The Day My Legs Gave Out
January 8, 2026 | Personal Experience
Two years ago today, on January 8, 2024, my legs gave out for good, and I have spent most of the time since then trying to figure out how to write about it without making it sound bigger or smaller than it actually was. The honest version sits somewhere in the middle. It was an ordinary Monday that happened to be the day my body finally made a decision I had been putting off for a long time, and the strange part is how undramatic that felt while it was happening.
Years of a Slow Leak
I have a progressive neuromuscular disease that is still, technically, undiagnosed. The working theory is a hereditary peripheral neuropathy that behaves a lot like Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a condition that slowly takes strength out of the limbs over a span of years. For a long time it was a slow leak rather than a sudden break. My strength kept dropping a little at a time, my balance got less and less trustworthy, and walking went from something automatic to something I had to plan, one deliberate step after another.
By the end of 2023 the slow leak had turned into something genuinely dangerous. My knees started buckling without any warning at all, which is a terrifying thing to have happen when you are halfway across a room or standing at the top of a staircase. A week before that Monday I had a bad fall and hit my head on concrete. I kept promising myself I could push through one more semester on my feet, but the falls had stopped asking for my opinion.
The Last Morning I Walked
January 8 was the first day of spring semester. I woke up and something felt different in a way I could not argue with. It was not one cinematic moment so much as a quiet certainty that I could not keep doing this, and that pretending otherwise was going to land me in a hospital. I had about two and a half hours before my first lecture, and I decided to spend them buying a wheelchair.
So I drove down to Boca Raton, walked into a mobility store on what turned out to be the last of my leg strength, and bought a small folding power wheelchair off the floor. Then I drove to campus, rolled into class, and I have not walked since. At the time it felt practical rather than emotional. I was not having a breakthrough or a breakdown. I was trying to make it to a lecture without cracking my head open again, and a wheelchair was simply the obvious tool for that job.
Looking back, that two and a half hour window was one of the most important stretches of my life, and I spent most of it worrying about parking and whether I would be late. There is something honest about that. Big transitions do not always announce themselves with music. Sometimes they just turn up on a Monday and ask you to be on time for an 8 a.m.
Learning to Live on Wheels
I will be honest, the two years since have been hard in ways I did not see coming. The physical side is the obvious one, but the mental side is what really wears on you. Living on wheels means relearning your own city from the ground up, finding out which buildings actually have working elevators, and reading every curb and doorway like a small math problem you have to solve before you commit to it. I have had to manage symptoms that never take a day off, and quietly let go of expectations I did not even know I was carrying around.
Some days were genuinely maddening, the kind where one broken ramp can unravel a whole afternoon. Other days were better than I had any right to expect, after bracing for the worst. Given enough time, the whole thing simply became my normal, not as a consolation prize but as my actual, real life. I did not think I would ever say this, but I have come to love life on wheels, and I mean that with no asterisk attached to it.
How I Ended Up With Three Chairs
Here is the part that still makes me laugh. I have somehow ended up owning three wheelchairs, which is two more than I owned at the start of that Monday and roughly three more than I ever planned to. None of it was a master plan. It was more that each chair solved a problem the previous one had created, and I kept the receipts every time.
The first is that little folding power wheelchair from day one, the black Pride Jazzy in the photo at the top of this page. It is not a fancy machine, but it folds down, fits in a trunk, and it got me to class on the morning I needed it most, so it has earned a permanent spot in the lineup. The second is my Permobil M3 Corpus, the one in the picture just above, and it is my everyday chair now. It handles campus, the long days, and all the parts of life the small folding chair was never built to carry.
The third is a four-wheel mobility scooter, pictured here in the garage next to the family Subaru, whose plate reads BE AWSM, which is about as on-brand as a license plate can get. I am fully aware that three wheelchairs is a slightly ridiculous number for one person to own, and I have made my peace with that. If two years ago you had told the guy white-knuckling his way to that first lecture that he would one day have a small fleet, he probably would have laughed, and then immediately asked which one was fastest.
What Two Years Taught Me
The biggest thing two years has driven home is that a bad situation can change with time even when the underlying condition does not. My disease is still progressive and still undiagnosed, and none of that has improved. What changed is me, and how I move through the world, and how much room I am willing to give a single bad day before I let it speak for all of them.
You adapt, you problem-solve, and you keep moving forward, usually faster than you expected once you stop fighting the wheels. I did not get to choose the day my legs gave out, but I got to choose almost everything that came after it, and that turned out to be the part that mattered. Two years in, on wheels, with three chairs and a plate that says Be Awesome, I am doing alright.
Written by Ryleigh Newman