Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

So I’m the new guy, and the latest guest post contributor to the EasyStand blog. My name is Shawn Dean and I am an attorney and disability consultant in Minneapolis, MN (by way of Eau Claire, Wisconsin). I look forward to sharing a new viewpoint on a variety of disability related topics. But before I jump right in with my first official guest blog post I thought that it would be a good idea to let everyone know who I am and what I’m going to write about.

In terms of disability I am a C6-7 quadriplegic, having sustained a spinal cord injury in a diving accident at a beach at the age of seventeen on July 12, 1996. I took a typical, every day, “Baywatch” style approach to the water, but the combination of my instinctual swim team racing dive and the water being much shallower than it should have been resulted in an unfortunate neck break: boom, life altered forever. Not a very ideal age for it to happen either, as I was going into my senior year of high school and transitioning to college. But then again there is no ideal age to enter the not so wonderful world of paralysis. You just have to play the hand that you were dealt and move on with your life the best way that you can.

As I mentioned at the onset, I am an attorney. I moved to Minneapolis in the fall of 2003 to start law school at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. It was a very difficult and stressful four years, compounded by the fact that I had to overcome many more challenges outside the classroom than my fellow law school classmates. But it feels good to have powered through. I graduated in May 2007, took the bar exam that summer, and I’ve been licensed in Minnesota since December 2007. I am most interested in practicing disability law and using my law degree to enforce, advocate, and/or improve on the ADA, disability rights, accommodations, accessibility, employment opportunities for people with disabilities, reforming the handicapped parking system to reduce rampant abuse, etc. Having a disability of my own gives me a unique insight and instant credibility in that regard.

A related project that I’ve been working on for the past two years is starting a Minnesota chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association with two good friends in the Twin Cities disability community. We essentially want our “MNSCIA” to be a clearinghouse resource center for people at all stages of their SCI experience. As I transitioned to this lifestyle after rehab I would have loved to have been able to reach out to one source to answer all my questions about good doctors to follow up with, medical equipment and supplies, attendant care, accessible housing, etc. instead of trying to figure it all out on my own. We hope to have it up and running sometime within this next year. It’s been an interesting and rewarding experience so far.

Other things about me in a nutshell: I’m an uncle of a three year old nephew and two year old niece, which is awesome but also challenging for a handful of reasons because of my SCI. I’m a super sports fan in general but my biggest sports passion is Wisconsin Badger football, having had season tickets for 11+ years now, despite living in Minneapolis. I am a big time movie buff and have seen who knows how many movies (a few hundred easily) since becoming a Netflix disciple in 2004. I’m an Eagle Scout award recipient, which I proudly include on my resume. I enjoy writing. I’ve been working on a book about my life’s post-accident SCI experiences for years now. I started it in college but it’s unfortunately taken a back seat since I started law school. I’m going to start working on it again soon though. I also started a personal blog last summer called One Man’s Access that delves into a number of disability and access topics.

As for what I plan to contribute to the EasyStand blog, there’s an old adage that you should write about what you know: and I know SCI. Well. In the fourteen years that I’ve been a quad I’ve experienced almost everything, good and bad, that the SCI lifestyle provides. One of my primary keys to “survival” has been to stay forward thinking and turn as many negatives into positives as I can despite the countless frustrations that I’ve encountered along the way. So as far as that goes, I intend to shed some light on a number of the very unique intricacies of my world as it pertains to SCI, wheelchair use, access (or lack thereof in most cases), family relations, career, etc. And most importantly, by implication I always hope to enlighten people that quads with SCI like me can be much more handi-capable than handicapped, sufficiently abled and not just disabled, possess abilities that go beyond disability…..you get the idea. I hope that EasyStand Blog readers will appreciate my insight.

Lastly, I do own an EasyStand stander myself: an EasyStand 5000 which I’ve had since early 1997. For the past five or six years I have been using it about every other day for up to an hour while I eat breakfast and watch SportsCenter.