This is an amazing story. A dutch paralympic cyclist (handcyclist) gets hit hard by a bike rider, then gets her feeling back in her legs…
She’s now signed for the Rabobank pro team.
Is this for real? It seems too far out there… amazing story if true though. Wow.
That seems like a crazy tough call though - by some stroke of luck she can walk again but decides to pursue ‘risky’ athletics, especially given the fact the doctors are clueless. Wouldn’t you be worried about having to go back to a chair again? Is it worth it? For her it seems so, but would you regret taking up cycling if it ultimately put you back in a chair? Would you be ‘content’ enough to forego the sports but have your legs?
She’s been in a wheelchair for over a decade, can’t walk more then 3 steps or run, but was signed by Rabobank and is talking about the 2016 Olympics? Did I miss something?
whole thing makes no sense, starting with the ankle surgery that paralyzed her from the hips down. what the heck does that mean and how did it happen? what was the pathway?
Conversion disorder? Can’t see that flying for the paralympics though.
It is for real. Reader’s Digest had a special on her a couple months’ back, I think. The Telegraph story glossed a lot over and got some of the facts wrong.
She was a champion disabled athlete and did Kona at least once (twice, I believe). And yes, she has now regained use of her legs. It was actually a very difficult transition back for her.
so what are the facts?
how did she lose the use of her legs? what exactly was wrong?
It is for real. Reader’s Digest had a special on her a couple months’ back, I think. The Telegraph story glossed a lot over and got some of the facts wrong.
She was a champion disabled athlete and did Kona at least once (twice, I believe). And yes, she has now regained use of her legs. It was actually a very difficult transition back for her.
so what are the facts?
how did she lose the use of her legs? what exactly was wrong?
It is for real. Reader’s Digest had a special on her a couple months’ back, I think. The Telegraph story glossed a lot over and got some of the facts wrong.
She was a champion disabled athlete and did Kona at least once (twice, I believe). And yes, she has now regained use of her legs. It was actually a very difficult transition back for her.
She was never supposed to walk again after contracting muscular dystrophy and losing the use of her legs at 14. At age 24 she was expected to die after getting hit by a car while training in her wheelchair, an accident that left her in a coma with a spinal cord injury.
But after a collision with a cyclist last year, she began to feel a tingling in her legs while in hospital. And last July, at age 25, she walked for the first time in 11 years. But her recovery didn’t stop there. Her remarkable progress saw her sign a pro contract on Friday to race for the vaunted Rabobank cycling team.
so now there is a cure for muscular dystrophy? I think the story is changing too much. Some thing not quite right
So she contracted an incurable genetic disease at age 14, but now doesn’t show symptoms from it. Got it.
Just do a quick Google search on her and lots pops up. Monique van der Vorst. http://www.google.com/search?q=Monique+van+der+Vorst+&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
She is a very accomplished athlete from what I can find.
just because shes an accomplished athlete doesn’t mean her story makes any sense.
Awesome!
There is a local woman here in Auckland. She was sighted for a long time, then for a reason I can’t remember, she went blind. She got a dog, then a husband and a daughter. Then after something like 10 years, she fell in her house and banged her head on her coffee table, and sat up, sighted again! She was able to see her husband and daughter for the first time!. She still has some visual impairment I think, but it was cool to see her walking around town with her dog on a leash, rather than the handle bar apparatus.
The human body is stranger than we can imagine.
Is this for real? It seems too far out there… amazing story if true though. Wow.
That seems like a crazy tough call though - by some stroke of luck she can walk again but decides to pursue ‘risky’ athletics, especially given the fact the doctors are clueless. Wouldn’t you be worried about having to go back to a chair again? Is it worth it? For her it seems so, but would you regret taking up cycling if it ultimately put you back in a chair? Would you be ‘content’ enough to forego the sports but have your legs?
Hopefully none of us every have to make that choice, but to me (no offence intended) your view seems like a “glass half empty” kind of outlook.
I prefer to see the world with the glass half full.
In the case of the Dutch woman, statistically, she’s not likely to get back in the wheelchair, as she’s already used up her bad luck. She is an athlete, and now chooses to live an able bodied athletic life. IF she gets re-injured and back in the wheelchair, I suspect she’d just revert to being a glass half full, slightly less able bodied athlete.
She’s living life to the full and I commend her for that. If she headed for the couch, she’d already have failed IMHO, while the failure (for lack of better term) of going back into a wheelchair is not a certainty.
I do wonder about muscle wastage in her legs. I’m sure that will take a while to come back. It didn’t look like she was filling out the jeans she was standing in in the picture.
so now there is a cure for muscular dystrophy? I think the story is changing too much. Some thing not quite right
yeah the lack of details in most reports on this is…weird.
so now there is a cure for muscular dystrophy? I think the story is changing too much. Some thing not quite right
yeah the lack of details in most reports on this is…weird.
Well, due to some national pride (unwarranted, since the crypto-fascists that run the place these days took away my citizenship, but that’s more of a topic for the LR), I fired up google.nl to get to the bottom of this. Both her own page (moniquevandervorst.nl) and her Dutch wikipedia page mention a T4 spinal cord injury, so not the muscular dystrophy thing. That must be the Canadian journo mistranslating stuff or something. That makes it a little more believable; I’m suffering from a spinal cord injury myself these days (not as serious, luckily), and the docs I’ve spoken to have told me that strange things happen.
I honestly don’t think she’s a fraud. She’s won too many handcycling races, but I have no idea how easy it would be to fake a disability.
14 years of atrophy reversed in less than a year?
Only her left leg was paralyzed from a childhood operation. She recieved a t-4 spinal chord injury when she got hit by a car training in St Petersburg Florida. The t-4 injury was incomplete, so she recovered from it.
From what I understand she was racing and got hit from behind. It is very common to get hit from behind handcycling, drafting is legal in mass start races and we use draft bars to keep each other from rubbing tires. She started getting feeling and movement again in her left leg after the crash.
Monique used a kneeling handcycle wich means she rode on her knees and used her gluts, abs, quads,back, arms, shoulders etc to power the bike. She was never paralyzed from “the waist down”. (Paraplegic doesn’t mean paralyzed from the waist down either, it just means you have paralysis in two of four limbs, I’m a para and have no fealing/movement from chest down)
I doubt Rabobank is expecting her to win races anytime soon, but with her level of fitness(I’m sure her LT,VO2 is on par with pro cyclist) she could actually make it
Maybe it was a media stunt by Rabobank to garner more attention since all of the Cavs are being shuffled around by new mega-teams.
A stunt that may be about to backfire - this was a great story but it’s heading south: