Transcriber: Mohand Habchi Reviewer: Allam Zedan
Imagine for a moment
you couldn’t speak.
Your ability to communicate has been taken away from you.
The words are up in your mind,
but the connection to your mouth has been lost.
You know what you want to say,
but it won’t come out.
Now imagine that you can’t move.
You feel as if you’ve been disconnected from your body.
You’re trapped inside your mind.
The world is going on around you,
but you can’t move or take part in it.
Now imagine that you can’t remember.
You don’t remember who your family is.
You don’t know where you are.
You’re struggling to try to figure out what is going on in the world,
but this world is so foreign.
You feel as if you’re trapped in a foreign country.
You're locked inside
and slowly losing everything you have.
For three and a half years,
this nightmare was my reality.
Growing up,
I was your typical eleven-year-old.
I played sports.
I had three brothers.
I was very active.
I was very much involved in school and sports,
and my main sport was swimming.
Everything was going for me.
I was the kid that never got sick.
I was on my way.
But on April 29,
my life forever changed.
I woke up to excruciating pain in the side of my abdomen.
Being the child who never got sick in the family,
my family assumed that I had gotten a stomach bug,
that it would pass
and I'd be fine, I'd go to school the next day.
But as days turned into weeks,
and my situation started getting worse and worse,
we realized
something more serious was going on.
I was slowly losing every ability I had.
My body was shutting down.
I had to watch helplessly
as my ability to walk,
talk, move and think
were deteriorating in front of my eyes.
A slow and very painful progression
to a vegetative state.
A state in which I’d be tapped in
for three and a half years.
Two rare neurological conditions:
transverse myelitis and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis
were ravaging and attacking my body.
But it took three and a half years
for doctors to figure out what had happened.
So in those three and a half years,
I struggled to stay alive.
Each day,
I would try with every ounce of energy in my body
to let my family know that I was still in there.
I was okay, "I’m going to be okay,
I want to survive."
I knew that end was near.
Each night, I would be terrified that I wouldn’t wake up the next day.
Terrified that I wouldn’t go to prom,
that I woudn't have a boyfriend,
that I wound't graduate.
Things that as young teenagers we dream about.
We aspire to be.
The doctors had written me off as a lost cause.
They told my family to give up on me,
to put me away,
I’d be a vegetable the rest of my life,
and if I survived,
I’d be nothing,
amount to nothing.
But I was determined to live.
My family was determined to get me back.
And in 2009,
it took one blink.
For all of us,
we blink hundreds of times a day.
We’re all blinking now.
We don’t think anything of it.
But for me,
the ability to blink on demand
was my doorway back to the world.
I would blink once for no,
and two times for yes.
And that was my sign, that was my glimmer of hope
that I was still in there.
I slowly but surely
started returning to my family.
Mind you,
things that we all take for granted,
such as smiling,
moving our fingers,
talking,
these were huge milestones I had to get over.
Being able to smile again,
that was a mountain I had to climb over.
Being able to find my eyes again
and be able to track what was going on.
To move my hands,
to eat.
I missed out.
I’m like four years of not eating.
I love food.
That was very hard for me.
And slowly having my family just wrap their arms around me --
and when I first started speaking,
I would mumble.
So I'd have these conversations with my mom in the car,
and I'm like, "dhuzzzz”
and my mom was just like, "Uhum.
Oh no!"
She had no idea what I was saying.
But she was trying.
My whole family was trying.
And from there,
I started going to school again.
I missed five years of school.
And I’m a triplet,
so I’ve been the queen bee of my brothers.
And they were way ahead of me in school.
I came to high school as a freshman with the fifth grade education.
And when I told them that I wanted to graduate,
because they were sophomores at the time,
and when I told them that I wanted to graduate,
on time with them,
they looked at me like I had four heads.
Now I already was in a wheelchair,
so they looked down on me because I’m like four feet,
the same hight I was when I got sick,
but they didn’t think I would do it.
But I was determined.
It was like, "I need to do this.
I might have gone asleep for a little bit,
but I’m back and I’m ready to go."
