A UNIQUE SISTERHOOD
Wives and girlfriends of men in wheelchairs bond in support group
On Jan. 2, 2016, Elena Pauly travelled to Cuba with her boyfriend, Dan, on their first vacation abroad after three years together. The day before they were to return home, Dan dived into the shallow end of the resort pool headfirst and was paralyzed. When the couple returned to Vancouver, Dan, a stonemason, confronted a new life. Pauly discovered a new normal.
“I would cook for him, shower him, I would turn off the lights for him, then close the door and I would just sit in my car and cry,” said Pauly, 31. “I felt so alone.”
From that experience, came a new group called WAGS of SCI: Wives and girlfriends of spinal cord injury. The name is a variation of popular reality TV shows. WAGS is an acronym that usually refers to the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes.
But Pauly and her friend, Brooke Pagé, have started to change the meaning of WAGS, highlighting a different kind of sisterhood, dedicated to making sure other women in their situations would feel supported. It started when Pauly used the hashtags #quadwife and #spinalcord while posting pictures of her and Dan on Instagram.
In March 2017, Pagé, 32, discovered Pauly, 30, while scrolling on her search feed.
On May 28, 2014, Pagé’s husband, Evan, then a construction site superintendent, was at a job helping to build a new school in West Vancouver. That’s when a load of unsecured 3,500-pound (1,588-kilogram) wood flooring fell on his head, smashing his helmet and leaving him paralyzed.
After discovering each other on Instagram and learning that they lived two blocks from each other in Vancouver, Pauly and Pagé would get together for yoga and coffee. But their meetups were much different: they would talk about bowel or bladder accidents, disability services in their area, what to do if their partner fell out of a wheelchair and medications.
The women started an Instagram profile in November 2017, where they shared glimpses of their lives alongside their paralyzed partners.
At first, the WAGS of SCI’S following was small. Then, on Valentine’s Day of this year, Garrett Greer, a World Series of Poker player and quadriplegic, posted on his Instagram account about how the group inspired him. After Greer’s post, thousands of women worldwide with partners in wheelchairs started following them.
Charisma Jamison, 24, said the WAGS of SCI community has been invaluable. She started dating her boyfriend, Cole, in December after meeting at a rehabilitation centre in Richmond, Va., where she was working. Cole was paralyzed after a diving accident when he was 16.
On the couple’s Youtube channel, Roll with Cole, they shared that sometimes people stare at them in public or leave them negative comments. “There’s going to be people out there that have a strong opinion about our relationship, but that’s their problem not ours,” Jamison said.