Tiffiny Carlson at work.
Tiffiny Carlson thought her life was over after a diving accident. In fact, it was just beginning.
By Lori A. Wood
“When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.” It’s a phrase we all know, but few of us have lived it as admirably as Tiffiny Carlson. “I was a pretty active kid, obsessed with dancing,” Tiffiny says. “I took baton-twirling, and was in dance. I had finished my eighth grade year, and had just joined the cheerleading squad. Everything was great.”
Tiffiny, a Minnesota native, also loved swimming. “In August 1993, my friends and I went swimming at a beach on White Bear Lake, the lake where I grew up. There was a slide in the water, and we decided we were going to dive off the top of the slide,” she says. While her friends managed to dive off without incident, Tiffiny did not. “When I dove off the top of the slide, I somehow dove the wrong way, and my head hit the bottom of the lake, and broke my neck. I was instantly paralyzed.”
Because friends didn’t know what was wrong with her and thought she was kidding, they didn’t pull her out of the water quickly enough, and she drowned. Eventually resuscitated and left with a C-6 spinal cord injury (SCI), 14-year-old Tiffiny was taken to Regents Hospital in St. Paul, where she stayed for nearly three months. “I was on a respirator. They were having a lot of problems getting my lungs healthy, because I inhaled all that water,” she remembers. After the first month, she was taken off of the respirator, and was ready to begin her regimen of physical rehabilitation. “The first thing they do is splint your hands, because if you’re a C-6 quadriplegic, they want to make sure your fingers are usable. My fingers are paralyzed, so they taught me how to handle utensils again. They do a lot of muscle strength training, to get your arms as strong as possible.” Though transferring into and out of a wheelchair is a typical technique taught during rehabilitation, it doesn’t apply to Tiffiny. “I don’t have any movement in my triceps, so it’s impossible for me to do that.”
After rehab, she resumed classes at White Bear Lake High School. “It was hard to go back to school in a wheelchair,” Tiffiny admits. “I was depressed for about three years. I felt like my life was pretty much over; I didn’t really see any hope for the future. I spent that time hating myself. The injury really screwed up my whole sense of who I was. At that time, you’re trying so hard to fit in, and you want people to like you.” At a stage of life where appearance is everything, Tiffiny couldn’t hide her disability. “Kids can be mean, and nobody wanted anything to do with me. I wondered what the point was of me being around. At that time, I had no role models to look up to.”
Mother Knows Best
At her mother’s insistence, Tiffiny attended Camp Courage, a summer camp for teens with disabilities in Maple Lake, Minnesota. “My mom made me go, because she knew it would be good for me.” Tiffiny was only there for a week, but her time there completely changed her attitude about her disability. “I was around people who were used to people with disabilities, so I felt normal there,” she says. “It was like I was better again. I made tons of friends, and knew that I could live my life and do things that I never thought I could do before.”
Armed with that empowered spirit, upon graduating from high school in 1997, she went to live at the Courage Center for a year, which served as the camp’s headquarters, in Golden Valley, Minnesota. “You learn independent living skills, such as cooking, hiring, and training personal care assistants, and driver’s training.” A paraplegic woman who worked there at the time, Karen Casper, became the role model that Tiffiny had wished for. “She was amazing. She had a full-time job, she drove, she was married and had children. I wanted to be just like her. I didn’t know that I could do those things, and seeing her live her life made me feel better. To this day, she doesn’t even know what she has done for me.”
The Write Direction
With these two experiences to give her hope, Tiffiny was ready to attend Augsburg College in Minneapolis, where she majored in business communications. While living on campus, she fell in love with computers, and started her own Web site, www.beautyability.com, in 1998. The site offers a multitude of features, including beauty advice, dressing tips for both women and men, and a section where singles with disabilities can meet.
“It started as a really little Website,” she says. “Through doing that, I realized I could still feel beautiful, successful, and desired. I wanted to share that with other people.” She figured that, if those newly injured with SCI could learn these things right away, they might be spared the depression that she went through.
Tiffiny was then approached by a woman from a now-defunct Web site called Half the Planet, which operated on the principle that half the people on the planet have or know someone who has a disability. “She wanted me to write for her,” Tiffiny says. “She thought I had interesting things to say, and liked my take on things.”
For the Web site, Tiffiny wrote advice for college students with disabilities, wheelchair fashion advice, and healthy living advice. “It was a really great gig, so it was sad when the Web site went down.” Interestingly, she never thought of herself as a writer. “When people started approaching me and liked my Web site, I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I could do professionally.’” Because she enjoyed writing so much, she changed her major to mass communications. In 2001, she earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject.
After college, Tiffiny decided to write a book; Wheelchair Fashion 101 was the result. “I selfpublished it, and sell copies through my Web site,” she says. “It features really practical advice on everything from lingerie to jackets, wedding dresses to everyday clothes. It gives you a rundown of the best kinds of clothes to wear when you’re sitting in a wheelchair all the time.” By way of fashion advice (some of which she shared with Action readers in her “Wheelchair Fashion Manifesto” in June), Tiffiny suggests getting long pants. “Your legs are long, for walking, so you buy long pants. When you’re sitting down, they’re going to go up, so you need to go somewhere like The Gap. They have an excellent line of extra long pants. ”
Two years later, she began writing “SCI Life,” a monthly disability column for New Mobility magazine. “I do the spinal cord injury page, and it’s usually divided into four sections: a bio, a health issue someone has overcome, a lifestyle tidbit about an accessible place or new product, and I write a ‘wild card’ part that can be about whatever I want. It’s one of those jobs that can be about something I care about, and I know that I’m making a difference.” A sample of the column can be found at newmobility.com/review_article.cfm?id= 454&action=browse.
Among other places, Tiffiny has also been published on www.ican.com and www.lovebyrd.com, (where she writes a dating and sexuality column). Her full-time job however is technical recruiting, where she helps staff high-tech jobs for corporations in the Minneapolis-area. In the future, she hopes to attend law school or earn a master’s degree.
How to Deal
“I have a personal care assistant who comes in the morning and at night to help me with transfers, using the bathroom and showering,” she explains. “These assistants are key to living on your own. You feel more independent that way. Once I’m in my chair, I’m pretty independent.” Tiffiny lives in an accessible, subsidized apartment building in Minneapolis, and can cook, clean, use a computer and drive a minivan. “You either adapt to SCI or you don’t. You just have to learn to deal with it.” Family members help her to do so. “As a support system, they’re invaluable. I’d be lost without them.”
At this stage in her life, Tiffiny Carlson is on a journey of self-discovery. With determination and courage to guide her, there’s no telling how far she’ll go.
Lori A. Wood is a regular contributor to Action.
