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KEARNEY, Neb. — Everyone faces obstacles, Heather Walker (pictured) says. They just have to work hard to overcome them.
Walker, 19, of Amherst performs with the University of Nebraska at Kearney Pride of the Plains Marching Band. For her, marching has been the obstacle.
Walker, a sophomore nursing major, was born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which a portion of the neural tube fails to develop or close properly, which causes defects in the spinal cord and in the bones of the spine, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Her doctors insisted Walker would never move from the waist down and would be restricted to a wheelchair for life.
Walker has had 13 surgeries and has done exercises since she was a child.
“My grandpa always said, ‘That little girl will walk someday,’” she said.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Kearney Hub:
