MVP Council Member Spotlight: Ce-Ce Mazyck
In 2001, Ce-Ce Mazyck was two weeks into a leadership training course at Fort Jackson when she realized she was pregnant. The happy discovery came at exactly the wrong moment: the grueling program was off limits to pregnant soldiers, but critical to Mazyck’s plan to earn her staff sergeant rank.
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So, she kept the news to herself and dug in.
“By day, I was doing road marches and runs,” she says. “By night, I was reading ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.’”
Mazyck aced the course, and later shared her secret with the instructor, Sergeant first class Tiffany Howard.
“That showed me how motivated and determined she was,” says Howard, now the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s Military & Veterans Program (MVP) coordinator. “Ce-Ce never made excuses and was one of my top students.”
The same drive that fueled her success throughout the course would prove pivotal when Mazyck’s life was upended by a spinal cord injury only a year later.
One moment, she was a young mother embarking on her 38th jump for the 82nd Airborne Division; the next, she was fighting a gust of wind twisting her parachute with another paratrooper’s. Though she broke free, her safe landing was compromised and she sustained an L1-L2 injury.
Despite her shock, she resolved to reimagine the future.
“Adapt and overcome, that’s what you have to do,” Mazyck says. “I had a son to raise.”
Over the next twenty years, Mazyck would graduate from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, compete in the javelin competition at the 2012 Paralympics, and work tirelessly to support other injured veterans.
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Mazyck recently added the Reeve Foundation’s Military & Veterans Program to her extensive list of outreach efforts. As the newest member of the MVP council, she will promote Reeve’s work at events and conferences for veterans in the South.
Since its inception in 2008, the MVP has helped thousands of families navigating paralysis access specialty care and resources at Veterans Affairs. Council members like Mazyck connect Reeve with veterans and caregivers and serve as outreach ambassadors at adaptive sporting events and disability expositions across the country.
Howard believes Mazyck’s contribution to the program will be formidable.
“She will be a great asset,” Howard says. “She can give living testimony and show people that, without a doubt, you can still live a full life after injury.”
Mazyck hopes sharing her own challenges and successes will help other people with disabilities realize “that the sky is the limit.”
“I want to share what I’ve been through for them to see a little bit of light, to help them out on their journey,” she says. “I want them to know that you can live and not just exist.”