“Better. Not Bitter.” That’s one of the slogans Kate Barrett ’14 stared at in her room, for three grueling, intense months, at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. It was one of countless slogans and decorations, actually; thanks to her immediate family, huge extended family (43 cousins!) and dozens of Holy Cross friends, the room was so abundantly adorned that the wall paint was barely visible.
First it was all reds and pinks for Valentine’s Day. Then they went full-blast emerald for St. Patrick’s Day. Next, Easter pastels. No matter the day, Barrett’s room was filled with a riot of flowers, streamers, little-kid crayoned drawings and great big stacks of books and DVDs to pass the time.
The Spaulding staff said they’d never seen a room this decked out.
“Inspirational quotes and pictures were plastered all over the place,” Barrett recalls.
And for good reason: Barrett’s family knew she needed inspiration wherever she could find it. Barrett had arrived at Spaulding in February of 2013 following a freak accident during a ski trip in Spain, when she fell getting off a chairlift. The impact broke one of her vertebrae and the shattered bone compressed her spinal cord, paralyzing the lower half of her body. Doctors worried that she’d never use her legs again.
She was 20 years old.
“My dad came up with ‘better, not bitter’ and it became a kind of mantra for me,” says Barrett. “It reminded me that ‘bitter’ wasn’t a choice. But working to get better, every single day? That was my choice.”
The Accident
In February 2013, Barrett was midway through her year studying abroad in Léon, Spain. “I’d really hit my stride,” she says. “I loved Spain. I loved my host family. I’d gotten extremely close to the eight other Holy Cross students there with me. My Spanish had gotten really good.” When her finals were over, she went skiing with two Holy Cross friends north of Léon.
When she fell getting off the lift, “I had some awareness it was serious,” says Barrett. “I couldn’t move my left leg.” The ski patrol brought her down to the medic tent, and then an ambulance sped her to a trauma center in nearby Oviedo, where she was put in the intensive care unit. Her parents flew in from the U.S. The decision was made to do surgery to decompress Barrett’s spinal cord since bone from her L1 vertebra was pushing up against it. After a short recovery, another decision was made: to head back to the States for rehabilitation.
Barrett remembers a feeling of everything happening quickly. “I had no real sense of what all this meant. I was incredibly scared, but also sort of blindly optimistic,” she says. “I couldn’t yet imagine the obstacles and didn’t fully realize the seriousness of what had happened.”
And while her body had suffered the injury, her heart and mind were still stuck on the fact that her year abroad was ending so abruptly. “Honestly, at that moment, I was most devastated to leave Spain. My friends and host family were religiously by my side at the hospital every single day. It was breaking my heart to go.”