The following aarticle about Joanna Christiansen has been taken from the newsletter of the Rehabilitation Institute of Orgeon.
You may recall that a year ago we featured a story about Joanna Christiansen on the front page of our newsletter. She had just been paralyzed from the waist down in a snowboarding accident and was recovering at the Rehabilitation Institute of Oregon (RIO) at Good Sam.
We're pleased to report that Joanna is doing wonderfully well a year after her accident. She is taking classes again and is planning to go to graduate school next year to become a physician's assistant. She works at a skilled nursing rehabilitation facility, helping physical, occupational and speech therapists with their patients. She occasionally teaches emergency medical training (EMT) classes at Portland Community College. And she recently began job shadowing the same physician's assistant who was on her trauma case at OHSU.
Joanna keeps in touch with the therapists at RIO and has become very good friends with a couple of them. She is also friends with the first responder who helped her down off the mountain after her accident; he and his fianc=E9 have invited her to their wedding.
Always a lover of sports, Joanna has experimented the past year with tennis, bowling, swimming and hand biking. She wants to try adaptive rock climbing, kayaking, snowmobiling and even parasailing.
She's very excited to be driving her car, a 2006 Subaru Legacy equipped with hand controls. She has flown to California and Nebraska, and in June she's going to join her sister and some friends for a ten-day cruise to the Caribbean.
Joanna says, "I can either stay home and pout, or say yes and get out there. This is my life, and I'm going to get the most out of it."