Send us a text

Maria's first breath came 15 minutes after she was born. In those critical moments, as a midwife performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in rural Missouri, the trajectory of her life was forever altered. What followed was an emergency helicopter evacuation to a distant hospital, while her parents were left wondering if they'd ever see their newborn daughter alive again.

This remarkable story kicks off our conversation with Maria, who shares her journey living with cerebral palsy from those dramatic first moments through childhood developmental challenges and beyond. With extraordinary candor and unexpected humor, she recounts the medical interventions that saved her life—including a desperate decision to administer an adult dose of Valium that could have either killed her or stopped her continuous seizures—and the years of intensive therapy that followed

Growing up in "the boondocks" of Missouri in the 1980s and 90s meant limited access to specialized services, requiring Maria's mother to drive 40 minutes each way, five days a week for years, to ensure her daughter received needed therapies. Through these efforts, Maria eventually reached major milestones on her own timeline: rolling over at eight months, walking at five years, and teaching herself to run at nine because she was determined that "come hell or high water," she would run.

What makes this episode particularly powerful is Maria's refreshing perspective on disability. When asked if she would remove her CP if given the chance, her answer is a resolute "no." Rather than seeing her condition as something to overcome, she views it as an integral part of her identity that has given her unique perspective and shaped her into a person she loves being. Her story challenges listeners to reconsider how we view limitations in our own lives and demonstrates how adversity can forge remarkable character and resilience.

Subscribe to our podcast for more enlightening conversations about disability experiences, and join us next time to hear the continuation of Maria's journey through college and beyond!

You May have noticed I added a transcript. This is produced by AI and sometimes it gets words wrong if you have speech problems. In this episode, we threw 2 people with abnormal speech at it with pretty good results. It did not get a few words Maria used so I put the corrected word next to it, in parenthesis.

Later this week, I will also correct the other season 3 episode. And hopefully each episode from now on will also be publishable.

Support the show