After a life-changing wreck in 2016, an Abilene woman will compete in a pageant for wheelchair users

Clare was driving too fast and not wearing her seatbelt when she missed a curve, she said.

She rolled her truck seven times and was ejected from the vehicle’s back window.

“The truck landed upside down on top of me,” Clare said.

She was positioned where the toolbox would have been if it had not fallen out of the bed of the truck.

If she could have moved, she could have touched the crushed cab of her truck or stuck her arm out of the bed, she said.

Clare’s spinal cord was injured but not completely severed in the wreck.

“My guardian angels were definitely with me that day, because the only major injury I had was my spinal cord injury,” Clare said. “I was able to start rehab pretty quick after that.”

It was a long road to recovery.

The injury caused more damage to her right side than her left, she said. It had an impact on her arms and hands — “basically chest level and down,” she said.

Since her wreck, she has had to relearn so many things she once did naturally. Clare started out completely paralyzed and gradually relearned how to walk short distances with the help of a walker. She used to be right-handed, but when she lost almost all use of it she had to learn to do things left handed. Clare’s left hand has refused to learn to write, she said, which led to her finding a way to write with her right hand despite her injury.

“A lot changed, but one thing that I tell everybody is that the one huge thing that I have learned since my accident is patience and perseverance,” Clare said.

Clare refers to the date of her wreck as her “second chance day.”

In spinal cord injury groups, she said people sometimes call it a “life day” — the anniversary of the day when someone’s life changed forever but when they received another chance at life.

Clare credits her faith with making her well and the wreck with saving her life even as it changed everything for her.

“I was a very broken person before my accident,” she said. “My accident literally saved my life.”

And now she wants to pay it forward with the help of the Ms. Wheelchair Kansas pageant.

Clare learned about the Ms. Wheelchair Kansas pageant after someone else suggested it to her. She decided it sounded like a good experience.

“Win or lose, really, I don’t care either way,” she said. “I’m so grateful for the opportunity. But if that’s what’s God’s plan for me is to win, then I will follow his plan.”

Clare thought the pageant would be a good way to advocate. She has wanted volunteer and to advocate for people with disabilities such as herself but had sometimes found opportunities hard to come by.

The pageant could offer her a platform she hadn’t found elsewhere, Clare felt.

As part of the pageant, she plans to speak out about housing issues for people with disabilities.

After her wreck, Clare had to live with her parents for a while. For four and a half years after the crash, her bedroom was the corner of her parents’ living room.

“There was no housing available,” she said.

Though there are apartments available for low income and disabled people in Abilene, many of them aren’t ideal for a single mother with young children such as Clare.

Most of the rentals that offered what she was looking for weren’t big enough or served primarily senior citizens who might not enjoy the noise generated by her sons.

“I just never thought about the fact that I was a single mother needing handicap accessible housing and most of those places are one-bedroom,” she said. “It was just really hard to be able to find that.”

Even when she gained access to Section 8 housing, Clare struggled in her search for a place to rent.

“Although they can’t discriminate against me because I’m in a wheelchair, I did find that I would get ‘well, the house isn’t set up to be handicap accessible,’ and — you know — shut down pretty quick” she said. “I just want to educate people — and landlords — on the options like the Section 8 (housing) and what can be done simply to make a house accessible.”

Clare has found a safe harbor with her current landlords Dr. Damien and Michelle Stevens since then, but she knows it’s hard for many people in her situation to find housing.

She’s eager to meet others with similar disabilities to her own and to raise awareness this weekend.

“I really am looking forward to the opportunity to just be able to go out and do more volunteer work,” Clare said. “To be able to get out there and spread the word about all kinds of different things that the disabled community — not even just people in wheelchairs, but the disabled community — just struggle with that — as we call you guys — able-bodied people don’t think about.”