Anyone with a spinal cord injury knows the challenges related to learning to live in a new way. For Ammie Morgan, her injury also required her to learn to love herself and others for the first time.
“I grew up in foster care, surrounded by drugs and physical abuse. My mom had no life for herself. I grew up thinking you were supposed to have a man run your life,” says Morgan. “I never saw love or affection. I didn’t know what that looked like.”
With no father figure to say what she deserved, Morgan assumed she needed a man to tell her what to do and say, even how to dress and do her hair. When she started working, she noticed coworkers whose relationships looked different, loving and supportive.
“They didn’t come to work having to cover a black eye or other trauma, and I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together,” says Morgan. “I began to speak for myself in my relationship. It didn’t go well.”
In April 2010, after Morgan broke up with her boyfriend, he sat outside her work for over seven hours and then shot her twice when she came out, once in the hand and once in the back that went out her chest. At 19 years old, Morgan sustained a T4 incomplete injury, and her boyfriend was sentenced to 20 years in prison.