Chelsie Hill knew she wanted to become a dancer ever since she was 3 years old, and not even a life-altering accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down was going to wreck her dream. She learned to use her wheelchair as part of her body and started to dance again. Today she is an acclaimed hip-hop dancer, motivational speaker and a fine example that when life gives you lemons, you can indeed make lemonade.
“Dance is the only thing my daughter has ever wanted to do,” Chelsie’s mother Wendy Hill says. She won her first competition at age five and kept turning in stellar performances all through her school years. She made the high-school varsity dance team as a freshman and everything seem to point to a successful career as a professional dancer. But then, tragedy struck. After a party, Chelsie got in a car with a drunk driver who hit a tree head-on at 40mph. She survived the ordeal, but was diagnosed as a T10 paraplegic. The aspiring dancer retained full control of her upper body, but doctors told her that she would never walk again. She was just 17 at the time.
