Roy runner courageously overcomes obstacles

Cindy Stanley gets a little frustrated because she can't run a 5K quite as fast as she once did. Of course, she's 54 years old now, so maybe that's to be expected.

And she feels bad that she managed to complete only around 10 miles for her team, the Zena Road Warriors, in the recent Wasatch Back Relay race before heat exhaustion got the best of her.

But hey, maybe she deserves a break.

After all, Cindy Stanley is blind.

Eleven years ago — on July 3, 1998 — Stanley lost control of her new car, a Pontiac Grand Am she had just purchased a week earlier, and the vehicle rolled five times while she was returning home with her daughter, a niece and two grandchildren from a trip to Lava Hot Springs in Idaho. Cindy and her 22-year-old daughter, who suffered serious ankle and wrist injuries, were knocked unconscious in the crash.

An avid distance runner who had participated in several marathons and ran in some sort of race almost every weekend, Stanley spent 28 days in a coma before she awoke at McKay-Dee Hospital.

"I thought I was dreaming, because I couldn't see anybody," Stanley said. "I had no idea I was blind; I had no idea I'd been in an accident. I don't even remember buying the car. I lost about 3 months. It was weird.

"I just thought, 'Hey, let's go to the hospital and we'll fix it.' That was the worst day of my whole life," she said, getting emotional as she recalled how a nurse told her the damage to her optic nerve was permanent. "I thought, 'There's no way, I can't be blind.' It was pretty bad. We all thought it could be fixed, and we bawled all the way home."

She also suffered a herniated disc in her neck and seriously injured her left arm, damaging the nerves to the point where she still has very limited use of it and her hand. Despite the loss of her eyesight, she still considers the pain in her arm and shoulder, and subsequently being unable to use her hand, as the worst part of the accident.

What most of us would consider as relatively simple, everyday tasks — tying her shoes, zipping up her pants, fastening her bra — are very difficult to do with one hand, especially since she cannot see.

She attended a school for the blind for a year, re-learning how to do various things. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, so she had to learn to walk and talk again. And the hospital's use of a respirator while she was comatose had permanently damaged her vocal cords.

She admits she understandably suffered the "poor me" syndrome and was bitter about her circumstances for awhile, but those feelings eventually faded.