COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - After helping Sami Simmons learn to adjust to life with a wheelchair, the staff at Rusk Rehabilitation Center was not going to let the Brunswick teen miss her junior prom.
Sami was paralyzed from the waist down after she was ejected from her airborne 1997 GMC Jimmy during an October 2013 wreck, the Columbia Daily Tribune (https://bit.ly/1dbPDEx ) reported. She was a patient at Rusk for about a month after the crash.
Barely 18 months later, she was back at Rusk for treatment of a pressure ulcer - a bed sore - that made it difficult for her to sit in her wheelchair. The wound led to a bone infection and another stay at Rusk.
While physical and occupational therapists helped get Sami on the mend, the prom at Brunswick High School was rapidly approaching. Sami, 17, had an elaborate prom dress, the perfect shoes - and a date.
“I said, ’We’re going to get you to prom,’ ” Jenny DeShon, an occupational therapist at Rusk, said recently while chatting with Sami, Sami’s 10-year-old sister, Samona, and her grandmother, Mary Simmons, who adopted Sami when her granddaughter was 6.
DeShon navigated administrative hoops to get approval for the April 25 prom date, and she assembled a team to get Sami dolled-up for the dance 75 miles northwest of Columbia. Mary Simmons smiled at the memory.
“They decorated her chair,” she said.
DeShon returned the smile. “It took a village,” she said. Rusk staff members styled Sami’s hair and handled her makeup.
DeShon and physical therapist Bonnie Fruits chauffeured Sami to the prom, leaving Columbia at 4:30 p.m. They returned seven hours later.
“We were the Sami pit crew,” DeShon said. “I was really amazed to see the support of her school.”
“They were really excited to see me,” Sami said. Friends jockeyed to take Sami in and out of a busy photo booth.
“All of the effort that it took - I wouldn’t think twice about it,” DeShon said. “We thought of everything you need being an hour and a half away from here.”
Sami said the warm reception and giggly reaction of her friends was a familiar experience in her small town of about 860 people. When she returned home from Rusk after the wreck, the townsfolk and other volunteers had renovated her grandmother’s house to make it accessible for Sami’s wheelchair.
Sami is able to drive thanks to a set of modified hand controls, and she is careful to wear her seatbelt. She was not wearing one on Oct. 11, 2013, when she left home at about 7 a.m. in her SUV to pick up her best friend for an early start on a school project. The large vehicle, a 1997 GMC Jimmy, skidded on graveled Lewis Clark Road, about a mile east of Brunswick; Sami panicked, overcorrected her steering and ran off the road.
She never lost consciousness.
“I remember the vehicle flipping,” she said. “There was so much adrenalin running through me … that I didn’t feel the pain.”
She does not remember how she left the vehicle, but Sami found herself on the ground and unable to move. She had only two minor cuts - she has a scar on one eyebrow and another small scar on an arm - but she had a broken back.
Before realizing the life-changing severity of her injuries, Sami said she was most upset that the emergency responders had to cut off her favorite pair of jeans.
“Everybody knows everybody” in Brunswick, she said.
Mary Simmons received a phone call about the crash at 7:20 a.m., but she already had heard all she needed to know from the police scanner she keeps in her house.
Sami was flown to the trauma center at University Hospital and soon learned she had only a 5 percent chance of walking again.
After learning to use a wheelchair, Sami said, she realized she could “do anything anyone else can do - I just do it differently.”
“I may be getting around differently,” she said, “but I still have goals and ambitions and things I can accomplish.”
DeShon said Sami’s emotional and mental strength played “a huge part” in the teen’s rehabilitation.
“There’s a certain level of emotional adjustment that has to happen,” she said. “Some individuals will get stuck somewhere along that line.”
Sami, who will turn 18 in August, wants to go to college to become a special education teacher. She also wants to find ways to advocate for people with disabilities and special needs.
“I am a person. My disability doesn’t define me,” she said. “I am a person with a disability.”
Mary Simmons credits a lot of her granddaughter’s positive attitude to the medical staff and health professionals who have worked with Sami.
“She hasn’t let this get her down,” she said. “She’s still a go-getter.”
Sami nodded.
“Your life doesn’t end when your disability begins,” she said.
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Information from: Columbia Daily Tribune, https://www.columbiatribune.com
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