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.
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.