UNITED STATES QUAD RUGBY ASSOCIATION

July 2006

Not Another Lifetime Movie
By Ryland Page

A lot of quads and paras I know dislike the phrase “confined to a wheelchair”. They feel it sounds minimizing, suggesting that a wheelchair isn’t a device that enables, but one that inhibits. To the able bodied, such an assumption is perfectly reasonable – after all, if Lifetime movies are any indicator, a wheelchair is a shrine to tragedy. Wheelchair users are latent artifacts of an erstwhile life that was once headed somewhere productive, now just benighted, decrepit shells of their former selves.

Of course this is not true. However, it is an easy assumption to make, even for somebody whose life has recently put them in a chair themselves. I was once in danger of falling into such a quagmire.

Facing the prospect of being unable to walk was something I was loathe to do. When it happened, I was a 22 year old marathon runner serving on active duty in the military. Like most young guys, I thought I was pretty bulletproof. I was, in most respects, at the peak of my short life thus far. To have my trajectory cut short so completely and suddenly was beyond rationale. My mind was still accustomed to all manners of physical activity, and driving my body to match its expectations. But when I first got out of rehab, I hit the edge of my mobility envelope every time I pushed my clunky folding-frame everyday chair around my house. Suffice to say, the reduction in what I could do for myself was dramatic. Going from running 26 miles to pushing 26 feet did make me feel “confined to a wheelchair”. Every time I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk was a major evolution involving a preponderance of my strength, both physical to overcome the carpetings reluctance to let me pass, and mental to overcome my own frustration at the inability to reach the cupboard my 6’4” frame once easily could. My adrenal gland hated it, but my body seemed to want to do no more. I was no stranger to physical challenges, but paralysis was an entirely new animal in that regard; there was no discernible way for me to push myself any harder when some of my muscles simply refused to follow orders.

About a year later, I was invited by a paraplegic friend of mine to attend a sports expo day held by the New England PVA chapter. Being naturally athletic, yet still feeling somewhat confined to the chair, I leapt at the opportunity in hopes that I would find a new way to apply the instincts that still smoldered within me. My life post-injury had thus far been entirely too sedentary. I wanted to change that.

I was exposed to a few different sports that day, but the one that remained the most salient in memory was quad rugby. I’d been a casual fan of Australian rugby a few years back, and the mere idea of replicating the sport with wheelchairs was enough to make me laugh out of sheer incredulity. I really didn’t think it would appeal to me in the slightest, but after actually trying it, I learned how incorrect my knee-jerk reactions were.

My initial reaction to the idea of the sport was similar to just about anybody else’s. With fascination, I marveled at the robust construction of the wheelchairs used in the sport. They were nothing like the featherweight titanium chair I was sitting in; constructed to be the smallest and lightest mode of transportation. No, these things were built to take a punch and give back even more. With a squat, low-slung frame, six points of contact with the ground, obscene amounts of negative wheel camber, and angled armored panels on the front, the chair I eagerly transferred into shared the lines of a modern battle tank. The rules of the game were simple enough for even my limited attention span to encompass, and conceptualizing the objectives were easy enough. I’d never been big on team sports before, but I took to rugby faster and with greater ease than I anticipated.

I have now been a quadriplegic for five years. I’ve been playing rugby for not even two of them. Even so, rugby has been instrumental in allowing me to break from the mold of a self-loathing derelict and reconnect my athletic nature with my new body. Beyond that, the people I’ve met through the sport have provided positive examples of achievement in spite of some of life’s more daunting obstacles, further cementing my belief that the chair is more of a superficial obstacle than anything else. Best of all, I’ve successfully avoided becoming fodder for another craptacular Lifetime movie. Mission accomplished.

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