Kelly Brush Davisson fell in love with sports at a young age. “I was raised doing sports,” she explains. “That’s what we did for fun growing up as kids.” As a high school athlete, she played a sport every season, and in college she was a ski racer.
During her ski racing days, she broke her back and became a paraplegic.
“I thought that I couldn’t do sports anymore, that that part of my life was done.”
Rediscovering a Passion
This was devastating to her at first, but thankfully she was exposed to the world of adaptive sports and she realized she didn’t have to give up her passion. “I feel like I’m just as active as I was before,” Kelly shares. Sports are still an active part of her life, both competitively and socially with her friends and family. She mainly skis with a monoski and does handcycling, but she also golfs and plays tennis. Most of these sports she also is able to do with people who are able-bodied. “I’m doing it a little bit differently, but I’m still doing it alongside of them,” she explains.
“People don’t know necessarily what I can do. If I go down a hard trail, people are surprised I can do that.”
She’s quick to clarify it’s only people who don’t know her, who underestimate or are surprised by her abilities. “It doesn’t change anything just because I’m doing it a bit differently,” she adds. Kelly has done a few marathons in her time as a handcyclist, the only sport she does competitively now. She even once won her division of the Boston Marathon, a huge accomplishment for her. She also hopes to try out waterskiing one day!
“There’s so much that I can still do, so I might as well still do it,” she shared. Kelly advises anyone in a situation to her to look at what you can do, not what you can’t. “There’s always things you can do,” Kelly shares.
“It’s just finding those things and enjoying those things, rather than worrying about the things that you can’t do anymore.”
Watch our interview with Kelly below (jump to 8:00 if you want to learn about her life as a nurse practitioner):
Thanks to Kelly for sharing her experiences and don’t forget to check out the Kelly Brush Foundation (jump to 11:52 for a few details on their work).
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