Victoria Arlen Quotes

Since the attack I have undergone over 250 operations to improve my physical functioning.

I had to learn to walk again, talk again, think again.

Last year I had a stroke. It left me in bad shape. I had to teach myself how to walk and talk all over again. It was a long hard fight. My speech is not perfect but I'm getting there.

How do I take a step? How do I lift my foot off the ground, move it through the air a little bit and then bring it down? I had to teach myself to walk again.

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.

I've had, you know, my leg chopped off.

I have to relearn how to walk again. It's not that you have to reteach yourself. But your mind and your foot have to get back on the same page, and remind yourself that it's OK to do this. You've done this before. It's reminding it what it's supposed to do again.

You break your neck, you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, it's foreign. You're in this body that you thought you were - that you were accustomed to, and now you're not. You have to figure out everything. I think the biggest thing for me was getting a license, because it gives you - it gives you your independence back.

I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.

I've been working hard: lots of therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy, yoga too.

It finally became clear to me that they had no hopes of my ever walking again.

Nurses told my mother that I was going to be OK. They thought I could walk without a limp and without a brace. And we stopped in a shoe store on the way home and bought a pair of low-top saddle Oxford shoes, which was sort of a symbol that I was going to be a normal little boy.

To go through the agonizing process of learning how to walk again and write again and speak again makes you much more empathetic to people.

Being injured, nobody wants to be injured.

The doctors said I might not be able to walk again. Today, I can almost run, but back then, I couldn't even stand up. I was bed-ridden. If I wanted to turn over in bed, I had to move my legs with my hands. I was in and out of the hospital for months.

Any athlete will tell you that it's the most difficult thing in the world being injured.

I'm just happy to have my legs back, cause at one point in time, I wasn't even walking.

I had to teach myself how to walk again. It was crazy. I couldn't even make a muscle in my leg. I felt like no muscles in my leg. I was already skinny. It was like my leg was dead.

I've done what I could as far as getting physically healthy after my knee injury, and I've done what I could to get mentally healthy after losing my husband.

That's one thing with stroke victims, you've got to have a goal and you cannot accept anything but that goal.

There's no way I can go back and uninjure myself.

Around 2001, I went to rehab in Arizona, and I started to see what was going on and how the past affected me. I started to get a grip on it. But over the next decade, I reverted to the behaviour I used to protect myself when I was young - being mindless, being defeatist and full of bravado.

The toughest time was lying in a Tenerife hospital with no-one speaking English, next to a window with the sun beating down and my leg tied up, thinking I would never box again or even walk again. It took every bit of shine off winning the world title.

When I was injured after 'Kill Bill' I had a year where I not just couldn't make any money but I couldn't swim, I couldn't surf, I could hardly run, which is insane. I couldn't do gymnastics, martial arts, I could barely crawl on all fours. That was devastating to me.

At the time I was asked if I would ever step back in a race car, but what was very important for me was to go into the bathroom and pee on my own, but I could not do that. I had to be helped. That was my number one priority.