Robin on Multiple Places with Multiple Disabilities AbroaDisabled: Part 1

Robin's Background (ADHD, Clinical depression, Anxiety disorder, C4 quadriplegic incomplete)
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[Video Description]
Zoom call recording. Robin (on left): African American female wearing yellow and red dress. Bobbi (on right): African American female wearing pink shirt with purple overalls.
[Video Transcript]
Bobbi: Can you give a background about your disability and your experience navigating through it?
Robin: Yes. I have, I am a person with multiple disabilities. I was diagnosed as a teen with ADHD. And which, you know, impacted things. And life, school, you know all of those things. Getting up. Time. all of those things. So, ADHD played a pretty major role because, you know, it also impacted my emotional health and development. Because it wasn’t discovered until I went to college. I mean I wasn’t diagnosed until I went to college. I had all of the problems and things with the ADHD but during the time when I was, during the time, I was diagnosed in the 90s. And living in the South, being a black woman, it usually, ADHD was something that was diagnosed in boys at that time. And so, they gendered it. But now, you know, there’s a lot more education and a lot more doctors, and educational people. They’re more aware and… that diagnose people now.
And I also have a mental illness. I have clinical depression and an anxiety disorder. And that also, it impacted all kinds of things including education because it’s hard to go to class and do things when all you can think about, is, you know, depressed thoughts and not being able to get out bed. And your executive functioning is, you know, gone. But, so, due to mental illness, and things like that, it took me seven years to get my bachelors.
So, but my other disability, the one that’s visible, that people see. I got 15 years ago. And that was, I got a spinal cord injury as a result of having an aneurism inside my spinal cord. But, I… and that experience, because what... It was really rare, what happened. And my, and so I had experimental surgery to remove the AVM, basically the thing that was causing the aneurism in my spinal cord. And I found out a week before that surgery that I was pregnant with my kid who is now 15.
But, so, I am a C4 quadriplegic incomplete. And I am, and I have mobility. Which, you know, some mobility, I use a walker and things. Which is also kind of a… it, you know the experience navigating that because I’m a walking quad, and to explain, yes I am a quadriplegic, yes I can walk. But you know, it doesn’t… but I’m still a quadriplegic cause I am affected in all of the four areas, all four quadrants of my body are affected by the spinal cord injury because my spinal cord was cut in two. Like as my doctor put it, I filleted your spinal cord and took it out.
So, but I was pregnant and so, they don’t know that maybe that my kid’s stem cells or as my kid was developing inside because all that new growth, maybe that was what helped me. We don’t know. But it did impact, it left an impact on me because I got to see. I got to experience firsthand, reproductive health. The reproductive health experience while having a disability.