The Surfer’s Secret to Happiness
They don’t seem to regret all that time they don’t spend actually riding waves.
By Ellis Avery
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/opinion/disability-surfers-happiness.html
Ms. Avery was a writer. She died in February 2019.
Aidan Koch
In 2013, at the age of 41, I decided to make a career change and become a nurse practitioner. At the time, an advanced case of reactive arthritis often left me unable to walk. The entire time that I was taking prerequisite classes, I was in a mobility scooter, a 35-pound dragonfly of a three-wheeler made by a company called TravelScoot. I also needed a large surgical boot on my foot to help me walk.
I rode that mobility scooter in the sun and through the snow, on the bike path by the Hudson River, from my home in the West Village to the Borough of Manhattan Community College downtown. I rode it through the intestinal maze of the New York City subway system, through tunnels that trapped the heat and cold of the previous day’s weather, up and down elevators that trapped the odor of urine, to New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn. I rode it and rode it and rode it, and wondered if I’d ever walk again.
This isn’t the real me, I wanted to tell the world. This time doesn’t count. When I walk again, that’s when I’ll be real.
Amid the misery, I let myself hope. A physician assistant at my primary-care doctor’s office told me about one of her fellow students, a man with cerebral palsy, who had completed the program and graduated while using a wheelchair. In 2016, I was accepted into a community college nursing program, but then told to come back when I didn’t need a boot, which might mean never.
I continued to ride my scooter and to believe that some school, somewhere, would make a place for me. I didn’t see my future self briskly striding through hospital corridors. I just needed to get through school so that one day I could sit behind a desk at a health center or work in an outpatient clinic. There was plenty of nursing work that could be done just as well in a surgical boot as in a shoe. I could write a prescription, give a vaccine, insert an IUD. I could look a patient in the eye and listen.
In July 2017, I was out of the boot and walking again for the first time in years. My spouse and I were thinking about moving to Australia, so I applied to programs there and was admitted to nursing school at the University of Melbourne. After completing my first semester, I decamped to Sydney for a month. There, I lived in an apartment overlooking Bondi Beach, perhaps the most beloved urban surfing destination in the world.
