Paralympian: Legs regained, dreams lost
AMSTELVEEN, Netherlands — Monique van der Vorst’s competitive spirit thrived even after she lost the use of her legs as a teenager. She won two silver medals at the Beijing Paralympics and hoped to win gold in London in 2012.
Those dreams are gone now, because another was fulfilled: She began regaining feeling in her legs over the summer, and now she can walk again.
Van der Vorst savors every step through the snow. Every climb up the stairs. The ability to look somebody in the eye standing up.
The Dutch 26-year-old says she doesn’t need Christmas this year: “Every day was special.”
But her gift also means that more than a decade after reinventing her life, she has to reinvent it again. At the London Paralympic Games, she had hoped to win gold in both handcycling and wheelchair racing. Now that she can walk, she’s ineligible.
Competing “was such a passion,” she told The Associated Press from her apartment, filled with Paralympic medals and mementos, weight machines and her idle handbike and wheelchair. “It’s difficult because I need to find a new purpose in life.”
Van der Vorst was a 13-year-old field hockey standout but kept on twisting her ankle. She says an operation to correct the problem went wrong and afterward, “my leg swelled up, went purple and cold, filled with liquid that stayed there.”
She said doctors still aren’t fully sure what caused the leg to go limp. The following year, she lost most movement in her right leg, too.
“It affected my muscles and nerves and everything in the leg. When I got it, people didn’t really understand it.
“With my family we tried everything possible, but my leg was paralyzed. So at one point, there is no longer any use” to look for medical explanations. So she never got the exact medical details. She declined the AP’s request to talk to her doctors from the late 1990s, citing privacy concerns.
