Buoyed by Community

Twenty-two-year-old Eden Schroeder has been a swimmer for much of her life. She started swimming competitively when she was in elementary school. So maybe it’s no surprise that when Shepherd Sharks coach Nicholas Dietrich, MS, ACSM-CEP, saw Eden practicing for a scuba diving trip in the Shepherd Center pool, he asked if she’d like to try out for the swim team.

“That's when I fell in love with swimming again,” recalls Eden, “And it’s become a huge part of my life.”

For a while, swimming didn’t seem to be in the cards anymore for Eden. In November 2020, Eden sustained a C5 - C6 level spinal cord injury (SCI) when she and her friends were boating off the coast of Naples, Florida. Eden dove off the boat and hit a sandbar. She spent about two weeks in the ICU at Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, before transferring to Shepherd Center.

“I was excited to be at Shepherd,” she says. “It sounds strange, but you’re going from the ICU, lying down and not doing anything — to a place where people are happy to see you, and they make the environment fun. They have great attitudes and have seen this happen before, so you’re not the only one going through it. I think one of the biggest things about inpatient is that you feel so seen, and people understand the challenges that you're going through, but they also see you as a person, so they don't just see you for your disability.”

Eden spent three months in the Adolescent Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Program, followed by three months in the Day Program. After some time at home, she returned to the Day Program, where she says her therapist, Heather Jones, DPT, helped her get her life together beyond Shepherd’s walls.

Eden has always been athletic, enjoying sports and the outdoors, so she tried adaptive sports, including hand cycling and sit skiing.

But swimming tops her list.

“I’ve fallen in love with swimming. It’s the closest I've been able to get to able-bodied exercise because I'm getting my heart rate up, and my body weight doesn’t hold me down. I'm going to continue to swim for as long as I can.”

And that passion has led to experiences Eden never imagined that day in the Shepherd Center pool. In March 2023, she started swimming with the Shepherd Sharks, part of the Fred, Shaler, and Andrew Alias Sports Teams program. In December, she competed in the 2023 U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships in Orlando, Florida, where she set American records in both the 50- and 100-meter backstroke.

“It was an amazing experience — really exciting and kind of overwhelming — because I had never been to something that big before,” she explains. “But even in that environment, it's very similar to Shepherd, and everyone has a disability, so no one sees you as any different.”

Beyond swim practices and weight training, Eden is in her junior year at Georgia State University. She’s majoring in psychology and hopes to continue her studies to earn a doctorate in rehabilitation psychology.

She says conversations with adolescent program rehabilitation counselor Cheryl Linden, MA, LPC; MS OT/L, planted the seeds for her interest in the field.

“I worked most of my adolescence, and I asked Cheryl, ‘What can I do now? How can I go back to work? My hands don't work. My body doesn't work.’ She asked if I had thought about counseling. And I realized that when I met people going through the same injury as me, I was helping them process. I would love a career where I could help people who have experienced this or other traumatic injuries.”

Eden is already giving back to others as a peer mentor in Shepherd's Keeping Adolescents and Young Adults Connected (KAYAC) program.

“That has been a great avenue for me to meet people in person. I've made amazing connections. Families tell me it's so good to see a young person transitioning through injury, returning to school, participating in sports, and continuing life. One person was a swimmer who wanted to get back into the sport, and I helped get him back into the pool,” she recalls. “I love that so much!”

Eden reaches many people — even those she doesn’t meet face to face — through social media, including her TikTok account h0twheels2.0, where she has close to 300,000 followers.

“I started my TikTok account to show that people with spinal cord injuries still live very normal lives. By posting what I am doing, I'm spreading awareness, so people know we still get out there. It's nice to hear from someone who doesn't have a disability, but when people who have disabilities say that they see what I'm doing and they want to try things as well, that's what's important to me,” she explains.

For now, Eden is focusing on school and swimming. In April, she competed in an international swim meet in Indiana, the Citi Para Swimming World Series USA. There, she swam her best times yet in all four of her events and got internationally classified, which means she will be able to compete in more big events. She swam with the Shepherd Sharks at the Bill Keating Jr. Memorial Cincinnati Para-Swimming Open in May and has her sights set on competing with Team USA for meets in the future.

As she trains, she’s grateful for the embrace of her Shepherd community, the support of Alias family, whose generosity has elevated Shepherd’s sports programs, and for the connections she has made.

“Shepherd has been a great vessel for me to build a support system. I've made friends who have turned into my family. At Shepherd, I don’t have the excuse of, ‘Oh, I can't do this because of my disability,’ because everyone there knows how to help me figure things out. It went from a hospital setting that should have been very traumatic and turned into a place of support, love, and family.”

Written by Ruth Underwood