{"id":53841,"date":"2018-12-13T08:41:51","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T15:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=53841"},"modified":"2018-12-12T16:55:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T23:55:53","slug":"graduate-kay-mitchell-spires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/graduate-kay-mitchell-spires\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduate Kay Mitchell-Spires: After debilitating accident, Tucson grad said NAU helped her make ‘beautiful mosaic of my life’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kay Mitchell-Spires<\/strong> has lived two lives.<\/p>\n

In the first, she was a business owner, a world traveler and always on the go\u2014living on her own terms, mother to eight children, happy.<\/p>\n

In the second, she is confined to a wheelchair, in significant pain, unable to care for herself, struggling to read and write and do other tasks that she used to do without thinking.<\/p>\n

They are bisected by a day in 2006 when Mitchell-Spires was in an accident that broke most of the bones on the right side of her body, including her neck, and left her with a stage III traumatic brain injury. She almost died. That day was followed by two grueling years of surgery and recovery, memory loss, doctor\u2019s appointments, speech, physical, vocational and cognitive therapy and longing for the life she used to live. She didn\u2019t recognize her children\u2019s faces at first. Everything she\u2019d had to live for was gone.<\/p>\n

Kay Mitchell-Spires, however, had no intention of dying, or even just going through the motions of life. As difficult, painful and foreign as her situation was, she kept going, starting with earning a college degree\u2014a goal she\u2019ll accomplish when she crosses the stage at Northern Arizona University\u2019s December 2018 commencement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being driven by an elder daughter to the Pima Community College campus and rolling into the registrar\u2019s office in my wheelchair, seeking to know the steps I needed to take to become a full-time student,\u201d Mitchell-Spires said. \u201cI expected stares and judgment but found only encouragement and acceptance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unable to read and write, she had help from a tutor and an aide as she worked through her class. She had audio textbooks and used broken-speech voice commands to type out her homework and papers. Every day for that first year, she cried and thought about quitting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt as if everyone was speaking to me in a foreign language that everyone understood but me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t quit, and as her brain got used to the work, she found other tasks were easier. By her second year at PCC, she was walking and relearning to read. Two years after enrolling at Pima, Mitchell-Spires was accepted at NAU, starting her bachelor\u2019s degree in public administration. She attended classes at the Tucson campus in addition to taking online courses through the College of Education.<\/p>\n

None of it was easy, she said. For the last nine years, she struggled with reading comprehension. She constantly feared she didn\u2019t understand what an assignment was asking for. The best part was seeing grades posted at the end of a semester and knowing she was one class closer to earning her degree.<\/p>\n

[block-quote align=”center”]I felt as if everyone was speaking to me in a foreign language that everyone understood but me.[\/block-quote]<\/p>\n

John Strader<\/strong>, a faculty member with NAU Online, said he taught Mitchell-Spires twice in her collegiate career, both at the community college level and as she worked toward her bachelor\u2019s degree at NAU.<\/p>\n

\u201cKay has overcome substantial setbacks and challenges in her life, and through all of those she has remained dedicated to learning and dedicated to her academic goals,\u201d he said. \u201cShe has proven to be an exemplary student in the process, demonstrating her depth of analysis through her discussions with her fellow students and her academic work product. It is a real pleasure to see someone not give up on herself or her goals, and to achieve so much success in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that degree almost in hand, Mitchell-Spires said a host of new career options are available to her; she\u2019s looking for jobs in the Department of Veterans Affairs and with nonprofits that seek to better the lives of children in the foster care system. She and her wife have adopted and fostered several children, so these causes have extra meaning for her.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s even found ways to give back to the community. For the last three years, Mitchell-Spires has spent four days a month teaching other foster or adoptive parents how to style and manage hair of African-American or multicultural children; it doesn\u2019t seem like a big deal, she said, but knowing how to care for a child you\u2019ve taken in who\u2019s a different race promotes bonding and makes children more confident and self-assured.<\/p>\n

Mitchell-Spires said it feels surreal to think about walking across the stage to accept what she calls her \u201csmall moment of glory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAttending NAU was a visual reminder to myself and others that, despite my different abilities, the impossible could become possible as long as my courage and perseverance never wavered,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to explain, but NAU, its faculty and students, gave me the skills and confidence to collect, gather and examine the broken pieces of my life and make the most beautiful mosaic of my life that I have now.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"NAU<\/a>Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
\n(928) 523-5556 | heidi.toth@nau.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kay Mitchell-Spires has lived two lives. In the first, she was a business owner, a world traveler and always on the go\u2014living on her own terms, mother to eight children, happy. In the second, she is confined to a wheelchair, in significant pain, unable to care for herself, struggling to read and write and do…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":53845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}