Paralyzed dancer determined to `Dance Anyway'

God sure has a sense of humor, Briana says.

Her last name is Walker. And now, walk is the one thing she can no longer do.

It's a good thing God isn't the only one with a sense of humor.

Briana's ability to laugh is one of the things that keeps her going.

God, it turns out, is the other thing.

At least they're on the same page.

It was, perhaps appropriately, while on her way to church that Briana's world went into a tailspin. When the spinning stopped, her dad, Ed, was leaning over her hospital bed, cheeks wet with tears, saying words she'd heard since she was a kid when the going got rough. "It's time to be somebody," the former Marine told his "little sparkle."

Boy, did she rise to the occasion.

The day everything changed was an August afternoon in 2002. Too hot for her leather skirt, she wondered?

But she wanted to look nice for Zach. He had just moved to San Clemente from Arizona. She wanted to give him a warm welcome, introduce him to her friends.

They were meeting at a Mormon church in Mission Viejo, Calif. It was a beautiful day, even if she was operating on only four hours of sleep after a late night of waitressing. No big deal when you're 23.

Briana left her house in Newport Beach, Calif., just after noon and drove north on the 55. She remembers seeing a sign to take the 73 toll road. "I thought, `If I take that, I'll be on time.'"

The next thing she remembers is being pinned under the steering wheel. She apparently passed out - no one has figured out why - and crashed into the divider, spinning like a top into a nearby ditch.

Her first thoughts were: Did I hurt anyone else? (No.) Is the car totaled? (Yes.) Please don't cut off my favorite leather skirt.

Then a paramedic tried to lift her, and she started screaming and passed out. Her back had been broken completely in half. "I mean, if I'm doing something, I'm going all the way," she says.

A surgeon inserted a 9-inch rod, but her spinal cord was severed. A doctor told her when she was conscious and alone in her hospital bed that she was paralyzed from the waist down. She screamed and cried.

No! She was a dancer. A bungee-cord jumper. She wanted nine kids. She was going to be a police officer - had in fact already finished her first year at the police academy.

As word spread and family gathered, her brothers and sisters tried to lighten the mood. Well, there's good news and bad news, they told Briana. The good news is you're paralyzed. The bad news is you're moving back in with mom.

It was the first time she laughed since the crash. When Briana was growing up, a spitfire cheerleader, she fought her mom like a wolverine - like many girls her age. Now it was time for Ruth to capitalize on her daughter's headstrong ways.

"You always fought back," mom said. "You're the fighter. Now is the time to fight.

After shouting a choice word - at the urging of a Mormon bishop who knelt by Briana's hospital bed to pray with her and realized she first needed to clear some things up - she started her journey.

The first few months were surreal. She would wake up having forgotten she was paralyzed, and then see the wheelchair sitting nearby.

In her dreams, she still walked and ran. Then one night she dreamed she was at church - sitting in a wheelchair. "That day I woke up, looked at my chair and said, `This is the way my life is going to be.' Not that I lost hope or gave up."

She was just ready to be somebody.

Soon after, she started dating a guy in a chair who was paralyzed after diving into the shallow end of a pool. She didn't have to explain to him how she felt. And he didn't feel sorry for her.

"Dating him was like boot camp in the beginning," she says. "He taught me all the little tricks: how to go down stairs, pop up curbs." If she fell out of her chair, she was instructed to ask any witnesses to score her fall. "He taught me how to be cool in a chair."

She became bolder. Briana strapped herself onto a guy jumping off a bungee-cord tower; she strapped herself onto another guy throwing himself out of an airplane; she lay on a surfboard and paddled out into the waves; and she competed in triathlons.

While shopping for a sports chair at Colours in Motion, a company owned by people in wheelchairs, she got her first chance to make a difference with this new life of hers. How would she like to be a Colours Girl? the national sales manager asked.

The Corona company sells wheelchairs, but it also sells a lifestyle: People with disabilities can achieve anything, despite, and even because of, their chairs. Briana is the perfect spokesmodel. She's toned, tanned and bubbly. And now her image is on billboards and posters - and even buses in the Netherlands. In 2004 she became the first female on the cover of Mobility Management magazine.

She was working a trade show when a fellow Colours model started dancing in her wheelchair to a song. Briana told the girl she used to be a dancer. "What do you mean `used to?' Once you're a dancer, you're always a dancer."

During the next few months, the two put together some hip-hop routines. Now they perform and compete. The highlight was dancing onstage with rapper Ludacris at the Vibe Music Awards in 2003.

This month Briana began selling her paperback "Dance Anyway." It starts the day she got hurt "because that's when my life started over."

That's what she tells the student assemblies at schools. That and the jaw-dropper that life is actually better since the crash. For one thing, "I don't have to worry about how my butt looks in jeans anymore."

But seriously, she believes there is a reason she is in a chair, "and the purpose changes all the time."

Ed once confessed to his daughter that after the crash he had a moment where he feared his little sparkle's sparkle might burn out.

"How could I ever have thought that?" he said. "It's brighter than it's ever been."

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To contact Briana or buy her book, go to www.brianawalker.com.

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(c) 2006, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.