‘A Lot More to Give’

After Maggie Hicks had a spinal stroke at age 62, resulting in a spinal cord injury (SCI), it never crossed her mind that she might not return to work.

“I knew that I still had a lot more to give. I still feel that.”

Maggie lives in Lawley, a small community in central Alabama. She was at home when she experienced the spinal stroke, a type of stroke that often happens because of an injury, but not in Maggie’s case.

“It just happened. Within 30 minutes, I had lost all sensation from the waist down,” she says.

After more than a week at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, Maggie transferred to Shepherd Center’s Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Program in January 2025.

She says she was impressed with Shepherd from the moment she arrived.

“When I got out of the ambulance and rolled into Shepherd, [Shepherd Center co-founder] Mrs. Shepherd is there,” she recalls. “She’s at the door. And that impressed me, to know that she took to heart what was going on in the facility.”

And that wasn’t the only part of her first 24 hours at Shepherd that assured her she had come to the right place.

“Everybody was so understanding, and within, I'll say, 15 minutes of being assigned a room, it was like ants, because there were so many people in and out, evaluating me,” Maggie says.

“Not only the nurses that are getting you situated, but … all the other doctors that you were going to see. And then within the next day — you're not thinking about physical therapy — they're starting physical therapy,” she recalls. “I read a comment prior to coming — ‘you don't stay in bed.’ That's true. You don't, because the whole thing is to get you back where you need to be.”

And where Maggie felt she “needed to be” was independent, back at home, church, and back at work, at the Alabama State Department of Education, where she is the student assessment coordinator.

She was ready to put in the work to get there. She worked with her therapists to strengthen both her lower body and her upper body, which allowed her to use a manual wheelchair.

While she was participating in inpatient rehabilitation, family came back and forth from Alabama to support her. Her husband and son would come, staying in Shepherd Center’s donor-funded family housing, when time permitted. When she began the day program, she and her husband stayed together in housing.

“It was wonderful to have someone who has set up the facilities so that they weren't having to pay or find a place to stay. Because that is very stressful — trying to get across town or … into that traffic. It was very helpful for them to be just right there,” she says.

While in the SCI Day Program, Maggie worked with a vocational rehabilitation counselor to develop a return-to-work strategy. She went on a field trip to an office building so she could think through any accommodations she might need in order to return to work using her wheelchair.

“That's where they kept emphasizing, ‘You're going to have to have a conversation with your employer to find out what's going on, how you're going to be able to adapt to your environment when you go back to work,’” she says. “That really stuck with me because when I did go back to work, even before I reported in the office, I had conversations with our HR and our legal about the building and what adaptations I would need.”

Maggie travels for work, so the vocational rehabilitation team also helped her think through what travel would look like. The team encouraged her to advocate for herself and to make calls and ask questions about accommodations and processes before traveling.

After three months of rehabilitation, Maggie returned home with her husband. She has returned to work with a hybrid schedule. She drives to the office three days a week in an adapted van and works from home two days a week, which allows her to attend physical therapy close to home. She has gained more sensation in her legs and has been able to take some steps using a walker and a knee brace.

She has spent a lot of time with her family, including her two grandchildren, and she’s taken work trips by both plane and car. She is also grateful for her small church family who kept the prayers coming while she was at Shepherd. “I’m so fortunate to have so many people praying for my recovery. All those prayers were felt.”

In fact, Maggie says she started working from home just a day or two after she left Shepherd. “My staff and supervisor did an outstanding job in my absence. I am very fortunate that they were able to pick up my duties so I could concentrate on getting well.”

“I had to get back into that routine of keeping your mind abreast of things that are familiar,” she says. “And I think that has really helped, the motivation for me to continue, which my grandchildren, my family, of course, do that. But going back to work has really been fulfilling. Again, staying at home was not something I wanted to do. I feel like I still have a lot more to offer, and I feel like I've got many more years to do that, and the wheelchair's not going to negate that. It's just a way of getting around.”

Written by Ruth Underwood