EXERCISING HER OPTIONS
Joni Dunn was an intermediate skier in 1972 when she skidded off a Vermont mountain trail. She plunged 100 feet into a deep ravine, fracturing her spine in seven places, and her neck and skull. At first, doctors held little hope for Dunn’s survival. “I heard them say, ‘She won’t make it through the night.'” Dunn remembers, “I knew if I stopped concentrating on living, I would die. I had always handled my problems along with everyone else’s. Now I was as dependent as a baby. When they brought my 3-year-old son, Brian, to the hospital, he reached out his arms. I wanted to touch him, but I couldn’t move.” It was nearly a year and a half before Dunn was able to hug her son. Meanwhile, an operation to save her from paralysis and a body cast took two inches off her height and left her hunchbacked. “My body seemed entirely alien to me,” she recalls. “I used to stare…
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