Victoria Arlen Quotes

It's damage to a nerve. It pretty much shut down the whole lower part of my left leg. I wasn't able to step anymore. It's called foot drop - basically, you can't lift your foot.

I got really, really sick with a horrible disease called transverse myelitis; I lost my legs. I couldn't play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

I feel pain everywhere. A lot of guys in chairs do feel their legs. But if you don't, there's a thing called disreflex, so you know if something happens, say, you can't feel your foot or your leg and your body reacts. You know something's not right and you survey what's going on.

I am optimistic. But I also know that, with time, I'm beginning to fight issues of aging as well as long-term paralysis.

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

Then I got a bad back injury, and they thought I wasn't going to have any feeling in my legs.

The thing about motor neuron disease, once a muscle stops working, it doesn't start again.

If you have two weeks of no feeling in your leg, you start to wonder, 'Will it ever return?'

When I was born, I had a birth injury in my second and third vertebrae. It gave me what they called spastic paralysis, which is actually cerebral palsy.

You know that feeling when your leg falls asleep and you can't really feel it or move it? Well, that's what my legs feel like all the time, so being fluid and graceful has been difficult.

My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip, my toes to numb to step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering.

When folks git ole en strucken wid de palsy, dey mus' speck ter be laff'd at.

When your spinal cord freezes up, you're vulnerable to everything. But he [Chrestopher Reese] was tough as nails. And he kept a great, kind of dark sense of humor about it, but also was able to accomplish amazing things.

MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive.

I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.

The lesion is in the area of my brain that is responsible for motor function, so I have continual chronic pain in my left arm from elbow to fingertips and the right side of my body from my ear to my breast area.

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.

As I got older, I got Parkinson's disease, so I couldn't sing at all. That's what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson's. I think I've had it for quite a while.

I would not want to live with a tube in my neck and not be able to move a finger. I wouldn't - that to me is not life.

Being unconscious is the ultimate disability.

I don't have feeling in my feet to my fingertips; I also have active lesions in my bone marrow and in my eyes.

My fiancee's brother-in-law was recently paralysed in an accident and it really brought home the fact that thousands of young people live with spinal injuries. It's an issue I wish had more coverage.

My family knew, but most of the sporting world did not realize that my right hand been some 75% paralyzed.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

If I couldn't move, I don't know what I would do. That would be terrifying for me; I don't know how I'd cope with that.