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As she lay in hospital, listening to doctor’s explain how her life would never be the same again, Chanelle Wimbish quickly decided she wouldn’t allow the news to dampen her fighting spirit.
"When they told me that I had just a three per cent chance of walking again, it really didn't faze me,” the 36-year-old says.
“I knew that was an arbitrary number and being a scientist myself understood that all bodies heal and recovery is different and that my outcome after [spinal cord injury] couldn't be predicted.”
Chanelle, a clinical research associate, had been hit by a speeding car on the last day of her holiday with her family in August 2009.
Ten years after the horrific incident she defied all medical odds by walking down the aisle, Mirror Online reports.
"I prayed and read positive books and poems, knowing that I couldn't change what had happened but that I could learn to live my best life despite/with the injury.”
Chanelle, from College Park in Maryland, in the US, sustained a T-6 spinal cord injury after the accident.
"I don't remember being hit per se but remember being on top of the hood of the car and then I blacked out after hitting the ground,” she recalls.
“I then remember one of my cousins standing over me while I was laying on the ground, telling me to hold on, the ambulance was coming.
"I then remember hearing the ambulance approaching, then I woke up in the emergency room with my aunt by my side.”
She spent ten weeks recovering in hospital before undergoing physical therapy at home.
Instead of focusing on getting used to life in a wheelchair, Chanelle was determined to learn to walk again.
Five months after her injury there was a glimmer of hope: she was able to wiggle her toes.
At first her dad lived with her to help her learn to use braces and a walker but by April 2010 she was living independently.
Four years later she met the love of her life Brennan (40).
Brennan proposed in February last year and Chanelle decided then and there that she would walk down the aisle with two crutches.
Each week, for six months before the big day, she had two hours of intense physiotherapy.
"No circumstance is as bad as you think it is, or as it seems,” she says.
“The mind is very powerful, so use it to transmit positivity in any situation to overcome.”
SOURCES: Mirror Online, 121private.home.blog
