Now 28, Cody Unser says she has come to accept the "rejected body she wanted nothing to do with."
By age 12, I knew my life would be different (meaning ).
Up until that fateful February afternoon basketball practice, I was like any other 12-year-old girl: active, curious about life, into competitive sports (which, I learned, would get me chased by kiss-hungry boys during recess). Heck, I even choreographed dances with my little redheaded sister, Shannon, to songs by Janet Jackson and Celine Dion, moments to this day she cherishes as “traumatic.”
I was ordinary in most ways except one: I spent summers with my family traveling with a sort of wild circus. But instead of billowing tents filled with exotic animals being bossed by ring leaders, our circus consisted of sun-baked race tracks and highly competitive drivers topping speeds of 220 miles per hour. Coming from a racing family with a combined total of nine Indy 500 wins, I was exposed early to a professional sport in which fame, family, fortune and ravenous ambition come together – and sometimes collide – to create a well-oiled industry that keeps fans returning for more, united by a passion for fast wheels.
Little did I know I’d be of my own, but not of the race car variety.
I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast that morning, or in what order I put on my Catholic-school ensemble. Conversations with my friends escape me. The only thing that stands out is the moment my body was ripped from the path of a comfortable, predictable existence and into something full of dark doubts and overwhelming thoughts that I would never be good enough or amount to anything worth living for.
Basketball practice always entailed passing and dribbling drills. On this particular day, my coach decided to split us into two teams for a scrimmage. I was successful at stealing the ball, but just as I was about to dribble it to the other side of the court, I lost control of it. I couldn’t breathe. I immediately sat on the sidelines, trying to regain control of my breathing, when a pounded my brain.
Everything happened so fast from there.
The school called 911.
I was carried to the locker room and placed on my back.
The pain was unbearable. I was screaming.
Terrified, I tried to move my leg. It wouldn’t obey. Still on my back, I attempted to hoist it up with my left hand. It fell down limply.
An ambulance rushed me to the hospital, where doctors couldn’t uncover anything to explain my episode. I was sent home with a diagnosis of dehydration. Still unable to walk, my grandpa Leonard carried me into the house and laid me in bed, where I couldn’t control my own legs, let alone urinate. I fell asleep hoping it was all a nightmare that would evaporate as quickly as the morning sweat on my forehead. It didn’t.
My parents were out of town, so my primary care physician came to evaluate me at the house after being called about my situation. After seeing how the paralysis had hijacked my lower body, she placed me in the bath, knowing that water can help trigger the brain to contract and relieve the bladder. Nothing happened. Instead, tears spilled from my eyes, when I realized I couldn’t feel the water – neither its texture nor temperature.
Back to the hospital I went, where after a week of tests, my fate was finally handed to me in two words: transverse myelitis.
TM, doctors explained, is a disorder in which the . In some but not all cases, the onset can happen within 24 to 48 hours of initial symptoms. The masterful cablelike system that allows the body to move and feel suddenly becomes hacked, powerless to stop the forces racing to injure it; a virus, in some cases, triggers the inflammation that wreaks havoc.