This is the hardest blog article I’ve written, but it comes from the heart:
I’m officially passing the ambassador torch to the next generation of power wheelchair user advocates. Social media is what you make it. It can be a powerful tool for advocacy and awareness, and is a challenging professional career. As I begin my career in nursing, I want to focus my energy on those challenges. I will still be supporting the content of the incredible disability advocates I’ve met along this journey. Many people don’t realize how difficult and draining it can be to share life publicly for the cause. Disabled people, especially wheelchair users, have my full respect for that.
I got my Quantum Stretto power chair in September of 2020. In the beginning of that year, I had a severe autoimmune reaction to a virus (probably COVID-19). My dysautonomia flared so much that I could only sit upright for short periods without fainting, and had full paralysis return in my legs. I was hospitalized and in a rehab center for months during the peak of the pandemic. When I got out, I was bedridden and couldn’t use my previous mobility devices due to the severity of the symptoms. My complex power chair helped me recover over the next two years to baseline with my disability and get my life and independence back.
In 2022, I experienced the major life achievement of becoming a Quantum Q-Roll Model Brand Ambassador. Before the pandemic, I was a Philadelphia musician. It was not my choice career, but it was how I coped with grief. All it takes to turn everything around is the chance to prove yourself. Becoming a professional advocate helped me take myself seriously enough to try again at having the career I truly wanted.
A new career:
In 2023, I took the chance and went back to school. I left college in 2008 with a 3.9 GPA in biochemistry to have eight brain and spine surgeries over ten years. Combining my passion for science and disability rights, I went for a career in nursing. Nursing school was very different than the prerequisite classes, but I got through it. For anyone who doubts the abilities of a disabled nurse, Florence Nightingale spent much of her professional career disabled and bedridden from chronic illness. She definitely could have used a complex power wheelchair.
Three years later, I graduated from nursing school, and on June 18, 2026, I became an official Licensed Registered Nurse. I’m very excited for this new chapter of my life, and grateful for the support I’ve had along the way.
To the Q-Roll Models of the future (and current):
Every day that you exist in a society that was built to exclude you is an achievement. Every time you show society that not only do you exist, but you persist, excel, achieve, inspire, create, love, make pudding recipes in your kitchen, you prove to the world the need for inclusion.
