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Sydney Flower was a healthy athlete before sudden chest and back pain led to paralysis from the chest down
NEED TO KNOW
- Sydney Flower was a healthy athlete before sudden chest and back pain led to paralysis from the chest down
- Before doctors discovered the true reason for her sudden paralysis, she tells PEOPLE it was a “medical mystery”
- Flower found hope through adaptive sports and community support as she adjusted to life using a wheelchair
When 13-year-old Sydney Flower stepped out of the car at her pediatrician’s office, her legs felt strangely tingly and fuzzy. Then she stumbled.
She and her mom laughed it off, not yet realizing that within minutes, Flower would collapse and lose feeling in her legs.
“We were joking around, like, ‘What is going on?’ ” Flower tells PEOPLE exclusively. “But we had no idea.”
Three days earlier, on Dec. 16, 2018, Flower had been at volleyball practice when she first noticed discomfort in her chest and back. The South Carolina native’s life revolved around athletics: she juggled volleyball practices with CrossFit classes and was determined to grow strong enough to one day play volleyball in college.
By the following day, the pain had become severe enough that Flower was sent home from school. She tried to sleep it off, but it wouldn’t go away.
On the morning of Dec. 18, 2018, Flower went to urgent care, where she was diagnosed with a lung infection and sent home. Later that afternoon, however, the pain became significantly worse, prompting her parents to take her to the emergency room.
After several hours, doctors suspected Flower had pericarditis — inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart — and sent her home for the second time that day.
When the pain persisted through the night, Flower’s parents took her to the pediatrician as soon as the office opened on Dec. 19, 2018. During the drive, she noticed that her legs felt as though they were falling asleep. By the time they arrived, the sensation had become so pronounced that she stumbled while getting out of the car.
Once inside the office, Flower’s symptoms rapidly worsened. The tingling in her legs gave way to numbness, and she collapsed.
Flower was rushed back to the same emergency room that had discharged her the night before, arriving around 11:30 a.m. By the end of the drive, she could no longer get out of the car on her own.
“They were trying to figure it out,” Flower says. “At that point, I was a medical mystery. I had just been there the night before with back pain and chest pain, and they had sent me home with a diagnosis of pericarditis. They were so puzzled.”
As doctors searched for an explanation, Flower underwent a series of tests. An MRI eventually revealed a mass on her spine. More than 15 hours after she returned to the hospital, at approximately 3 a.m. on Dec. 20, doctors took her into surgery and performed a laminectomy to remove it.
By then, Flower could no longer move or feel anything below her chest. Testing later revealed that the mass was caused by a staph infection that had settled in her spine and compressed her thoracic spinal cord at the T4-T5 level, leaving her paralyzed from the chest down.
“They said the staph could have been in my body for one to three months,” Flower says. “But once it went into effect, things started moving really, really fast.”
The first surgery removed the mass, but it did not bring the improvement Flower and her family had hoped for. Because the procedure was performed below her level of sensation, Flower says she couldn’t feel the area where doctors had cut into her back. Even afterward, however, she remained seriously ill and continued to get sicker.
Doctors soon discovered that the mass had returned and doubled in size. Even more concerning, it was spreading upward.
“They had to have this conversation with my parents about how serious it really was,” Flower says. “If the mass kept going up, we were talking about the loss of my arms, or even my brain being impacted if the staph reached it. It was really scary.”
Flower was rushed into surgery once again. This time, doctors were able to remove nearly all of the mass. She then began receiving powerful intravenous antibiotics through a PICC line every few hours, a treatment that continued for six weeks.
Although doctors had saved her life, overcoming the infection marked only the beginning of Flower’s recovery. Her future remained uncertain, with doctors unable to say whether she would ever walk again.
“I had so much hope, and they were hopeful, too,” she says. “My family and I just went at it.”
“We were like, ‘This is just another obstacle, and we’re going to figure it out,’ ” she adds. “My mindset was to put my best foot forward and see what I could do.”
That determination carried Flower into the next stage of her recovery.
About a month after her surgeries, once she was medically stable, she and her family relocated to Atlanta, Ga., so she could receive specialized treatment at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Shepherd Center. For the next nine months, they divided their time between the hospital and a Ronald McDonald House, centering their lives around her recovery.
Progress came slowly, beginning with movements so small they might once have gone unnoticed. About six weeks into her recovery, Flower detected a flicker of movement in her hip. Then, two or three months after becoming paralyzed, she wiggled her toes for the first time.
