Northridge Magazine

Nicole Simpson ’09 (Kinesiology) may not always see them coming, but she is an expert on navigating life’s twists and turns.

During Cal State Northridge’s May 2009 commencement exercise, she navigated her wheelchair to the podium and stood up in her leg braces as her name was called, a feat that represented the sheer grit of the woman and a team of remarkable student volunteers from CSUN’s Kinesiology Department.

In fall 2002, a fit and eager Simpson gave up ownership of her gym in order to enter the College of Health and Human Development as a fulltime student. Her eye was on a bachelor’s degree in exercise science and a possible future in physical therapy.

“I loved fitness, loved helping people,” said Simpson. “I still do.”

Mid-semester, some twists and turns arrived, as they tend to do, out of the blue.

Following a weekend pool tournament, she and a friend had stopped off to get in a little practice at a local establishment. Simpson’s memory is fuzzy on the details, but she has been told she visited the ladies’ room and “never came out.” An initial search by her alarmed buddy failed to turn her up, but two hours later she was found behind the pool parlor.

“Between the doctors and the police,” Simpson said, “they figured I had been beaten, raped and run over by a car…The person, or persons, never has been found…And so it’s a mystery.”

Simpson was left with a broken neck, a broken lower back, broken ribs, a broken collar bone, both lungs punctured by her ribs, and a lacerated liver.

She spent three and a half months in the hospital.

The very next semester, spring 2003, Simpson came back to CSUN.

With therapy, she was crawling by summer. Within 14 months, using her leg braces and a walker, she took her first steps since the spinal cord injury.

Ferociously independent, Simpson spent all of 2005 in Australia as a Study Abroad student, proving her ability to live on her own. Confident and impatient to get on with her life, she signed up to return to CSUN for fall 2006.

But again, twists and turns. Some suspicious pains sent Simpson in December 2005 to a doctor’s office in Australia. Within six months, she was battling full blown ovarian cancer. Five surgeries and 12 cycles of chemotherapy dominated her life for the next year and a half, and her weakened state left her unable to walk.

By fall 2007, Simpson was back at CSUN.

A project for kinesiology professor Steve Loy’s Kinesiology 446 “Research in Exercise Physiology” class became much more. Loy recognized the potential for an extraordinary learning experience for Simpson and for graduate students at CSUN’s Brown Center for Adaptive Aquatic Therapy and Center of Achievement for the Physically Disabled. “For students to see hard work rewarded within the time frame of a semester’s education was important,” he said.

Loy asked Simpson to set a goal she thought she could achieve in one semester, and Simpson chose to stand up at the podium at graduation. “It would signify all the hard work I’ve been through in the past seven years,” she said.

On a rainy day at the end of fall 2008, the students met with Simpson, Loy and Mai Jara, interim adapted aquatics director, to create a training program. “This was not part of a class for the students,” Loy said. “This was one of their peers who wanted to accomplish something, and they had the knowledge…and the capacity to help her do that.”

Simpson and a devoted friend and classmate, exercise science graduate student Moisey Bininashvili, already had begun therapy as part of the 446 class project. During spring 2009, students Beatriz Chavez, Ryota Nishiyori and Ai Katase worked with Simpson at the Brown Center on campus and met weekly with Jara to assess and plan.

Jara’s therapy program for Simpson “focused slowly on weight bearing exercises, started with leg strengthening…so she would be able to support and carry her weight.”

Simpson, at high risk for fractures, often worked strapped to a tilt table, gradually putting weight on her lower extremities. As graduation approached, her crew of helpers grew anxious, she said, “but I had undying faith that I would do it.”

On the evening of graduation, escorted by kinesiology student Steve Paredes, Simpson heard her name called. Paredes stood to one side and assisted as his friend made the most important of all her journeys.

Simpson’s big, loving family was on hand to see it. “My dad—he’s hard of hearing, bless his heart—got into the ceremonial line to give me a kiss on the cheek,” she laughed. “He couldn’t hear anybody saying ‘Sir, you can’t go up there!’ “

The crew of student volunteers also attended. “It was a great feeling,” said Nishiyori. “…If you have determination and desire and a goal like Nicole did, you can achieve your goal. To be a part of that is exactly why I got involved [in CSUN’s kinesiology program], helping people regain something they’d lost.”

Simpson already is a work on a book about her triumph over assault and illness, and on developing a nonprofit she will call the Wellness Network, a web of health practitioners who “address all the dimensions of wellness.” When it is up and running, Simpson will connect individuals—including those who cannot afford to pay—with the appropriate therapists.

“This is my career,” she said, “my life blood.”

— Brenda Roberts

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