Read The Promise: A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship for Free Online

it. And he was just asking, not giving me any information. It was excruciating for us all as he did the test.
    After a few minutes he stopped the test and said plainly, “You will never walk again.”
    My parents were the only other people in the room at the time, and they broke down crying and held each other.
    “What are the chances that she might?” my dad asked.
    “Maybe five percent?” the doctor replied.
    My parents sobbed. It was heartbreaking to hear them in tears and in such pain. I felt worse for them, actually, than I did for me. I was in shock, I guess, but the implications of what it meant for me just felt far less than what it meant for everyone else I loved. I watched them cry, and my heart sank. I kept thinking over and over in my head, You will get through this. Stay strong. It’s going to be okay. One at a time, they went out to make phone calls to tell relatives. My mother was working desperately to get Chris on the phone, I was told. I needed so badly to hear his voice, to calm him down. I felt calm and he needed to hear that from me.
    The wait felt like forever. After about five hours someone walked into the room with the phone, my mother maybe, and held it to my ear. It was Chris. He had just begun the three-hour drive to the hospital.
    I wasn’t crying when I spoke to him.
    “I’m okay.” I wanted him to know I was dealing with it. “I’m handling this, but do you know exactly what’s going on? What have you been told?” I asked.
    “I don’t know much. Explain it to me,” he said. He sounded in shock. I knew he knew what had happened, but he wanted it in my words, as though maybe my answer would be different than what he had been told, like I held the truth and it wasn’t as bad as he thought.
    “I’m not going to walk again. I broke my neck.” I just wanted him to have the information. I didn’t want to sugarcoat it for him.
    He said “Okay” a couple of times but not much else. He wasn’t crying either, but I could hear the shock in his voice. He didn’t know how to react and suddenly became a man of few words, which was completely out of character for him. I knew he was rattled, so I just wanted to put him at ease and let him know I wasn’t a mess, that I was coping. I wanted so badly for him to hear that message from me because I knew he was upset. We said good-bye and I started counting the minutes until he arrived.
    It became clearer that I needed to have surgery, but we had to wait about eleven hours for some special machine to arrive. My C6 vertebra was completely shattered and the fragments had to be removed. My C5 and C7 had to be stabilized with a rod. The wait for the tools was excruciating for all of us, more so for me because I hoped Chris would get there before I went into surgery.
    Oddly, my parents had gotten bad news about me once before, ironically about me walking. When I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on October 2, 1985, the doctors weren’t sure whether I would ever walk. Isn’t that crazy? It was like some kind of bizarre foreshadowing. They thought I might have had spina bifida. That wasn’t my only issue; I also was born with a vision impairment called nystagmus. The doctors thought even if I learned to walk, I wouldn’t be able to play sports like tennis, because I wouldn’t be able to see a tiny ball. I showed them on both fronts. I started playing when I was two, and I never stopped.
    My parents and the doctor went out of the room at some point and told everyone in the waiting room about the surgery. A crowd of twenty-seven had gathered, apparently just for me; no other big groups were waiting for news on a loved one. All the girls from the party were still wet from the pool. The nurses brought them some blankets, and they huddled together, waiting. Some of their parents had arrived, too. The update included the information that I’d never walk again, that the damage was permanent. That was jarring news for them, as in the chaos of the