You cannot know what it is like to fight for the use of your whole body again.

Unless you’ve walked in my shoes, you cannot know what it is like to be three fourth’s paralyzed and unable to walk. You cannot know what it is like to have lost your life’s savings to hospitals and doctors. And because of that less, to hope you can find a rehabilitation facility to help you.

You cannot know what it is like to fight for the use of your whole body again. To have a harness wrapped around your whole body and lowered to a four step stool in the hopes that your legs and feet will remember what steps are and what it feels like to go down them.

Or what it feels like to be taught how to clean a bath tub from a wheel chair and how to shimmy from your wheelchair to a blank so you can bathe.

You cannot know what it is like to not only be the only white person but also the only female in a support group. How in a short space, you all are dropping or smiling at preconceived ideas. You cannot know what it is like to receive support from the gangs of L.A. and some of the innocent victims of the wars. To have a Crip or a Blood respond to you after saying you were afraid you would not get enough affection when you left, “Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right.”

I thought I had little in common with this new family except the common denominator is that none of us can walk.

In a short time, I saw that the best of the human takes over and all of us supported each other with hope and kindness.