It wasn’t
that long ago, and Devon Geary has come a very long way.
She was so
sick in 2006, when she was a sophomore at James Monroe High in Fredericksburg,
that she had to drop out of school. She thought she might be dying. If she was,
would her doctors and parents tell her?
She suffers
from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). The rare genetic
disorder can be debilitating. Sitting up or standing can cause heart rates to
soar and blood flow to the brain to decrease, resulting in fainting.
Worse,
Devon's case of POTS is accompanied by Ehler-Danos syndrome, which affects
connective tissue between joints and can make movement agonizing.
At 16, she
was faced with the prospect of being bedridden or in a wheelchair for the rest
of her life. Her doctor gave her little hope.
But she
refused to give in.
In 2008, she
came to Germanna Community College in a wheelchair and earned her GED.
She began
classes at GCC, using a walker and frequently losing consciousness.
There was no
way I could have gone to a four-year school," Devon said. "I could
barely walk. I could barely stay conscious."
"I
would sometimes find Devon in the fetal position," Win Stevens, GCC's
Coordinator of Disability Services said. She was able to stick with it, she
said, because at Germanna: "Nobody stared at me. Nobody laughed at me. I
had been in a wheelchair for 2½ years. I was used to pity stares. But I didn't
get that at Germanna. People were very kind and accommodating, but they didn't
pity me."
Devon
thrived on the kind of one on one attention students receive from faculty at
Germanna.
Her
condition gradually improved, and though there was still pain, by 2010, she not
only walked on her own, but became an assistant dance instructor. As a
teenager, she had dreamed of a career as a professional dancer.
She did so
well at Germanna she was awarded nearly a full scholarship to Amherst, one of
the top liberal arts schools in the country.
At Germanna,
instead of being pigeonholed, she decided who she was going to be.
"If
anything, I was the 6-foot-tall redhead with the 4.0," Devon said."I
was never defined by my illness there and I really appreciate that. I don't
know if it would have been that way at a four-year school," she said.
"I think I did pretty well, but it was because of the environment."
Now she's
22. She has graduated from Amherst, been chosen as a Amherst-Folger
Undergraduate Fellow and will work there as a teaching assistant through the
end of the academic year as she prepares to begin graduate school.
As part of
her fellowship, she will learn about archiving at the Folger Shakespeare
Library on Capitol Hill in Washington. It’s the world’s biggest repository of
the printed works of William Shakespeare.
And she said
she's "looked at frontispieces, engravings, and other illustrations in
maps, atlases, and books, most of which were about the New World, to see how
Europeans depicted the Other in the Early Modern Period––particularly how the
English depicted and represented American Indians in images in that time
period. It really was amazing."
Her recovery
has been so dramatic that she said she made the University of Massachusetts
Competitive Ballroom Dance Team last fall, although she didn’t compete because
she was working on a paper she hopes to see published. “If you’re going to
compete, you have to rehearse a minimum of eight to 10 hours a week, if not
more,” she said. “In ballroom dancing, it’s two moving as one and everything
counts.” She hopes to compete soon, but said she had work to do first.
She wrote an
analysis of the novel “Whatever You Love” by Louise Doughty that includes work
with literary and psychoanalytic trauma theory.
Her last
week as an undergrad, she submitted 100 pages of her own critical writing, 83
of which belonged to her paper on “Whatever You Love,” which she calls a
“thesis-ish” and which she continues to refine in hopes of getting it
published.
She saw
herself in it, she says, because POTS took away the things she loved when she
was younger, before she fought her way out of a deep hole of pain and despair
to reclaim her life.
“When I
first read 'Whatever You Love,' I could really identify with the protagonist,”
she said. “I read it cover to cover. When I finished, I said ‘Whoa!’ because I
really saw myself and my own experiences in that story, and I didn’t feel so
alone anymore.
“A few
months before that, I had read through all the journals I wrote when I was
processing what it was to be sick. I saw in the narrative of the book the same
ideas I saw in my journals. Back then, I couldn’t figure out how to move
forward, even though I knew I had to if I had any hope of feeling like a person
again.
“Honestly, I
don’t know how I did it.”
But it’s
pretty simple, really.
She started
by dragging herself to class at Germanna.
Then she
made her own wish come true.
“I’m so
happy,” Devon said. “I’ve really found what I want to be doing, at least for
the foreseeable future. It’s exhilarating and invigorating and all around
wonderful.”
