran to the left side. It was his last carry.
As the tacklers unpiled and blockers left the scene, Sam lay injured on the field, holding his knee. It was a dislocated knee, something to which football fans have become all too accustomed. But this was different. The dislocation had severely damaged the artery behind the knee and caused a disruption of blood flow to the lower leg and foot. Irreversible damage had been done to the muscles and nerves. Sam Paneno’s life was about to change forever.
Several surgeries allowed the doctors to restore the flow of blood to the lower leg, but further efforts to preserve the leg and foot were to no avail. Sam Paneno’s leg was amputated below the knee.
The loss of the limb devastated his family and teammates. Sam, however, stayed centered. Family and faith brought Sam to a place in life that allowed him to accept and understand the way destiny sometimes unfolds.
The incident drew much attention from the national press, and I was touched when I read
the meaningful quotes attributed to this young athlete. The best way I know to share the courageous attitude that contributed to his recovery is to share Sam’s statements:
“It’s good to go out that way. I felt I played hard, so to go out of my football career like that, it doesn’t bug me that much.”
“I have no bitter feelings. I got a chance to play football for a long time. A lot of people don’t get that opportunity.”
“Life is too short to worry about football.”
“Why should I complain? They have good prosthetics.”
“From day one, I’ve looked at it in the aspect of ‘every day is a new day,’ and I have already gotten on with my life.”
“The media experience has been very nice. I’d like to get the message that it’s not that big a deal.”
“I’m actually fortunate in that I thought they were going to cut me off at the knee and I’ve got inches and inches of leg left.”
“My family and God have been through a lot together. With so much love from God and everybody else, there is no way I couldn’t look at this in a positive attitude because I’ve gotten so much support.”
“I don’t see this injury as hindering my recreational sports.”
I know I go back to this theme quite often, but my hat’s off to parents who work so hard to instill the values that this young man expresses. Sometimes the winning and losing become the highlights of a story, at the expense of the hearts of the warriors who play the game.
That is what touches us so deeply. Sam Paneno lost a leg, but not hope. I have gained a Companion in Courage.
32
Diane Golden
In 1990, at the age of twenty-seven, Diane Golden announced her retirement from the world of competitive skiing.
In 1982, while a sophomore at Dartmouth College, she won her first world title in competitive disabled racing. In all, she won nineteen U.S. and ten World disabled skiing titles. She was once clocked at sixty-five miles an hour—on one ski. In the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Diane won the gold medal in the women’s disabled giant slalom, a demonstration event. She led an impressive U.S. Disabled Ski Team to eighty-five medals against eighteen other countries in thirteen disabled skiing classifications.
Companions in Courage Page 11