Gardening with Disability

INSPIRING A LITTLE GARDEN THERAPY FOR THOSE WITH ILLNESS, AGING, LIMITATIONS, DIFFICULTIES, OR DISABILITY.

About Gardening with Disability

My Story

My YouTube Channel

I laid my head down one night a healthy, happy, thin, beautiful woman with BIG plans for the future, and I awoke the next morning with almost complete paralysis from the neck down and a body on fire. All of it. Imagine being set on fire and burning 24 hours per day from the top of your head to the bottoms of your feet, no patch of skin unaffected. Unending fire. Unable to stop the pain. In addition to that hellfire, I had very limited use of my arms and legs, no control of my bowels, barely able to walk, and body tremors beginning.

Two visits to the ER resulted in me being dismissed. I was instructed to return to my PCP for care. By the time I made it to my PCP's office, the tremors were so bad that I shook all over - eyes, head, arms, hands, every part of me. My PCP and her staff could SEE that there was something terribly wrong with me. I could focus on nothing and had double vision, needed assistance walking, couldn't hold anything nor open doors. Her staff worked tirelessly to find a neurologist who was willing to see me immediately.

The next day I could no longer walk. I could no longer do anything for myself. My husband bathed a crying wife screaming in agony, then he had to push me in a wheelchair to my first neurologist appointment. That first neurologist's assistant of 22 years said she'd never seen a patient come in in my condition.

After a CT, 3 MRIs, 2 EMGs (arms and legs), 2 lumbar punctures, and lots of meds, I finally received a diagnoses - an extremely rare, spontaneous spinal cord injury at the C1 vertebrae and medullary junction (where the brain stem connects to the spinal cord). A second opinion also diagnosed the same but added an additional diagnosis of an unfortunately more common disease.

Because of the delay of both diagnoses, appropriate treatment that should have began within the first 30 days of symptoms began on day 71 which left me with a permanent disability. And my new normal began.

I can walk now, run, dance, bike, hike, kayak, bathe myself, brush my hair, brush my teeth, dress myself, wipe my butt, and not piss my pants. Of course I garden again too; but I unfortunately had to learn to do all of these things on my own without physical or occupational therapies because no doctor would order it; and I can only assume that it was because they, all of them, thought I was a lost cause, permanently disabled, a quadriplegic who would be wheelchair-bound for the rest of my life.

Learning how to do all of these things...started in my gardens. Gardening was my mental and physical therapies.

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My YouTube Channel

What else could I possibly do with my gardening knowledge while struggling through my own personal tragedy?

Share it!

@GardeningWithDisability was created because there is a lack of exclusive content out there for people like me who want to continue gardening after being struck down by disability. Unfortunately, I had to learn to garden with a disability the hard way - all on my own; but because of an extensive wealth of gardening knowledge and determination to continue gardening, I believe I was meant to share all that I know, have learned, and will learn about gardening....now from the perspective of disability.

https://youtube.com/@GardeningWithDisability?feature=shared

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I am Abel Tu

My name, Abel Tu, is of course a pseudonym and not my real name. I use it to convey that I am "able to" do many things that, in all honesty, I shouldn't be able to do.

Gardening is my passion - especially vegetable gardening. When this terrible thing happened to me - an extremely rare disorder that was eventually paired with a common disa

My name, Abel Tu, is of course a pseudonym and not my real name. I use it to convey that I am "able to" do many things that, in all honesty, I shouldn't be able to do.

Gardening is my passion - especially vegetable gardening. When this terrible thing happened to me - an extremely rare disorder that was eventually paired with a common disability - I continued to garden, albeit with tremendous pain and difficulty. I had been gardening for 15+ years before diagnosed with a disability. Afterward, my passion remained, and I had to learn how to continue gardening with a disability, learning tips and tricks along the way, finding tools and equipment to help me garden from a sitting position, and I had to be more careful and aware of my health while doing so.

At the start I found that there is no one website or YouTube channel entirely devoted to teaching anyone with a disability how to get back out into their garden; and so I created a YouTube channel - @GardeningWithDisability - to do just that and paired it with this website to show you how you too can get back out there into your own gardens....for some much needed garden therapy.

To learn more about me and my YouTube channel, please click the link below.

https://youtu.be/ETYVHi1ufS0?si=O-vSG91kqlLHjYyO

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