Back on the bike: A year after horrific accident, cyclist vows to ride across the country
KOKOMO, Ind. — One year ago Wednesday, Donita Walters was planning to embark on a cross-country trip on her bike, starting in San Francisco.
Walters, who was 47 at the time, was an avid biker, and served as the swim coach for Kokomo High School. Her upcoming ride was to raise money for a veterans organization. It was a beautiful day, and she didn’t expect to spend the following months in a hospital, undergoing extensive physical therapy.
Less than 48 hours before leaving for California, Walters was enjoying her last bike ride in Indiana before her long journey. It was around 7 p.m. on May 24, 2016, as Walters was riding her bike on a rural road near Kokomo. A car passed her on the left.
She doesn’t remember all the details, but she does remember squealing brakes behind her, and feeling an impact.
After the first car passed her, the driver of a truck behind that car noticed Walters too late, hitting her while traveling at about 60 mph. Walters was found face down in a ditch, 60 feet away from the point of collision.
“I don’t remember an ambulance…I remember no sirens,” she said.
She was initially flown to St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. She had a broken pelvis and neck.
She would remain in the St. Vincent system for the entirety of her ongoing recovery. In the past year, Walters has undergone a lot of physical therapy. She’s not back to where she was, and there are certain aches, pains and other physical glitches that could be with her for the rest of her life, she noted. But she can get on a bike again.
Monday, on a trail near an abandoned railroad corridor, Walters was getting ready for her third bike ride since the accident.
“It’s phenomenal,” she told the Kokomo, Indiana Tribune. “It’s like a dream. It’s freedom. Listen to the birds. I love that.”
Long before she was ready to start pedaling again, Walters, who lives in nearby Galveston, worked with Sharon Abad, a physical therapist at St. Vincent Kokomo Physical and Sports Therapy.
Abad said she started working with Walters about four months after the accident and released her in April. In those early days, weeks and months of therapy, Walters said she remembers having trouble with very simple movements. She spent three months in a neck brace while her neck healed. The brace left her without the ability to turn her head, so she would have to rotate her entire body to look in any direction.
When the brace came off, her neck muscles had atrophied, and she had to undergo manual and “meticulous” therapy. The brace had been holding her head upright, and when the brace was gone, so was that support.
“I don’t know what our heads weigh, but I can tell you they weigh a lot,” she said, adding that the difficult recovery also was plagued with terrible headaches.
Abad said she started Walters with aquatic therapy, where the water eases the weight put on one’s feet. From there, Walters slowly transitioned to land-based therapy.
Walters said she set small goals for herself throughout her rehabilitation. But ultimately, she said there was never a time she doubted she would ride again.
Meanwhile, between the three weekly sessions with Abad and her own exercises, Walters took up a new hobby — needle point — to keep her mind busy.
“I’m such a busy, busy body, so that was one of the things they taught me…that you need to pick up something new that you can do,” she said.
“It helped me, because when you go from teaching and coaching and cycling and being busy for 15 hours a day, to lying around doing nothing, I had to learn a lot.”
Walters’ husband, Bill, was along for the whole ride, helping her through the process, and now she believes they are both better for it.
“I think I’m a better person, my husband’s a better person. I think as a marriage, it’s kind of weird to say, I think our marriage is stronger,” said Walters.
“I’ve tried putting myself in his shoes…I can’t imagine getting that phone call.”
As for Walters, who just celebrated her 48th birthday, she still wants to ride cross-country. For now, she has a tentative goal of making the trip before she turns 50. Although that goal might not be doable in that relatively short time frame, she’s also hoping to be back at school by next fall.
But for now, she’s still marveling at what the past year has brought and far she’s come.
“It’s hard to image that I’ve done this,” she said. “Honestly, God’s done this. Because I couldn’t’ have done it alone. He has worked out every little piece of the puzzle.”
Neuenschwander writes for the Kokomo, Indiana Tribune.