‘Cura Personalis’ Column: Walking with Michelle

Karen Konkoly

Over the summer, I was walking on the beach with my sister Michelle brainstorming names for this column. I told her I wanted to write about having a healthy lifestyle and share my passions for healthy eating, the science of sleep, exercising and promoting positive mental health.

Michelle has been my health-food spirit animal since fourth grade. Now 23-years-old and out of college, Michelle suggested the motto of her alma mater: cura personalis. The phrase is Latin for “care for the entire person” and spoke to what I wanted to say about healthy living. The concept made my sister think of physical and mental health together as one, but according to Google it also suggests a way to interact with others based on individual attention to their needs and gifts.

I thought cura personalis was an intriguing way to look at the world, and knowing that it shaped my sister’s views lent a personal depth to the unfamiliar phrase. For most of my adolescence, Michelle dedicated herself to swimming with a passion I didn’t have about anything. While I quit French horn, track, tennis and theater, Michelle was breaking school records as captain of the swim team. By the time I was a sophomore in high school and quitting class congress, Michelle was going to college and walking on the Georgetown swim team.

Michelle is my lifelong role model, and since she’s almost 6 feet tall, I never thought I’d stop looking up to her until I looked down at her in a wheelchair.

In January of her freshman year of college, Michelle slipped off her desk and fell five stories out of her dorm room window. She shattered her ankle, broke several ribs and suffered a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Suddenly, one of the strongest people I knew could only sit up for half-hour-increments and needed help going to the bathroom.

Michelle spent her second semester freshman year in a rehab hospital, putting just as much passion into physical therapy as she had into swim practice. I remember visiting one weekend, crouching over Michelle’s emaciated leg and for the first time, seeing it flinch. She had been visualizing this movement for weeks, mentally willing her legs’ neuropathways back into existence. When movement was an impossibility, the mental aspect of cura personalis gave my sister a way to keep improving anyway. Endless potential arose from that flinch. Michelle could learn to walk again.

The next fall, Michelle went back to Georgetown. She brought canes, walked up steps one by one, and had to thoroughly convince my mom that, no, she would not wear snow tire chains on her shoes to prevent slipping. Without a second thought, she joined the swim team.

At the beginning, she was getting faster all the time, but soon she realized that with the permanent weakness in her legs, she was never going to be as fast as she was before. I remember going to a Georgetown swim meet that year and watching Michelle race alone in the pool. She wasn’t earning points for the team, but the whole crowd cheered like crazy.

I’d always assumed that Michelle was just better at things than I was. I swam in middle school, but I lost all my races and promptly quit. For Michelle, quitting never crossed her mind. I finally realized that Michelle’s passion for swimming didn’t depend on her ability to win. Her attitude could inspire her team just as much as breaking records. I started getting involved in extracurriculars again, knowing now that I could make a difference no matter how good I was at them.

Of course, while I was joining the track team again and celebrating fifth place in the mile, Michelle found a way to break national records. Her weaker legs meant she could qualify for the U.S. Paralympic team, where athletes are ranked according to the severity of their disability and compete against their similarly ranked peers. Physical disabilities are ranked from one to 10, with 10 being the least disabled. Michelle, a class nine, often competes against people with one leg or one arm.

Last summer, I got to watch an international Paralympic swim meet in California. Having attended a rather large amount of swim meets in my life, I wasn’t expecting anything too exciting. However, it was extraordinary. I saw class one swimmers race across the pool with nothing but a single arm, and parades of wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs ferried from one end of the pool to the other. Michelle set two American records there, and is now training full-time for Rio in 2016.

The commitment of being a professional athlete has epitomized Michelle’s dedication to health and fitness and inspired my whole family to pursue a healthier lifestyle. This passion has made me explore the way I think about the physical aspects of health, like nutrition and sleeping, as well as ways to keep my mind as healthy as I keep my body. Each column of cura personalis will focus on a different aspect of self-care or caring for others based on my own perspective, tips, and experiences.