What’s It Like to Learn to Walk Again?
Key takeaways:
Pop musician Lynn Julian’s stage accident in 2006 left her confined to a couch for many months.
She learned to crawl up the stairs and along the walls to get around. She also used a wheelchair after the accident and, eventually, a cane.
She survived the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, but it was another setback to overcome.
In 2006, Boston resident Lynn Julian was a performing pop musician, and her career was starting to get national notice. Lynn, who had been on stages since she was 5 years old, had just been written up in Rolling Stone magazine. And a manager had offered her a contract to sing country music.
On October 1, 2006, she was performing her superhero pop star act at a Boston nightclub when she stepped on a power cord, and her foot rolled forward. Her legs flew out from under her, knocking her backward. And, she says, her head bounced on the stage.
“This was all a fraction of a second,” she says.
She went to the emergency room and was later released to her boyfriend’s care. She stayed on his couch, sitting up straight but unable to make herself walk.
Life after the accident
After the accident, Lynn’s legs were too weak for her to stand, so she moved about with the help of a wheelchair. When she tried to lie back on the couch, “the room would spin,” she says. “I would grasp at it, and I would vomit.”
The accident had left her with perilymph fistulas, defects in the membrane between the inner and middle ear. After she had a procedure to repair them, some of the issues she was having moving around were addressed. The inner ear surgery stabilized her ear when she moved her head, which stopped the room from spinning. But Lynn was still unable to walk.
Nine months after the accident, she was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. At that point, she could feel her legs, but it felt like they were asleep — like pins and needles — she says.
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‘Tough love’ to get out of the wheelchair
Lynn says she credits the physician who performed her inner ear surgery, and his “tough love,” with helping her realize she had to work to walk again.
“I don’t know why you’re in that chair. And I’m not here to judge you and tell you you do or don’t need it,” she remembers him saying. “But I will tell you that you’ve been in it too long. And if you don’t fight with everything you’ve got to get out of it soon, you’re not going to have a choice anymore.”
Looking back, she says, “He scared me enough to fight.” After she left the hospital following the fistula surgery, she began physical therapy. She also went to occupational therapy and vision therapy, as well as vestibular therapy for balance.
One step at a time to regain mobility
Even with physical therapy, Lynn’s progress was slow. At first, she would stand behind a chair for 1 minute. That became 5 minutes, and then 15.
She was soon able to forgo the portable toilet by the couch and crawl up the stairs, using her arm strength, to get to the bathroom. While that seems “humiliating to a healthy, walking person, for me it was a win,” Lynn says.
She also figured out she could wall-crawl, “sort of like Spider Man,” to the kitchen.
In 2012, Lynn started using a cane. Though, she felt she was using it more as an unnecessary crutch. With the help of a support group, she may have been able to stop using the cane sooner, she says. And that’s why she recommends mental health counseling or a support group to people relearning to walk.
In the summer of 2012, she landed an acting job and was motivated to stop using the cane.
Surviving the Boston Marathon bombing
Lynn had been walking on her own for less than a year when tragedy struck again. In April of 2013, she was watching the Boston Marathon when terrorists detonated a bomb. She was close enough to the explosion that she experienced a worsening of the brain injury from her stage accident. And as a result, she experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and a lower back injury.
Lynn started to use the cane again. “It was scary as hell because you’re so afraid that this is a downhill slide,” she says. She thought, “Now, I’m going to end up in the wheelchair again.”
But this time she had learned how to motivate herself. She didn’t just return to the Boston Marathon in 2014, she ran it in the mobility-impaired division.
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Lynn had trained for months, first on a treadmill and then outside. By mile 23, she was dragging one leg behind her, but she finished. She took off her shoe at the finish line and her foot “just ballooned.” It was so taxing she returned temporarily to the wheelchair afterward.
Living with chronic pain
The deepening of the brain injury also means that Lynn now lives in “fight or flight” mode. If the telephone rings, she says, her brain reacts like it’s a fire alarm. And she has had chronic migraines for more than 10 years in addition to the chronic pain she’s had to learn to manage.
The shock from the bombing also affected how her legs function. Now, when she’s having dinner with people, for example, they’ll leave the table after the bill is paid, but it will take a few minutes for her brain to tell her to walk after she’s stood up. And she’s developed a stutter that comes out when she is stressed.
“It makes me very self-conscious,” she says of the stutter and her issues with walking.
But Lynn continues to work toward full recovery. In 2024, she says, she will try transcranial magnetic stimulation, a noninvasive procedure that sends magnetic pulses to the brain to alter neural activity.
Advice on walking again
Lynn says she wants people who are feeling defeated and want to give up on something to know this: “The first year is the worst year, and the first time is the worst time.”
She adds, “If I had thought every physical therapy appointment would be [as bad as the first], I would never have gone back. It’s going to get easier — much, much easier — the longer you do something.”
Lynn says she also learned that recovery is not a straight line and that you’re going to have setbacks. But you’ll be stronger each time because you had improved before the setback.
“How many times did I fall? I don’t care,” she says. “How many times did you get back up? That’s what I care about.”
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