A few years back, a Columbia woman named Cheryl Overstreet had a stroke in her brainstem. She woke up in University Hospital, and the whole left side of her body just would not listen to her anymore. Eight days in the hospital, 17 more at Rusk, and then home in a wheelchair, with no real idea of whether she would ever walk across her own kitchen again, let alone pick her crochet hook back up or get on her knees in the dirt of her garden come spring.
What she did next was not some big dramatic comeback. She just went to PhysZOU, twice a week, sometimes more, for the better part of a year. That’s the physical therapy clinic Mizzou runs out of the School of Health Professions, and the students working with her were not even licensed yet. They were still figuring out their own careers while they helped Cheryl figure out how to stand again. Learning to shift her weight. Learning to trust a leg that kept giving out. None of it moved fast. It was a game of inches.
By the time Cheryl was walking without a walker, the students had gotten attached to her, the way you would to anyone you watched fight that hard for that long. At the end, they gave her a t-shirt with a pun on it about how motivated she had been: mOTivated. She still has the shirt.
I use a wheelchair myself. That’s due to multiple sclerosis, and no, I am not going to spend this whole column on it. What I will say is that I am working toward something along the same lines as Cheryl, just on a slower clock. In 18-24 months from now, I would like to get out on an ordinary warm evening and go around my own block with my wife, Leigh. Nothing fancy. Porch lights coming on down the street, somebody’s grill going a couple houses over, us just being one more couple out walking.
That is genuinely the whole ambition. I am chasing it in the same unglamorous way Cheryl chased hers, a little at a time, on days that do not look like much of anything if you happen to be watching.
What gets me about her story, honestly, is not even the walking. It is what it says about the assumptions we make regarding age. Nobody told Cheryl that her sixties were a fine time to rebuild a set of legs from scratch. She just did it, and now she is out among her tomatoes every June like she always was.
Columbia is full of people doing this sort of thing. There are Special Olympics Missouri volunteers setting up at Cosmo Park with the grass still wet, for an event that gets maybe four sentences in one of the papers. A table of Rotarians is sitting somewhere right now, coffee gone cold, hashing out a project that will not pay off for years. A retired teacher walks the MKT with two trekking poles a little farther every week. She would not know her mile total if you asked, and she does not care.
None of that gets covered. Cheryl’s achievement barely did. But it is the kind of thing that ought to make a person stop and reconsider whatever age-related excuse they have been carrying around, because a stroke, a bad knee, a wheelchair — none of it is the final word people treat it as.
So, if you have your own version of a walk around the block that feels too far off, do not wait for it to look impressive before you start. Cheryl was not impressive in any single PhysZOU session. She was just there again on a Tuesday, in a Columbia winter that had zero interest in her timeline.
I am planning on walking my own block one day and telling her that in person.
