By Trish Moore, Star-Bulletin
Sheila Freitas, who was diagnosed as a quadriplegic
after her Sept. 10, 1990 car accident, defies the doctors
who told her she'd never walk again.

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Woman heeds ‘internal
voice’ that tells her
she can walk again

By Trish Moore
Star-Bulletin

LIHUE -- Don't tell Sheila Freitas she can't do it.

Doctors have tried. They told her she'd never walk again after her spinal cord was severed in a 1990 car accident, which left most of her body paralyzed.

Today, aided by a walker and braces that lock her knees, Freitas, 31, and diagnosed as quadriplegic, walks the halls at Wilcox Hospital and recently along the bumpy gravel driveway at her home in Hanapepe Valley.

But it took nearly two years of hard work and determination to convince physical therapy and physiatrist specialists that she had a chance of walking.

"Everything in her chart says quadriplegic," says Shelley Seifert, Freitas' physical therapist.

Even when Freitas began showing dramatic improvement in her upper body and trunk movement, two doctors refused to approve the special knee-locking braces she needed to stand. One told her she was wasting his time.

The Medicare program required five different doctors to certify that Freitas had a chance of being able to walk for her to get the braces she had read about in a medical journal.

She continued stretching, lifting weights and badgering the doctors.

"I told the doctor this is what I need," Freitas says. "I kept insisting and insisting and insisting till I got someone to give me a chance."

Freitas' spinal cord was severed at the seventh vertebra, and all muscles controlled below that point shouldn't be able to function.

She had limited muscle control of her arms and no movement in her torso and legs. She needed to be strapped into a wheelchair to sit up straight.

Dr. Ellen Elmore, Freitas' general practitioner at Kauai Medical Group, said it's impossible to predict how much body function a patient will regain after a spinal injury.

"I believe in hope. If you take that away from people they can't go anywhere," Elmore says.

It was Freitas' own internal voice that told her she could do it.

For six years she lived the terms of her diagnosis. She spent her days painting her fingernails and feeling sorry for herself.

The turnaround came about two years ago when Freitas decided to try getting out of her wheelchair. There's a snapshot of that moment in her photo album. She's leaning on a deck railing outside her home, her lifeless legs dangling to the ground.

"I realized if I can do this, I can do more. If I can do more, I can do a lot more."

She started going to physical therapy to stretch and strengthen her muscles.

Seifert says Freitas fit her diagnosis when she first saw her. She couldn't sit upright.

Now her goal is to walk with forearm crutches. Eventually Freitas wants to be able to drive a car.