Nicole's Story.

Hello, my name is Nicole I'm 30 years-old now, and I had a complicated story long before Diamond ever snuggled his way into my life.

Everywhere Diamond and I go, we get a lot of stares. Able-bodied people just aren't accustomed to seeing a woman in an electric scooter with a live cat riding in the front of the basket.

I was born with a fairly well known birth defect called Spina Bifida. I was also born with hydrocephallus, scoliosis, and clubbed feet. This added up to a great deal of surgery for me while I was growing up. I'm only partially paralyzed from the waist down though, so I can walk on my own inside the house. Outdoors I use crutches as needed.

I was adopted as an infant, and I grew up in an open adoption; which was rarer for my time than it is these days. I have full contact with my birth family and I love them as equally as my adoptive family. :)

I grew up using crutches to get around, but this was beginning to wear on my joints, and my physicians began to worry that I'd lose my ability to walk sooner than later. Around 1999, my physicians prescribed an electric scooter for me to delay the ravages of arthritus. I resisted getting the scooter for a very long time, because among some disabled people such as myself, there's a certain amount of pride in the physical abilities you do have and you don't want them to diminish. And I didn't want to gain weight. Eventually though, I let them talk me into it, because I want to be walking when I'm older.

I had an extremely hard time adjusting to the scooter. In my crutches, people just don't stare at me as much as they do as when I'm sitting in my scooter. While they're staring, people also just don't think about the looks on their faces, and dozens of people staring at you at a time, overtly and (they think) covertly, can feel so threatening sometimes.

Psychologically, I was born into a genetic shooting gallery. I had had symptoms of depression since my teens, but I just didn't know it. My birth mother has Unipolar, her twin sister has Bipolar, and their non-twin sister has Schizophrenia. Their brother is reputed to have clinical depression. I was first diagnosed with depression in the spring of 1998, and I took a year off from University to try to "find" myself again. But I think the introduction of the scooter in 1999 de-railed me even worse.

When I came back to WSU in early 2000, I moved into the dorms, but I didn't register for classes after the Spring semester. I had stopped leaving my dorm room very much at all except at night. I didn't truly realize it, but I had depression that aggravated into agoraphobia. (By the way, I'm not perfectly certain I have all of these dates entirely accurate, because my memory is sometimes fuzzy about the years I was depressed.)

I was finally evicted from the dormitories in January 2001, a move which seems harsh but may actually have saved my life. I found an apartment in the nick of time that was handicap accessible, two bedroom, covered by H.U.D., and had eight glorious windows. I spent the winter and spring letting glorious light back into my life, and I was beginning to heal. But I was unable to return to school because of the financial hold on my transcript, and I owed about $13,000, and had no way to pay it on a $520 per month income. I was still very depressed.

That summer, I decided I was a recluse, and if I was going to be a recluse, I may as well either have an animal or work with animals to have some company in my life. I knew my lease didn't allow pets, so my initial intention was to volunteer at the local Humane Society. I soon found out (In June 2001) that they had an overflow of cats, and were allowing people to foster animals in their homes. I decided that fostering a kitty for a week surely couldn't hurt my lease, and asked them to hand me any old cat.

They placed "Yaggie" in my arms, and I didn't know that my life was about to change...