Running
For 23-year-old student Cody Gray – a Wings for Life World Run ambassador of five years – a severe spinal cord injury wasn’t reason enough to put her life on hold.
Cody Gray is a Wings for Life World Run (WFLWR) ambassador and a touch football coach. She’s a student, and is currently studying for her third Bachelor’s degree in financial planning (her first two are in marketing and tourism and event management, respectively). She likes going to comedy shows, the movies, and hitting Adelaide’s restaurants with her friends in search of good food and drink (they try a new one each month).
Cody’s a big reader, and has a particular soft spot for crime thrillers. (And Harry Potter). She listens to podcasts about financial literacy. She loves marketing and is aiming to one day find a job in the field, and she currently works part-time in market research. She prides herself on being a good daughter and friend, and she hopes all of her friends know that they can go to her anytime, with whatever issues they might be facing.
In addition to all of these things, Cody is also a quadriplegic, having suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a freak skiing accident when she was just 16, halfway through year 11.
It all happened so quickly: she hit a jump, landed on her neck, and immediately knew she couldn’t feel her legs.
Before her accident, Cody was big into sports and athletics. “That was pretty much my whole personality,” she tells RedBull.com. She was even training with the under-18s state touch football team and had, up to that point, a bright sporting future ahead of her.
Having shattered the C5 and C6 joints in her neck in the accident, Cody spent a couple of months in ICU and rehab, and ultimately spent close to seven months in various forms of care until she could return home. “It was very, very hard to deal with…and still is,” she says. “Sport is still a part of who I am, but it took me a long time to redefine who I was. That’s hard enough when you’re 17 or 18 – you don’t even really know what you’re doing in the first place and then everything changes. I’m still kind of working it out.”
When people reminisce or start pitying you for what was, I just feel like saying: ‘Look, we can’t change that now. So let’s move forward, and just try and make the best out of everything’.
With such a high level of spinal cord injury, Cody requires a lot of assistance with day-to-day tasks. As well as professional support workers, her friends and family play an active role in her daily life. “My parents, my family, my sister, all my best friends who I’ve known forever – they’ve all been incredible,” she says. “I’ve been with my partner, Trent, for five years, and he’s been awesome too.”
Immediately after the accident, some family friends set up the Courage for Cody Facebook page, which “went a bit mental”, according to Cody, and quickly gained close to 7,000 followers. What began as a way to keep friends updated with Cody’s progress, quickly became a fundraising tool in its own right, and helped Cody and her family cover some of the costs involved with her ongoing treatment.
Now 23, and having been a WFLWR ambassador for the last five years, Cody is passionate about trying to move the conversation around spinal cord injuries – and what it means to live with one – forward. “I remember sitting in the doctor’s office, and there was an old lady in there, and she said: ‘Oh, you’re too young to be in a wheelchair!’,” says Cody. “I was like…’Thanks…what am I supposed to do with that? What does that even mean?’”
But instead of getting frustrated or despondent, Cody decided the best thing she could do was to be as honest and open as possible. She began posting more candid ‘behind the scenes’ photos and captions on her Instagram account – one of the realities of Cody’s life is that she faces “endless” medical issues – and found it to be something of a release. “For the first couple of years after the accident, I just wanted to try and get back to semi-normalcy, and I didn’t really want to acknowledge it,” she says. “But people had so many questions…I just thought, ‘Why not start sharing it?’ and then people will gain more knowledge, and feel more comfortable talking to me about it.”
Of course, despite her efforts to be as honest and open as she can, Cody admits that people still regularly say “weird stuff” to her in public. But does it annoy her, now?
“I’m not annoyed, because my situation is obviously pretty shit,” she replies. “But there’s also the element of just wanting to get on with my life. When people reminisce or start pitying you for what was, I just feel like saying: ‘Look, we can’t change that now. So let’s move forward, and just try and make the best out of everything’.”
One of the themes of Cody’s life since the accident has been this idea of ‘redefining’. And sometimes, she admits, that means letting go. “The biggest change for me was when I admitted to myself that I’m never going to be able to play sport again,” she says. “And the next thought was: ‘So what can I do?’ And I decided that I’m going to be really good at uni, and I’m going to become even more confident in myself.”
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Cody Gray is a Wings for Life World Run ambassador. Raising essential funds and resources to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, Wings for Life World Run 2023 will take place on May 7th. All you need to do to get involved is to download the app, raise some money, and run for those who can’t.
