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Jennifer Darmon rests her hands on her fiance's shoulders, looks into his eyes and takes a step. The dance is clumsy at first, but it gets better.

With no sensation from her hips down, it's amazing Jennifer is on her feet at all. That she will walk down the aisle April 16 and share a first dance with her bridegroom is miraculous. Jennifer, 28, suffered a catastrophic spinal injury in a 2008 car crash. A vertebra broken and the nerves to her spinal cord shredded, she was told by a surgeon in London, Ont., she would never walk again.

But thanks to a will of steel and leg braces of titanium, she now spends hours on her feet and out of her wheelchair.

Jennifer and fiance Mike Belawetz, 24, practised their wedding dance last week at the Detroit Medical Centre's Rehabilitation Institute of Michigan (RIM). Jennifer has been going to RIM three times a week for two years.

She started with the goal of getting stronger and more independent, but after Mike proposed in June, she set her sights on walking down the aisle."I wasn't going to let this wheelchair stop me," she said. "I always saw myself doing everything the traditional way.

"When Jennifer worried it would be impossible for her to walk down the aisle without bars on each side of her, Mike suggested a plan. "Why can't you just walk with people?" So on her wedding day, her father Alan will take one arm, and her younger brother, Kevin, will take the other.

With the walk down the aisle perfected, Jennifer and trainer Liz Richmond tackled the wedding dance.

They recently showed Mike their technique, then let him try, first between the parallel bars for safety, then out on the open floor, dancing in a slow circle. "Turn left," Jennifer tells Mike. "Like NASCAR."

Mike is flummoxed at first. He presses both hands into Jennifer's hips so she doesn't lose her balance.

Mike has done his share of positive thinking for Jennifer, she says, especially after the July 27, 2008, crash. She had two operations in two days. Then came the news she would be paralyzed forever. She spent three weeks in hospital, one in intensive care. She was then moved to another hospital for two months of rehab.

There, the emphasis was on her learning to use a wheelchair, she says. In contrast, the emphasis at Detroit's RIM is to get her out of it.

"They have a different outlook on what 'recovery' means," she says.

Jennifer figured her career as a counsellor with the John Howard Society would be over. Now she's thinking of how she might get back.

She also figured her injury would send Mike running for the hills. Mike laughs. "She's still the same person," he says. He proposed on June 8, four years after their first date.

RIM is featuring Jennifer in a series of promotional videos it has posted on YouTube. Called "Walk of Love," it chronicles Jennifer's progress up to and including the day of her wedding.

To watch Jennifer's "Walk of Love" videos, go to www.youtube.com/RehabInstitute.

A new video will be posted every two weeks.



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Original Article: http://www.montrealg...1349/story.html