Power of will can only be discovered and developed through challenges and hardship in life. I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, when I was only 11-years-old. As a very active young girl who loved surfing, hiking and running, this news came as an utter shock. After six months of intense chemotherapy treatment, which left me so close to death, I felt a deep and scary emptiness inside. I was then faced with the hardest decision of my life: choosing between a hip replacement or an amputation. I ultimately decided to get my left leg amputated through the hip. Afterwards, I felt like all the things I loved doing as a child were a distant memory, and felt an immense amount of fear about my future—or lack thereof. However, my desire and will to live outweighed this fear.
Fourteen years and three Paralympic Games later, I found myself on a climbing wall in Brooklyn with the Adaptive Climbing Group. Whether you are an amputee, wheelchair user, blind or have a neurological disorder, climbing will challenge you in your area of “weakness,” and continually test your depth and strength of willpower. That willpower must be seen as a muscle, and needs to be trained and exercised just like any other muscle in the body. In climbing and in life, some “holds” or moments will challenge you more than others. Either way, we need to find a way to turn those crimps into jugs that catapult us forward. And if you fall off the wall and come back as a differently abled person, you simply figure out how to adapt and continue enjoying the climb of life.
This article was originally published in RANGE Magazine Issue Seven.
Image by Simone Schiess.