“That was the first time I cried,” she says. “I was so excited, like, ‘Wait, there’s hope.’ They were happy tears.”
More than a physical milestone, the movement prompted Flower to begin processing the magnitude of what had happened to her.
“I was numb but also naive about the whole situation,” she adds. “I hadn’t cried once or really had time to let it settle in. I was just so confident. I was like, ‘No, I’ve got this. We’re going to crush this. We’re going to conquer it.’ ”
As Flower worked to regain movement, she also grieved the athletic life she feared she had lost. Before her injury, sports had shaped her routine, her goals and the future she had imagined for herself. Six months after her injury, however, she began discovering a new way to be an athlete. Flower attended Adventure Skills Workshop, a camp offered through the Shepherd Center for people with spinal cord and brain injuries.
There, she tried a wide range of adaptive sports and realized that using a wheelchair did not mean she had to leave athletics behind. That discovery helped Flower reconnect with one part of her former life, but returning home brought a new set of challenges. After nine months in Atlanta, she moved back to South Carolina to begin high school — this time using a wheelchair.
“In the hospital, I was in this bubble where everyone else around me was sick, so it felt like I was around my people,” she says. “That was normal. Going home meant returning to all the same situations that had once been mindless and easy, but now everything was difficult.”
Back home, Flower had to relearn tasks she had once completed without thinking. Dressing herself, using the bathroom and getting out of bed became hard-won steps toward independence, while navigating her bedroom and getting around her hometown presented challenges at every turn.
“Getting a spinal cord injury is like becoming a baby again, except you’re coherent enough to know you’re starting from scratch,” she says.
As Flower adjusted to that new reality, the support of her community helped carry her through.
“I’m so grateful that I had such an incredible community lifting me up,” she adds. “I don’t think I could have done it without the people in my life. They rallied in a way I never could have expected. It was truly incredible.”
In time, Flower began extending that same sense of support to others. Throughout her recovery, she shared her experiences on social media, blending personal stories, humor and education to challenge assumptions about life with a disability. Her candid approach has since attracted more than 380,000 followers on TikTok and 45,000 on Instagram.
Some of her favorite videos use humor to deliver a larger message. In one, Flower put her own spin on a social media trend that called for participants to jump into a pool by rolling herself into the water — a playful moment that also showed viewers what remains possible after paralysis.
Whether her posts are humorous or more personal, Flower says the connections they create are what matter most to her.
“I love just sharing like my story and then people like relating to it, whether that’s through like just having this spinal cord injury or like staph or whatever it may be,” she says.
That sense of connection extends beyond people navigating similar injuries. Flower has also heard from parents raising children who use wheelchairs and looking for reassurance about what their futures could hold.
“I’ve had moms of like 4-year-olds who are in wheelchairs reach out, and they’re like, my son’s in a wheelchair, and he saw your videos,” Flower says. “And he just like was so encouraged by like your strength, but also like the life you’re living. And even as a mom, like this is so encouraging to see because like being in the mom position of someone with a disability is so hard.”
Those responses have helped Flower find a new sense of purpose in an experience that once upended every aspect of her life.
“It just means so much to have gone through such a hard experience, and then the relatability with people who are currently going through what you went through and you just have so much empathy because you quite literally were there at one point,” she says.
Even as she uses her experience to encourage others, Flower remains focused on her own progress. Now 21, she attends Anderson University and competes as an affiliate player on Clemson University’s wheelchair tennis team. She also walks with leg braces, stays active and builds her strength in the gym.
Her social media accounts have become a record of that ongoing journey, allowing Flower to reflect on how far she has come while giving her followers an honest look at the time and effort recovery requires.
“It’s so cool because also like I, to have it all be filmed and to look back [at] where I started, like it was so hard just to stand there and be upright at first... and then to slowly watch my progress, it’s so awesome,” she says.
Years after becoming paralyzed, Flower knows that new obstacles will continue to arise.
Yet, rather than expecting life to follow a fixed plan, she has learned to adapt and find another way forward, the same approach that has carried her from the first days of her injury through every stage of her recovery.
“I think if you have like the correct mindset of just being prepared for things not to go your way,” she says. “If you’re prepared for it not to be like a set plan and you can adapt and you can work around whatever life throws at you, you borderline become unstoppable.”
Read the original article on People
