Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Amanda Parezo, a self-professed \u201cbeach bum,\u201d can no longer get onto the sand or lay out a beach blanket on her own. <\/p>\n
The loose grains are \u201cjust impossible to navigate through\u201d in a wheelchair, she said.<\/p>\n
Still, she seizes every opportunity to return to the Shore \u2014 an activity that has brought her healing since her childhood in New Jersey.<\/p>\n
Five years after a random shooting in Olde Kensington<\/a> left her paralyzed from the waist down, she participated in \u201cThey Will Surf Again,\u201d an adaptive surfing event in August in Wildwood<\/a>, N.J. Designed for people with physical disabilities, the event was hosted by California-based nonprofit Life Rolls On and sponsored by Jefferson Health<\/a>.<\/p>\n Volunteers and friends helped her onto an adaptive surfboard that was wider and thicker for greater stability. <\/p>\n The first time she participated in 2022, she was afraid of how her legs might shift while riding. But whenever she fell off the board, volunteers scooped her back up immediately.<\/p>\n Parezo loved the feeling and energy of going fast in the wave. That sensory experience brought her relief as someone living with constant nerve pain.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t even describe it. It just felt so good,\u201d she said of the summer surf event.<\/p>\n In the years since her life-altering injury, Parezo has had to take similar leaps of faith as she\u2019s worked to rebuild her life.<\/p>\n She now had to worry about how she would shower, use the bathroom, drive, and simply enter public spaces while in a wheelchair. An assistant professor of occupational therapy at Jefferson, Parezo was used to helping patients, not being one herself.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a lot of just mourning who I was before,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In the process, she has become an accessibility advocate, competed in a pageant for women who use wheelchairs, and taken on adaptive sports from surfing to chair yoga.<\/p>\n She says her former patients are her biggest motivators.<\/p>\n \u201cI think about them every day,\u201d said Parezo, now 40. \u201cI haven\u2019t forgotten a single one of them that I\u2019ve treated in outpatient.\u201d<\/p>\n The injury<\/p>\n On the evening of the shooting in 2021, Parezo, then 36, had just finished playing a game of kickball at Hancock Playground in Olde Kensington with her friends. They were sitting near the benches, chatting and packing up, when gunshots from a nearby shooting suddenly rang out.<\/p>\n As her teammates ducked for cover, she felt a stinging sensation enter the right side of her body, just below her ribs. Parezo immediately fell backward as a wave of numbness swept from her hips down into her toes. <\/p>\n In that split second, a series of images flashed through her mind. <\/p>\n She saw patients she had treated as an occupational therapist. She saw herself sitting in a classroom, studying a PowerPoint slide about spinal cord injuries. And she imagined herself in a wheelchair.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no doubt in my mind that I had a spinal cord injury, and I knew it was bad,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She screamed in pain as everything the stray bullet touched started to dysfunction. Authorities have not identified the shooter.<\/p>\n At Temple University<\/a> Hospital, she would be diagnosed with a complete spinal cord injury, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair the next day,\u201d Parezo said. <\/p>\n