From the El Paso Times:EL PASO -- Sometimes Colin Lewis feels as if he were on a treadmill.
"My wheels are turning but I'm not going anywhere I need to go," the aspiring chef said from his apartment in the Upper Valley. "I am still trying to push myself into figuring out what needs to be done to get to where I want to be."
Where Lewis aspires to be is behind the line, preparing meals for hundreds of guests.
It's just that if he wants to someday work in a kitchen, he has to wait for a lift. And instead of standing and facing the stove, he sits. He has no choice. Lewis is paralyzed from the waist down.
Experiencing severe back pain on April 19, 2006, Lewis went to an El Paso hospital. The next day he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis -- a neurological disorder caused by inflammation across both sides of the spinal cord -- leaving him a paraplegic at 24.
Although Lewis never cooked in a professional kitchen, his love of cooking developed from a very young age.
"I love to cook -- I always have," he said. "Cooking has always been a big thing in my family. My mom cooked, my dad cooked, my grandmother is Polish, so she can cook, and my grandfather cooks, so it's always been part of my family."
Prior to being diagnosed with transverse myelitis, Lewis was an active husband and father. He was a double major (criminal justice and psychology) before taking a semester off to drive a truck when bills become too much to handle.
Understandably, Lewis became depressed when he was put in a wheelchair."We hated seeing him unmotivated and depressed all day long," said his wife, Kate Lewis. "Just seeing him playing video games all day and not being able to get out of the apartment was depressing for us, too."
Being proactive, Kate Lewis went online to find a culinary arts school.
She found the Texas Culinary Academy -- which has a Le Cordon Bleu Program -- in Austin and applied for her husband.
"I give her a lot of credit," said Sherry Lewis, Colin Lewis' mother. "He was very depressed, and she just got tired of him being that way and she knew he had to do something. She is the one who made the inquiries to begin with. When they came back positive, that's when she told Colin about it."
The family packed up and moved to Austin.
"It was amazing how they took him in and how much they helped him," Sherry Lewis said. "They were talking about having a cooking buddy for him who would reach for stuff off the top shelf and help him in whatever he needed. But then they said if he gets into a real kitchen will they assign somebody to do this or does he have to figure out how to work that out himself?"
Lewis adjusted and thrived at the culinary school. He even got a job at the Jester Dining Hall at the University of Texas campus. Then he became sick and had to leave in August 2007.
"I have two classes and my internship to go," he said. "I have my bakery and a restaurant practical to complete. I got so sick, I had to be put on a medical leave of absence but instead they withdrew me from the whole program. And when I was ready to go back, they said I had to pay $10,000 in loans. That is the situation I'm in now."
Lewis said he has been looking for a restaurant job in El Paso, but because of his wheelchair and the limited space in a kitchen, it has been difficult.
"I can't roll into a kitchen and ask them to build me a table before they hire me," he said. "Who is going to do that in the culinary world? There is no room for wheelchairs in the kitchen."
One very basic problem is that all kitchen equipment is standard; nothing is built for a chef in a wheelchair. But Lewis does not mind shouldering up to the counter and cooking at chest level.
There simply is not enough room behind the line for a wheelchair to maneuver, and he fully understands that.
But by no means is Lewis willing to give up. In the kitchen, he continues to chop, dice, sear and saute -- everything from his wheelchair height.
"Everything that I learned in culinary school, I myself had to realize, OK, here is the technique, I can I do it from where I sit," he said. "There's different things that can help, like boards that you can click on to your chair. And there's these counters that you can spend thousands of dollars on so the counters can lower themselves down where you can open a panel to get the wheels of the wheelchair in."
The National Restaurant Association, the National Council on Disability, and The Disabilities Statistics Center in San Francisco -- a company that collects statistics on disabled persons in the work force -- could not identify a single paraplegic chef working in a major restaurant.
But Lewis marches on, not worrying too much about whether a restaurant owner would take a chance on a wheelchair-bound chef working out in the frantic and cramped confines of a fine-dining kitchen.
Instead, Lewis is focusing on the message he is trying to send.
"Just because you become disabled, you still can cook," he said. "You need to get in there and do it. You need to be independent. Plus, there is nothing wrong with asking for help or receiving help when you are in the kitchen. Maybe it requires a little bit more preparation, but it can be done."
Lewis is not setting his sights only in El Paso. He recently applied to be a contestant on the Food Network's "The Next Food Network Star."
"I'm still going to keep on trying," he said. "I don't want to be a TV star and get oodles of money. I want to do it because I want to reach people who become disabled for whatever reason, and say, 'Look, get back in that kitchen and cook.' Just because we're in a wheelchair, we are people too. We need the same respect you give a person whose legs work."
