Did you know that you can turn your everyday online shopping into support for RAMP?
Click here and shop at over 330 stores like Amazon.com, L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, Barnes & Noble, Gap and many more! These stores give up to 26% from every purchase you make to your cause. Many of these contributions can be tax deductible for you.

Disability came into my life on January 20, 2002, a few minutes after midnight when my then 16-year-old son fell on his head while wrestling with a buddy at the home of a friend. He cracked his C-6 vertebrae into three pieces and smashed the spinal cord at the injury site. Surgery repaired the broken vertebrae, but medical science hasn't yet figured out how to fix the damaged spinal cord. David is paralyzed from the chest down and his arms work, but his fingers don't. 

In his junior year of High School, David was the starting center for the Rochelle Hubs and had been playing organized football since the age of 8. As a mom, I had worried all those years about injuries from football and then the paralyzing accident happened in a living room! You just never know what tomorrow may bring. 

The days, weeks and months that followed radically changed our lives in so many ways. Through the care and concern of friends, family, our community and every single medical professional who touched our lives during that time, we came out of it better, stronger people with a true appreciation for the blessings in our lives that we once took for granted. David bravely led us through those changes with his usual optimism and enthusiasm for life. Today he lives quite independently as a college freshman at the University of Illinois. Each day he continues to work around his disability to handle the tasks of daily living and with each day he has another success. I'm not saying his life is easy. It's not. The secondary complications of spinal cord injury can be worse than not being able to walk or pick something up, but as David says, "you can sit around and cry about it, but what good will that do." 

In the two years since David's accident, we have had to make many adjustments. While he was in rehabilitation, we were lucky to have the resources to build an accessible home. David was never going to be able to access his bedroom or most of the other rooms in the house we then lived in. There were no existing accessible homes in our community available to buy and none of the homes for sale could be easily modified at the time. 

Also, we had to find and purchase a wheelchair accessible vehicle since we had no public transportation in our town and no way to get a 6 foot, 240 pound paralyzed football player into a car. Even finding a van that worked was a challenge! 

David's older brother Jon took a semester and the summer off from college to be with David and help coach him through rehab and learn how to live with his new body. We trudged through the maze of social services to seek financial support for personal assistance so I could continue to work and earn the income that supported us. 

Blessings abounded in the coming year. Since he traded half of his junior year for rehab, David had to take summer classes in order to graduate with his class and then was accepted to several schools including U of I. Jon reunited with his Jr. High sweetheart Melissa because of David's situation and they got married in the summer of 2003. Two months later, I married my fiancé of eight years, who had stuck by our side through the thick and thin of our ordeal. 

I lost my job in June of 2003 due to corporate restructuring, which turned out to be another blessing. I loved the job I lost, and my former employers were another blessing I counted as we worked through months of hospitalization and rehab, but as with everything else in my life, I found that my personal priorities had changed. I had the opportunity to spend more time with David before he went off to college. Suddenly I was hungry to learn everything I could about spinal cord injury and I relentlessly researched the topic on the Internet. Through that research, I learned about all kinds of disabilities and decided that in seeking new employment, I wanted to work on disability issues. I wanted to do something to improve the lives of people with disabilities because I know first hand the challenges that people with mobility issues face every single day. The job I envisioned came to me through RAMP. 

This is still a relatively new world to me, but I already feel like the staff here at RAMP is my extended family. Each and every person has been warm and welcoming and I've found that people who dedicate their lives to helping others certainly aren't in it for the money, they are simply very special people with an abundance of love, patience and a huge capacity to care for people. All people. 

I hope to do this job justice. I want to be the change I want to see in the world. I never want to have reason to complain without having done my utmost to solve a problem. I want to retain the greatest gift I have received in the past two years of my life, appreciation. Appreciation for an entrance without steps, for a restaurant where David can join us for lunch, for each day that David, our family and I have our health, for my friends who lift me up, for a lovely spring day. 

Come with me on this journey. RAMP is about helping people with disabilities be as independent as possible. You, too, can be the change you want to see in the world. Help me advocate for change and learn to be your own advocate along the way.

Send me an email at kmontgomery@rampcil.org if you'd like to join our Advocacy Email List. I'll keep you informed of what's going on in Washington and Springfield and Rockford and Belvidere and Freeport and DeKalb and throughout our counties. There is strength in our numbers. Let's join together to do our best for all people with disabilities to have equal access and equal rights, and truly appreciate our freedom as Americans.

Have comments about or problems with our site?
Contact the webmaster.