Living ‘an Active Life with Inactive Feet’ After Spinal Cord Injury

A cautioning inspirational quote—Expect Nothing. Be ready for anything.—might be wise words to live by, but with a spinal cord injury, nothing like it is even on your radar screen, and it’s virtually impossible to be ready for it. In our exclusive interview with speaker, writer, publisher, and businesswoman Dr. Rosemarie Rossetti, she describes how she struggled to sustain an active life, well-lived before her spinal cord injury, after a freak accident dramatically altered her future on June 13, 1998.

She had an impressive resume at the time. Writer, speaker, teacher—Rosemarie was all those things and more when she and her husband Mark celebrated their third anniversary with a bicycle ride on their favorite trail. As they powered down the trail, they heard a sinister sound, described by her husband Mark as a “gunshot.” It was actually a towering old tree cracking in half. The tree, followed by power lines, came down, and she was “totally engulfed under this 7,000-pound tree, 80 feet tall.”

Like most everyone with traumatic spinal cord injury, Rosemarie—who had always kept a positive outlook on life—was not ready for it. So where did she go from there? She’s added a few things to her resume: Rosemarie carried the Olympic torch as it passed through columbus, Ohio before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. She was Ms. Wheelchair Ohio in 2004, and it doesn’t stop there.

Read the complete interview with Rosemarie Rossetti on the AMS Vans website:
http://blog.amsvans.com/living-an-active-life-with-inactive-feet-after-spinal-cord-injury/