00:00The first time I cried was after wiggling my toes for the first time because I just was
00:03so excited of like, wait, there's hope. On a random Sunday, I just started to feel like not
00:12well and I had really bad chest pain and back pain and then that just progressed and progressed.
00:20My parents were like, hey, we have to do something about this. And so that next morning,
00:25we went to the pediatrician's office and on the way there, my legs started to get kind of tingly
00:31and fuzzy. Just sitting in that office for like 30 minutes, I slowly started to like lose feeling
00:39in my legs and my dad came and picked me up. And by the time we took a 10 minute
00:47car ride to the ER
00:50where I just was that night prior, I could not even get out of the car. Everyone's just trying
00:56to figure it out. And so they were running all these different tests. And then eventually I got
01:00an MRI and then the MRI showed that there was a mass in my spine. They didn't know like what
01:07it was,
01:08but they rushed me into surgery. After the surgery, they like cultured the mass. And then that showed
01:14that it was a staph infection. They got it out, but then obviously like now they saved my life. So
01:20now it's just the beginning of the road of, okay, well now I can't move or feel anything from the
01:25chest
01:25down. So now I have to start this journey of what's life going to look like. Can I regain,
01:31you know, the strength in my legs to walk again, but I had so much hope and they were obviously
01:36hopeful
01:37too. Um, and so we kind of just like went at it both me and then my family as the
01:44weeks went on
01:45and the months went on, I slowly started to see flickers. I started to feel things again. And, um,
01:52it was a long road for sure. Probably like two or three months post paralysis. I wiggled my toes for
01:59the first time. The first time I cried was after wiggling my toes for the first time. Cause I just
02:03was
02:03so excited of like, wait, there's hope about six months after my injury. I was
02:09like, I want to get back into sports because I still had that in me. Um, and so I went
02:16to this
02:16like camp for people with spinal cord injuries and brain injuries through shepherd center called ASW.
02:22And I basically tried just about every sport you could imagine. I saw this whole new world of like
02:28all these kinds of sports that I could play. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like I can still
02:35have like
02:35my identity as an athlete, even though I'm paralyzed after that weekend. I was like, Oh, I'm totally not
02:43done being an athlete. Like I'm going to get back into this. I reached out to a few schools that
02:49had
02:49adaptive sports programs and Clemson was one of them. They were like, we would love to recruit you. And I
02:57basically were like, that's okay. You're athletic. Like we've seen your videos, like water skiing,
03:02doing CrossFit. Like we'll teach you like you're an athlete. We got this. And so I went to school,
03:09um, come fall and I got to play on the tennis team for Clemson. It genuinely was like
03:18what I had dreamed of. And so it was just so cool that it was possible, even though I was
03:26in a
03:26wheelchair. Little Sid's dreams are all coming true. It's not how I envisioned them when I was,
03:31you know, walking and doing all those things, but it's exactly what I always wanted. It's like weird
03:36because yeah, I'm in a wheelchair, which in some ways limits me, but it also opened up this whole
03:43new world of like possibilities and getting plugged into all these communities that are literally life
03:49changing.
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