PROVO — Her comeback began with a toe. Janell Johnson would lie in her hospital bed for hours trying to move her big toe. She visualized it in her mind as she tried to will some movement in that digit until finally it moved. The next day, she would start again, working for hours just to move that toe again.
She was never supposed to be able to do even something so simple as that, but then she did a lot of things over the years she wasn't supposed to do.
There's no explaining it. The surgeon confirmed the severity of her injury shortly after the accident: Her spinal cord wasn't just damaged; it was severed. A section of the cord actually broke off and slipped down behind a lower section. The doctors' prognosis was grim: There was no hope for movement below the injury in her neck.
One day, a doctor and a group of residents gathered in Janell's room. "She'll never walk again," the doctor told the gathering, with Janell hanging on every word. "She'll never move her hands or legs. If she's lucky, she might be able to operate an electric wheelchair."
It has been 25 years since the accident. At 39, Janell, a thin woman with strawberry-blonde hair, can move her hands and arms, and she leads a busy, full life. She is a systems analyst in Provo. She works at a keyboard, tapping the keys with the tip of a pencil — gripped with both hands — at a rate of 40 words per minute. She drives a special van with an electric ramp. She earned two degrees from BYU. She teaches singing lessons. And she navigates the world in a wheelchair — electric and manual.
"It's such a blessing," she says of the chair.
She says this frequently during the course of two, one-hour interviews. "It's such a blessing," she says of her custom-made van. She also says this about her house, her family, her job, her life.
It's such a blessing.
It was August 1985, and she was sleeping in the back seat of the family car as they passed through Ontario, Calif. She was 14 years old and returning home after singing and performing in a stage production of "Fiddler on the Roof." She awoke to the sound of her father's voice: "Uh, oh." A drunken driver ran a red light and broadsided the Johnsons' car. Her mother, Julene, escaped without injury; her father, Frank, had 13 broken ribs and a broken pelvis.
"Janell, are you all right?" Julene asked, looking into the back seat.
"My neck hurts, and I can't feel or move my body," she whispered.
That was the end of one life and the beginning of another.
She could move her arms slightly, but nothing else below the injury. Her breathing was shallow and labored; she could speak only in a whisper, and even that was difficult.
She spent four months in the hospital with a metal "halo" screwed to her head and a 35-pound weight holding her neck in traction. There was no chance for improvement, she was told. "I hated to be told I couldn't do something," she says. She set out to prove them wrong.
She performed rehab exercises 10 hours a day, six days a week, with help from her parents, neighbors and members of her East Anaheim 10th Ward. After the hospital's rehab department closed and everyone had gone home, she would perform rigorous exercises there with help from her mother.
She was like a baby again as she slowly reclaimed some of her movement. She had to learn to sit up without the aid of stomach muscles. She learned to crawl with her arms by being placed face-down on a slide, dressed in slippery ski pants and elbow pads. A crawl area was created on the floor. In the beginning, it took Janell 45 minutes to make one lap. Eventually, she could do it in three.
She was placed in a swimming pool with this injunction from her brothers: If she grabbed the side of the pool, they would push her off. She swam one mile without a flotation device; it took her 90 minutes.
She learned to write again by having a Sharpie taped to her hand. Her penmanship was so awkward that a single letter filled a sheet of paper. She refused to wear special "extenders" at the dinner table — special silverware attached to her hand. She insisted on using a regular fork and spoon, though it took her 30 to 40 seconds to get a single bite into her mouth, with food often tumbling out en route.
"You have no idea how hard she's worked to accomplish each little thing that she does," says Julene.
Through home-school study, she graduated with her class and enrolled at BYU. She navigated the campus by pushing her wheelchair; she refused to use an electric wheelchair, just to prove her doctors wrong.
Every step of the way, she seemed to embrace a new challenge. An instructor told her she was a terrible writer. When she began her graduate studies, she urged a professor to allow her to publish a paper. She spent days and nights writing and revising, and she submitted it to teachers and friends for critiques. Her first submission of the paper was published in a scholarly magazine, without revision.
An accomplished singer before the accident, she tried to sing again, despite obvious challenges. She had minimal use of the diaphragm muscles used to power her voice, and she couldn't stand or even sit up straight, as singers do when they perform. Because of her breathing difficulties, she became faint when she sang. "Things looked black, and I couldn't hear well," she recalls. "I felt like I was in a hole."
So of course she decided to major in vocal performance.
She began by taking a group singing class. At the end of the semester, she was required to perform for a jury and was told she was not good enough to continue in the program. She was allowed to take lessons and try a second time. She practiced four to five hours a day, at the risk of injuring her voice.
"I searched for the hardest professor, because I knew he wouldn't let me slip by," she says.
In the middle of the semester, he told her there was no way she would make the cut, even if she worked at it for years. "No one who hears you is going to want to take lessons," he said. "It's tinny and ugly. Don't you have talents in another area?"
Janell replied, "It's not your job to tell me what to major in; it's your job to teach me how to sing."
Recalls Janell, "I prayed about it after I left his office."
When she performed the next day in class, her professor was surprised by her dramatic improvement. "What did you do?" he asked her. "It sounds different."
She made the cut and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in vocal performance. She was selected to be the undergraduate student representative at the 1998 convocation for the school of music. She also sang a solo at the event. She currently sings with the Utah Baroque Ensemble and teaches voice lessons.
"When my voice teacher said I had an ugly voice, that was a pivotal point for me," Janell says. "I wouldn't trade the lessons I learned from that experience, as difficult as it was at the time. I am grateful for my teacher's candor. I learned that someone was not going to tell me unkind things without some good intention. There had to be truth in it, and I had to decide what to do about it."
She faced another crossroads after earning a master's degree in public administration. What could she do for work? Who would hire her with her disability? "I know what the law says, but I didn't want to get a job just because of my disability," she says. "I wanted to bring value to the job."
An adviser urged her to be realistic and seek a minimally demanding job because of her disability — perhaps data entry, he suggested. She would have none of it. She sought a challenging job and was hired by Intel Corp. as a systems analyst and payroll specialist in 2000. She worked there for nine years before the company moved its operations out of Utah. Reluctant to leave family behind, Janell didn't make the move and lost her job. She could have coasted from there, living off unemployment checks. Instead, over the course of an entire year, she filled out 375 job applications before her persistence paid off with a new job a month ago.
"I don't want to be stagnant," she says. "I like to grow. Being productive is important to me."
Janell lives with her mother in the foothills above Provo and makes a short commute to her job each day. Just getting ready for work is a major task — it requires a prom-worthy 21/2 hours. In her spare time, she "hikes" with acquaintances by driving her electric wheelchair on dirt paths. Last summer, she rode wave runners with friends and flew off the machine in the middle of a lake.
"It took awhile to get me back on it," she says. "The coast guard was worried. They asked, 'What's wrong?' I said, 'I'm paralyzed, but it's an old injury.' "
Says Julene, "There's no way in the world she should be able to do the things she does. We felt Heavenly Father helped her."
"The Lord makes up for what I lack," Janell likes to say.
She is at peace with her lot in life.
"I was told a long time ago by a friend that feeling angry will stop your progress," she says, "that if you feel sorry for yourself, if you're going to feel bad, just give yourself 10 minutes, and then it's over and you go on. Some things you can't change."
Doug Robinson's column runs on Tuesdays. Please send e-mail to drob@desnews.com.