Rick Fisher has never had it easy. Confined to a wheelchair, he is often overlooked for jobs, has trouble finding a girlfriend, and there are days when performing the simplest tasks takes twice as long as it used to.
"He was an athletic kid. He played third base in the spring and wide receiver in the fall. I don't think he ever thought he would face the kind of challenges that he has today," said Fisher's father, Jerry.
When he graduated high school, Fisher worked all summer to save money for a motorcycle. Three days after buying the bike, he had trouble handling a curve in strong winds, and lost control of his motorcycle. "I saw a truck coming and I panicked. I overcorrected and the next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed." Rick had avoided the truck, but went off the road and hit a culvert.
"At first," Rick told me, "I wished I had hit the truck. I would have been killed, instead of lying in a hospital bed unable to feel my legs. I had splitting headaches all the time, from the concussion, and I was paralyzed from the waist down. I just wanted to die."
He didn't, and now his outlook is different. "I see it as a challenge now," he told me.
His doctors concurred. "Rick was a handful at first. He was a proud young man, and had trouble accepting his situation. But over time, he started to see it as just another challenge to overcome. He...
He said, 'I will walk again."
Rick Fisher adjusted to life in a wheelchair, but he found that people looked at him differently since he was confined. "I thought nothing much would change, you know. I thought I was just use the wheelchair entrance and that would be that," said Rick, who just celebrated his 20th birthday. "But a lot of people think there's something wrong with you. My mind isn't gone, I'm still as smart as I always was. I just can't walk. That's a big thing to overcome, when people think of you as 'disabled'. I don't think about myself like that. It's like, I'd rather be doing something physical like I was before, but I can still do a lot of jobs, like working at a computer or talking to customers on the phone. But you go for those jobs and people think you can't even handle that. It's frustrating."
Fisher gave up on full-time work and went back to school, enrolling in business school to become an accountant. But even that hasn't been as smooth as he would have hoped. The school is supposed to be fully accessible for the disabled, but as Fisher explains "there's definitely a difference between what an able-bodied person thinks is accessible and what someone like myself thinks is accessible. They give me a handicapped toilet but they don't give me a sink I can reach. And the door only goes one way, which…