And I did. I was able to graduate.
And then,
another monumental thing happened in 2010.
I graduated in 2013,
but in 2010,
I found the water again.
It was not by choice.
I was actually petrified of the water.
It took my brothers
that one day came into my hospital room,
unhooked my feeding tube,
strapped on a life jacket,
grabbed my arms, grabbed my legs
and jumped in with me.
It was traumatizing.
But I didn’t drown,
I jumped in.
I jumped over that fear
and it changed my destiny.
And with things scary in life,
you must either have to figuratively and literally jump in,
get over that barrier of fear,
just go after it.
And from there,
I started swimming again.
I learned how to swim without the use of my legs.
I started moving and finding my freedom in the water.
Freedom in which I didn’t need a chair.
I didn’t need help.
I could just be with the water.
Nobody knew my situation.
Nobody knew when I first started swimming,
that I would have to unhook a feeding tube
and go into the water.
Nobody could tell.
I was normal again.
We fight for normalcy,
but what is normal?
I mean normal for me was
walking around in stilettos
and being kind like everyone else.
But in the water, I felt like everyone else.
And two and a half years later,
I found myself swimming in the London Paralympics games.
And prior, that whole year prior,
I had set my sights out on London
and everyone laughed at me.
They told me I couldn't do it.
They told me that because I had come so late into the game,
that when most of my peers were training in 2008,
I was fighting for my life.
That when I came here,
they said, "You’ll not going to stand a chance."
But I took my family and my coach that believed in me.
And sure enough,
it worked out.
I came home with one gold and three silver medals
at the London 2012 games.
So it worked out pretty good.
I didn’t listen to them.
But my point is
a lot of people will ask me, “How did you do it?
How did you not give up?
How did you smile
when there seemed to be like everything to cry about?
How did you not just curl up in a ball and let it consume you?"
And I’ve come up with a motto
that I've lived by for the past seven years.
And at one of the hardest times in my life,
when I was so sick,
I was in so much pain
and I just wanted to be free,
I wanted to get out of this situation,
I came up with a motto
because I wanted to live.
I wanted a second chance.
My motto was,
“Face it.
Embrace It.
Defy it and conquer it.”
I had to face these challenges head-on.
I couldn’t run away.
I couldn’t curl up in a ball.
My family couldn’t do that.
I had to face it
and accept what had happened to me,
but ultimately embrace what had happened to me.
I had to embrace it. I couldn’t be better.
I couldn’t be angry because that solves nothing.
I had to embrace it.
"Okay, life happens.
Things happen.
We can’t explain it,
but we can make a difference from it."
And ultimately that helped me defy it.
That helped me defy the odds,
defy the doctors who had written me off and said I wouldn’t survive,
that I would be a vegetable,
that I would amount to nothing.
And ultimately,
that would help me conquer,
conquer the coaches who said I wouldn’t do it,
conquer the doctors who said I wouldn’t do it,
all the naysayers,
all the people that said no.
And with society nowadays,
it’s so easy to say no,
so easy to squash someone’s dreams
or someone’s thoughts of making a life for themselves, being better.
But yes, you can.
I had so many people that said no,
but I had a handful of people that said, “Yes, you can,”
and I held onto that.
And conquering is still an ongoing process for me.
In fact, I’m trying to get back on my feet.
I’m from a tall family.
They are like six feet and I’m four.
I mean, I’m in heels and I’m still four feet.
(Laughter)
And two weeks ago,
I was able to stand on my two feet with the help of a trainer.
And still, it's conquering.
We all have to keep conquering.
As we gather here today,
our theme is "Mindset",
how our mental attitudes and choices
can influence our results,
can make our lives better,
and can ultimately
get you out of the darkest hours of your lives.
It can even help you cheat death,
get a second chance,
make your life better when all the odds are against you.
It takes one person to start a fire.
So I'll leave you with a final thought.
What obstacles, setbacks or challenges,
that are in your life,
that with the right mindset,
you can face,
embrace,
defy
and conquer?
Thank you.
(Applause)