Claire's Journey

Still dark outside, Claire lies awake in bed, waiting for her parents’ alarm clock to go off. Soon her dad Matt will come get her up to get ready for school. They have a routine that they’ve always followed: get ready, get positioned in her wheelchair, and get on the bus. Claire, at 13 months, had been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy. Doctors told her parents that she would never be able to walk or function at all. Claire’s dad ignored that and helped Claire succeed at standing and walking. As she began to grow up, it became very difficult for Claire to continue walking; therefore she got her first wheelchair and was fitted for leg braces at Shriners in St. Paul, Minnesota. She walked until she was three years old.

The workers fastened the seatbelt for Claire, and set the speed on the lowest setting for her to practice driving the wheelchair. Within a minute and a half, Claire was driving as fast as it could, up and down Shriners’s hallways shouting, “nan nan na boo boo you can't catch me!” Like any other kid, Claire thought having a wheelchair was awesome. As she got older, she quickly realized that was not the case. She found that everything was hard to do like feeding herself or brushing her teeth. When Claire was in second grade, she was diagnosed with scoliosis. Now she also needed to wear a back brace that went from her armpits down to her hips. Claire felt miserable while wearing this and hating how she felt trapped inside her own body. At seven years old Claire hated everything about her but never showed it. All she ever wanted to do was jump out of her chair and just walk around her house and bedroom, but Claire knew that being able to walk would never happen again.

When Claire was in fifth grade, she received some bad news. Her doctor told her she needed spine-fusing surgery and if she didn’t go through with it, she would eventually pass away from its affects. So two years later, on July 29th 2009, Claire was in surgery for 11 hours; three of...