Olympian Amy Van Dyken doesn’t spend time lingering over her life-changing accident. In 2014, the Olympic swimmer, who took home six gold medals in her career, was in an all-terrain vehicle accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
She tells Oprah: Where Are They Now? that she doesn’t wonder what would be different had she never crashed the ATV. “I’ve never been angry that I’m like this. I’ve never looked back and said, ‘I woulda, shoulda, coulda, what if?’ Because ‘What if?’ didn’t happen. This happened. This happened for a reason.”
That doesn’t mean Amy never feels down or frustrated. “Sure, there are days when I wake up and I’m in so much pain I can’t even handle it, and there are days when it is so hard to get in and out of this chair that it’s just ridiculous, and there are days when I am sad.”
Ultimately, she says, she keeps some distance from the sadness and learns from it. “I take that moment, I look at it, I try to learn from it and then move on.”
Published 04/14/2016