Paralysis doesn't preclude action for ex-police officer

She knows this only because someone told her about it later. She has no memory of the time between when she filled up water bottles for her bike ride and when she awoke from surgery five days later to discover that her own body "felt like a foreign place to me."

On a sunny May afternoon in 1998, she had suffered a spinal cord injury that left her a paraplegic. Gulden, now 42, is one of 5.6 million Americans living with some degree of paralysis, according to a just-released survey commissioned by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

In some ways, though, Gulden is far from typical.

Teaching criminal justice

The former police officer in Alexandria (a handcuffs key on the keychain tucked beneath her bicycle seat led to her sergeant identifying her) and triathlete teaches criminal justice full time at Alexandria's sprawling T.C. Williams High School — featured in the 2000 film Remember the Titans.

She retired from the police department on disability in 2000 and, for a time, "traveled and fooled around. In some ways, living was a full-time job." When a new REI store opened near her home in Arlington, Va., she took a job as a saleswoman, figuring "I'll meet like-minded people."

Police department friends told her about the opening for a criminal justice teacher at T.C. Williams. "I had come to realize that I really like kids," Gulden says, so she applied for the job.

Although she taught three years at the police academy, this is her first year teaching high school. One day last week, she asked her students what they liked most about a recent field trip to see the Alexandria jail and courthouse. Said one girl: "The best part for me was how Miss Gulden knew everybody."

Relatively few Americans with spinal cord injuries are employed, the new survey suggests. It found that 42% have an annual household income of less than $15,000, while that's true for only 13% of the general population. More could work, says Joe Canose of the Reeve Foundation, but they'd lose Medicare coverage if they earned too much.

An eloquent "ambassador" for the Reeve Foundation, Gulden has testified on Capitol Hill about the need for stem cell research.

Last month, she was among the invited guests at the White House when President Obama announced he was reversing the Bush administration's limits on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research.

She presented the president with a pair of Superman dog tags from the Reeve Foundation for his daughters. Pretty heady stuff for a Northumberland, Pa., native who credits actress Angie Dickinson in the 1970s TV show Police Woman for her interest in law enforcement.

'It doesn't get easier'

But if Gulden seems upbeat when you first meet, do not tell her that she seems to have adjusted well to life in a wheelchair.

"I may just be having a good day," says Gulden, who was injured while training for a 330-mile ride to raise money for AIDS. "It doesn't get easier. It just gets different."

Not surprisingly, people living with paralysis have an increased risk of depression, says Edwin Trevathan, director of the Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Being in a wheelchair also raises their risk of obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes, Trevathan says, as well as bladder and kidney problems.

Pressure sores also are a problem. To reduce her risk, several times an hour Gulden grasps the top of her chair's wheels and pushes straight down, raising her bottom off the seat for a second or two.

Nearly 11 years after her accident, living still is nearly a full-time job for Gulden.

She awakes at 4 a.m., because it takes her an hour and a half to get ready, much of that time in the bathroom. And this is a woman with very close-cropped dark hair who doesn't wear makeup.

She drives her station wagon to T.C. Williams, where she arrives a little after 6 a.m. "There's just so much to do, I can't get it all done between 8 and 8:30," when her first class begins. She returns home at 4:45 p.m. Every other day, after letting her yellow Lab outside to do his business, she starts her "bowel program." That requires sitting on the toilet for an hour and a half.

"Who spends 2½ hours a day in the bathroom?" Gulden says.

At least she can get into her bathroom. When she visits her brother in California, she must stay in a hotel because his bathroom doorways aren't wide enough for her wheelchair. When visiting friends close to home, she has to keep her stay short for the same reason.

Other barriers are attitudinal.

Despite her many accomplishments, Gulden says, "there's still an attitude that because I'm in a wheelchair, I can't do anything."

When her faculty mentor introduced her last summer to another teacher at T.C. Williams, that teacher addressed questions about her to the mentor instead of Gulden.

Says Gulden: "We're all a bunch of 'Delta Does.' "

Label: Health