The Book of Gutsy Women by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Author:Hillary Rodham Clinton [Clinton, Hillary Rodham & Clinton, Chelsea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Tatyana McFadden

Chelsea

Tatyana McFadden spent the first six years of her life in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Born with spina bifida, she was paralyzed from the waist down, and her birth parents couldn’t afford to take care of her. Tatyana recalls that the staff at the orphanage did their best to encourage her independence (“I must have been a handful!” she said later, laughing), and though there was no wheelchair for her, she learned to walk on her hands in order to keep up with the other children.

When Deborah McFadden was in graduate school, an autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome left her temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. She used an electric wheelchair for four years, then crutches for eight more while she continued to recover. The discrimination she faced at school and work because of her disability made her into an advocate for others with disabilities. In 1989, the year Tatyana was born, Deborah had helped write the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Five years later, on a visit to distribute U.S. aid, Deborah met Tatyana at the orphanage where she lived. Deborah came back to see Tatyana several times over the next year, and when she learned that Tatyana was going to be transferred to a different orphanage, she couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye. “It had never been on my mind to adopt, but the moment they said they were going to transfer her to this place that, frankly, in your worst nightmare you can’t imagine, I said, ‘You can’t do this,’ ” Deborah said. Twelve months later, Tatyana came to live with Deborah and her partner, Bridgette, in Clarksville, Maryland.

When doctors told Deborah and Bridgette that Tatyana was unlikely to have a long life because she hadn’t had the medical care she’d needed while in Russia, they refused to accept the grim prognosis. Instead, they decided to sign their daughter up for sports to help her build strength. When they tried to sign Tatyana up for swimming lessons, every instructor except one turned them away. The first time Tatyana submerged herself in the water and popped back up to the surface, she shouted, “Ya sama!” (“I can do this!”) That was only the beginning of what would become a lifelong love of sports. “I tried a lot of sports, and I really fell in love with wheelchair racing,” Tatyana remembered later. “It made me feel so fast and free.” After years of building the muscles in her arms, shoulders, and back, she excelled at the sport. She would eventually earn the nickname “The Beast” from her coach because of the way she charged up even the steepest hills.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.