FARMINGTON – For 27-year-old Aaron Abbott, it was a choice: He could either make the most of his life, or be bitter over being paralyzed from the waist down from a car accident earlier this year.
He chose to make the most of it.
Since returning home from a rehabilitation hospital in Atlanta, Ga., on May 19, Abbott says he’s been to the gym nearly every day, swimming, doing laps on the track in his chair, and lifting weights. “I don’t want to be cooped up,” he said in a brief interview Wednesday afternoon in between a gym session and a poker game “with the guys.”
“I just like getting out, being out and about,” Abbott said, explaining since his return he has even gone out fishing and taken rides on an ATV.
“I’m happy to be back and stuff like that,” he said.
Abbott, formerly a construction worker, was on his way home from work at Sugarloaf mountain on the evening of Thursday, March 23, when his car careened off the road, flipped over and landed upside down. The crash severed his spinal cord, fractured his ribs, collapsed both lungs, fractured his skull, and partially severed one ear.
Abbot was not wearing a seat belt when he lost control of the car, and does not remember anything about the day of the accident. Police think he fell asleep at the wheel.
Abbott said Wednesday, “It was weird, very surreal” to wake up in the hospital unable to move his legs. “It was very confusing, to say the least,” he said. “But I think I dealt with it well – I have good days and bad days,” he said.
“They taught me in rehab, try to do as much stuff as you can,” Abbott said, and so he plans to “ski, (do) downhill mountain biking and swimming,” go back to school for a degree in rehabilitation therapy, and hopefully even compete in the paralympics one day.
“My legs won’t ever move again, where I totally severed my spinal cord,” Abbott said. “That’s why I try to do everything.” He said he’s learned that “legs are just a convenience.”
“Now that I’m injured I can do something that uses my mind a little more,” he said. “I want to go to school, use my mind, do sports; getting injured gives you opportunity to do a lot of things you wouldn’t have,” he said.
People with use of their legs can excel in sports without being able to even think about competing in the Olympics, he said. “But if you really excel” with an injury, you can do almost anything, he said.
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