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In October 2011, the Louisiana personal trainer and physical therapy assistant missed a stop sign while driving home from an appointment with a client. A truck hit her vehicle broadside, and Hughes went flying through her windshield. She landed in a ditch and, seconds later, her burning car landed on top of her, searing her back. Conscious throughout the ordeal, Hughes knew she was either paralysed or that her legs were amputated because she couldn’t feel either one. “Immediately, I started asking myself all the physical therapy questions. Is my spinal cord severed? What kind of injury is this? How far up? How low down?”, she told the media. At the hospital, doctors told Hughes that she would never walk again. But during a nine-hour surgery to insert rods and plates along her spine to stabilise it, they learned that Hughes’ spinal cord wasn’t severed as they originally thought. “That was all I needed to hear to keep pushing forward,” she said. “That was kind of my prayer.” After her 100-day hospital stay, Hughes went home and immediately started training. An athlete all her life - she was supposed to run a marathon the week after her crash - exercise had always given Hughes an emotional outlet. After the accident, her love of exercise proved critical to her recovery, and to attaining the new goal she had created for herself. “I told my sister from the beginning, I will not get married - whoever it be to, or whenever it happens - I will not do it until I can walk down the aisle. I just won’t be in a wheelchair,” she said. “So that was always a goal. I didn’t know the next year it would actually happen.” Hughes heard about a Michigan trainer who had worked with other paraplegics. She reached out to him and flew to Michigan to begin training.
“The first time I talked to her on the telephone, she was like, ‘Look, I don’t want to be in this chair forever. I understand what happened to me, but I want to work hard and see where I can get,’” said Mike Barwis, a strength and conditioning coach who frequently works with Olympic and professional athletes. It was during a session with Barwis that Hughes moved her legs for the first time since the accident. Hughes had reconnected with a former acquaintance, Odie Hughes. She initially worried about meeting him again now that she was in a wheelchair. “I didn’t know how he would accept that, or how he would feel about that,” she recalled. “But it was like he never even saw the chair, he just saw me. He believed everything with me. If I told him, ‘I think I can do this. I want to try this,’ then he would be my biggest cheerleader.”Within three months, they were engaged. Hughes started the clock: She had nine months to get on her feet. Barwis said he had no doubts they could make it happen. But while working to build up the strength in her legs, Hughes also had to plan a wedding. She also opened a gym she started in her community of Bogalusa, about 70 miles north of New Orleans. There was also the issue of finding a wedding gown. “I actually bought three dresses. I didn’t like any of them,” she said. After getting ready to settle on one of them, she received a call from the cable network TLC, asking if she wanted to be featured on the show, “Say Yes to the Dress.” Hughes flew to the Atlanta bridal store featured on show and finally found a gown she was happy with.
She never practised walking in it until the day of her wedding. “I didn’t want anybody to see the real one,” she explained. So instead, she practised using one of the other gowns. She started in a full-body brace, then with a walker before moving on to two canes. Finally, she used two leg braces that went up from her feet to just above the knees, all while holding on to a person on each side of her. On her wedding day, September. 20, Hughes walked down the aisle, on her two feet, holding the hands of the two men giving her away: Her dad, who stood to her right, and Barwis, on her left. As excited as she was, Hughes said she never anticipated the nerves she experienced as she stared down the aisle at her guests. “I felt like this was everybody’s fairytale ending. This was the story they had been following for so long and this was the ending they were waiting to see,” she said. “So I felt like there was a lot of pressure but there was no greater reward than getting to the end of that aisle, for sure.” Waiting for her there with a huge smile was her fiance. “When her foot caught that slip my heart stopped. But she just held it together like a champ,” said Odie Hughes. “I had complete faith in her.”
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