Sports is everything. I live for sports.
I watch sports for fun.
I just love being active.
Sports make me feel productive and I feel like I can just be
invincible. Mya, she's a goofball,
she's a perfectionist.
And she's always jumping around trying to flip around, trying to do cartwheels,
so let's get her into gymnastics. The perfection is everything.
I am a perfectionist. So perfecting everything,
trying to get that 10 is just, Oh, I love it.
I just got off of vault and floor was the third event.
That was my last event I was going to compete at that meet. And then I was like,
okay, next pass I'm going to do a half. I kind of just went for it.
I was just like, you know, go, you did at practice the day before you're good.
And I opened my eyes and I saw how far away I was from the ground. I was like,
Oh no, something bad is about to happen.
And I felt five pops all in one. Just in my knee,
down on the ground. I was just down on the ground. What happened?
That's pretty much it. And then she got back up and tried to do it again.
So I was thinking, okay, well she's, she's fine.
So she can go out and try it again. But that second time she went down,
like we knew. I was running for my round off. And I noticed like,
I felt like shifting in my knee. I was like, okay, something's off.
I did the round off. And I knew instantly,
like once I did that, I, I thought I broke my kneecap. I was like, Oh my God.
So one of the best ways to look at it is from the side view where you can see
her kneecap, her femur, her tibia, her posterior cruciate ligament,
but then her ACL is torn. So there's a scar ball down here.
And this is just all the scarring where she's lost her ACL.
It's completely torn. She has small lateral meniscal tear too as well.
I cried. I, cause I was just about to start my track season.
And then I asked how long I was gonna be out,
and she said six, eight months.
And I remember thinking in my head like, that's way too long.
I was just devastated.
I don't even remember hearing anything else other than the six to eight months.
So while she was crushed and pretty disappointed when it initially happened,
she really changed gears immediately into how do we fix it and how do I
recover the best way I possibly can.
As a gymnast, we all start laughing when bad things happen.
So at first, when I told them they all started laughing and then they were like,
wait, you're being serious. And I was like, I'm being very serious.
They were all like, okay, we're here for you. We'll help you through this.
We will be there for you the whole entire time. And they really did.
And I just love my team.
When I was at Henry Ford West Bloomfield hospital,
they were super nice and I felt very comfortable
and I felt like I was at home.
Henry Ford was very thorough in everything they were going to do.
They walked us through the entire procedure, even before she had the procedure.
And like Mya said, we felt at home instantly.
I mean the odds, I mean, were kind of against her.
I don't know if she's going to be able to do gymnastics ever again.
And I didn't think that because she's such a strong-willed girl,
but when she actually went out there and started doing this stuff, four or five,
six months after surgery, I was thinking like, Oh my gosh, like my kid,
she's got, she's got this. Like she can do this.
After the first competition I felt accomplished. I knew, no hesitation,
no nothing, don't even think, just do. And that's been my mentality ever since.
I feel privileged to be able to take care of her.
It's impressive to see how focused she's been in terms of her rehabilitation.
And she was always positive.
She was always thinking about how am I going to get better every single day with
my physical therapist and with my surgeon.
She had a specific goal in mind and that allowed her to stay on top of her
recovery.
You have to keep a positive mindset. If you don't, everything comes down,
you have to keep pushing. Like my coach has always said, keep pushing,
never look back.