When visiting a friend resembles an episode of Man vs. Wild.
By Beth Livingston
Last summer I made plans to visit my friends Lisa and Mike in Salt Lake City. I was going to be in town on business and delighted in the thought that I would get to see them, too, as a side […]

By Beth Livingston

“You people are amazing!”
How often do you hear that and wonder whether you belong to some unnamed tribe?
When I returned to Bozeman after rehab, I was officially “different.” I was in a wheelchair. I stood out. I suppose some communities have larger populations of people with disabilities than in Bozeman, Montana, […]

By Beth Livingston

Lila and Parker, the author’s children.
Months after the car accident that left me paralyzed, my husband gently revisited the subject of having children. I had always assumed we’d have one—or many. “Things are different now,” he said. “I would understand if you didn’t want to have kids.”
Things were different, I […]

By Beth Livingston
Just months before I was injured in a car accident (see Growing Pains, “Chronicles of a Young Woman Coping with Paralysis,” in the January Action), I had relocated to Bozeman, Montana, from the East Coast. I was still settling in, so to speak, when I caught a Med-Jet to the trauma center […]

By Beth Livingston

After my car accident, I was stabilized at our local hospital, before making the flight to North West University Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. There I was to undergo spinal reduction surgery, and the thought was that I would do my rehabilitation at the nearby Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. I had family in […]

By Beth Livingston
In 1989, I had arrived. I had recently completed my undergraduate studies at Parsons School of Design in New York City and had moved across the country to start a new adventure. My husband George and I were married 3 years earlier. We were committed to living in the Rocky Mountains, and […]