After Rare Illness Paralyzes Tween, She Finds Her Calling

When Alabama teenager and avid dancer Erica Wilson was 12 years old, her life changed drastically in less than half an hour: That’s how long it took for a sudden bout of leg cramps during gym class to leave her paralyzed, leading to a grueling six-week hospital stay and an inexplicable diagnosis of transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disorder affecting the spine.

“It all happened so very fast and it never felt real,” Wilson, now 17, tells Yahoo Parenting. “It felt more or less like a dream.”

It’s kind of how she’s felt about the latest chapter in her incredibly determined life, becoming an accomplished wheelchair basketball player not long after losing the use of her legs — and, more recently, being chosen by Gatorade as one of five young athletes who are succeeding against the odds for its new campaign, “Win From Within: The Series.” The first two video shorts in the lineup featured Bobby Hornsby, a young man who overcame a troubled childhood to become a professional boxer, and Ben Jackson, a teen wrestler with cerebral palsy who is currently training for the 2016 Paralympic Games. Wilson said she entered the Gatorade search on a lark, after being prompted by the coach of her basketball team, the Lakeshore Lakers.

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“I submitted my bio not having any hope of hearing back from them, so being chosen came as a surprise,” she says. “It all happened so fast, and all of a sudden I had a video! I just wanted to share my story with other children because I know, being 12 when I got TM, I wish I’d had someone reach out to me and tell me, ‘It’s going to be okay. You’ll find things to do that you’ll love more than what you used to do.’”

Erica Wilson. Photo courtesy of the Wilson family.

In the 4-minute video, “Erica Wilson, Starting Again,” mom Jamie recalls the day of her daughter’s diagnosis through tears. “It didn’t make sense to me how you could be active and be healthy one minute, and then the next minute you can’t walk,” she says. But later that year, she took Erica — who had previously danced ballet, jazz, tap, and clogging — to watch a wheelchair basketball team practice nearby.

She was initially “pessimistic,” she recalls, adding that she knew “absolutely nothing” about basketball, despite having two very athletic younger brothers, but she gave it a whirl. “When I first started playing, they would tell us to go line up on the baseline and I would just sit there in the middle of the court looking around, like, what is that?” But she quickly came to love the sport, and progressed so quickly that she went from being a bench warmer to a starting player at the team’s national tournament within just seven months.

Erica’s official Gatorade campaign poster. Photo courtesy of Gatorade.

“When I play wheelchair basketball it’s a very free sensation, like I’m free of the judgments of others, and the fact that I’m disabled, so to speak,” she explains. “So it’s a very special kind of feeling.”

It was particularly comforting within the first year after her diagnosis, Erica says, when she found herself being abandoned by friends and having to adjust to a new social reality.

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“I guess I had hung out with what some people would label the ‘popular crowd,’” she says. “I had a few of them visit me in the hospital, but when I started back to school in seventh grade and I came in in one of the big bulky rental wheelchairs, it was really hard because no one understood why exactly I was in a wheelchair.” She found herself cast out. “I wouldn’t say I was bullied, but I had kids purposely not want to sit with me at lunch because they thought it was contagious. They didn’t understand. You kind of learn who your real friends are and who’s really mature enough to accept you for who you are. I lost several friends, but I gained better ones.”

Many of her most special bonds have come through being a part of the Lakeshore Lakers. “I think it’s helped me come to an acceptance that it’s okay to be where I’m at, and that I’m still the same person regardless of how I function,” Erica says. “Our main concern is, ‘How good a player are you?’ rather than, ‘Why are you in a wheelchair?’”

In addition to honing her athletic skills, Erica has made a remarkable partial recovery, learning to walk first with a walker, then crutches, and now canes. “It’s been baby steps and just lots of practice,” she says, explaining that she has only a small amount of feeling in her legs. “The doctors told me I would never walk, but I’m a very stubborn person.”

A high-school junior, Erica now has her sights set on college — possibly University of Illinois or University of Texas Arlington, which have wheelchair basketball teams — and maybe even majoring in neurology, so she can help kids with TM and other disorders. The idea that she’ll be walking unassisted by then is something she likes to believe is possible, too. “There’s no timeline for recovery with TM, so who’s to say that 10 years down the road I won’t be running around? It’s not very likely,” she admits, “but I like to keep my mind open to it.”