After fully embracing life in a wheelchair, she's riding it straight to the Paralympic Games

In 2014, at 22 years old, Sarah Adam was building the life she wanted.

In 2014, at 22 years old, Sarah Adam was building the life she wanted. She graduated from Augustana College in her native Illinois and embarked on a fulfilling career in occupational therapy, helping kids and adults with physical disabilities participate in adaptive sports.

But that year also represented a life-changing moment for Adam. While she was halfway through her graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis, she started to realize her own physical disabilities.

“We were doing a class testing hand function, and my professor said, ‘Hey, that hand doesn’t look quite right; you should get that looked at,’” said Adam, who will compete on the U.S. wheelchair rugby team in the Paralympics this month. “And so they thought it was just a nerve injury, and then other symptoms came about that were hard to ignore.”

Just days shy of her graduation in May 2016, Adam was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system that disrupts signals to and from the brain. 

Symptoms can include numbness, tingling, mood changes, memory problems, pain, fatigue, blindness and paralysis. The losses may be temporary or long-lasting depending on the person. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/paralympics/sarah-adam-paralympics-rcna167464

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