It started in seventh grade, at Franklin Middle School in Riverside, California. I sat in the third row and couldn't make out what the teacher was writing on the whiteboard. I figured it was just a matter of needing glasses. My mom took me to an optometrist on Magnolia Avenue, I got a pair — and within six months I couldn't see a thing again. Second pair. Third pair. After the fourth pair I told him, look, something's not right here. He said it was just growth, puberty, it would pass. It didn't pass.
They referred me to Loma Linda University Medical Center, to the ophthalmology clinic. Months of tests, a handful of doctors, until they found a defect in my retina. Two structures in one body that were never supposed to intersect.
At eighteen, something else happened. I wore heels to my cousin's quinceañera in San Bernardino, and suddenly I felt the floor tilt under me. I figured it was the champagne. It wasn't the champagne. Within a year I was getting dizzy just standing barefoot on the kitchen floor. Another diagnosis: a balance disorder. I lost control of things nobody ever thinks about — carrying a grocery bag, boiling pasta without spilling the water, reading a paragraph without the words crawling off the page.
I fell a lot. Once, at the Metrolink station in Riverside, I already had a walker. The elevator was broken, a little "OUT OF ORDER" sign taped to it. I got on the escalator instead. The front wheel of the walker caught between two steps, and I went down face-first, in front of everyone waiting for the train. Nobody moved for what felt like forever. Then two strangers lifted me up at once, like I was a sack of flour.
At twenty-one I got a DNA test done at a genetics clinic at UCLA. I waited three weeks for the results. The doctor called me into her office, closed the door — and that alone told me everything before she said a word. SCA7. A degenerative disease of the cerebellum, one that causes progressive blindness and loss of speech. Progressive. Meaning: only worse, never better.
That night I sat on the bathroom floor at my parents' house in Riverside, phone in hand, deleting one app at a time — everything tied to school, a graphic design program I was supposed to start that September. I deleted the photography portfolio I'd spent the past year building too, the one that was supposed to get me into art school. I realized I wouldn't study there. That I wouldn't live on my own. That I wouldn't meet anyone. That I wouldn't have kids. I cried every day for months. I wasn't mourning someone else — I was mourning myself, the person I was supposed to become.
What changed everything was an appointment with my neurologist at UC Irvine Medical Center. She offered me a fairly new drug and was upfront about it: this won't cure you, it'll only slow the decline. At first nothing happened. Three months of pills with no noticeable change. Then, one day, I noticed I could swallow soup without choking. After that — my words came out clearer when I talked to my mom on the phone.
Once I saw things stabilizing, I let myself dream again. I signed up with a supported-living nonprofit for people with disabilities in Corona, to start the process of moving out on my own. And I made a Tinder profile. I got turned down a lot. People would see the wheelchair in the third photo and end the conversation. I knew it would take patience — dating is hard enough for able-bodied people; imagine doing it from a wheelchair.
Then Ryan's profile showed up. His bio said, "Looking for someone to share the road with, not just the rent." That's what made me swipe right. We started texting, and I told him almost right away that I use a wheelchair. He got offended. Not about the chair — he thought I was joking, mocking people with disabilities. It took a fifteen-minute phone call to convince him I was completely serious.
For our first date we picked a small restaurant near the Mission Inn in downtown Riverside. He got there thirty minutes early and just waited. He was sweet, attentive, asked questions and actually waited for the answers. It was exactly what I wanted — and that's precisely why it overwhelmed me. I wasn't used to anyone being that present. That night I texted my best friend, Jess: "I don't think this is going to work." She wrote back: "Maybe he just means it. Give him one more shot before you shut it down." She was right.
On our second date he dropped me off right at the building entrance so I wouldn't have to wheel myself in from the parking lot. I never asked him to. He just knew. I almost gave up on a person like that — imagine that.
After five months Ryan moved in with me, into the apartment I'd finally gotten through the nonprofit in Corona. He came to every appointment with my neurologist, jotting down on a sticky note the things I forgot to ask, since my hands don't write fast anymore. He learned how to feed me without me choking, learned the clinic, the doctors' names, the Social Security disability office's phone numbers by heart.
Exactly a year ago, on September 17, we drove back from UC Irvine after a follow-up visit. The doctor said things had been stable for three straight years now — about the best outcome anyone could hope for with SCA7. That evening Ryan pulled a small velvet box out of the kitchen drawer, got down in front of my wheelchair — not over me, but level with me, so our eyes met at the exact same height — and asked if I'd let him stay with me forever, not as something taken for granted, but as a choice he'd keep making every single morning.
We got married three months ago, at a small venue in Corona, eighty guests, no dance floor — because I didn't want anyone feeling like they had to make accommodations for me on that particular day. Ryan danced alone anyway, spun himself around three times right next to my table, and everyone cracked up. After the wedding we sat down with a Social Security caseworker to go through the paperwork, and Ryan specifically asked to be registered as my primary caregiver on file, not just as my spouse — so the support benefits would stay stable no matter what happened with my health down the line. I signed the form with the pen he'd brought, since holding my own is hard these days. That paperwork, the official words "primary caregiver" next to his name, isn't romantic at all. But it's the most secure thing I've ever had.
