Andreea Chelaru Hopes to Walk Again

Andreea Chelaru closes her eyes down tightly and quiets down. “Look, it’s almost like I don’t remember this. I don’t want to [remember it] anymore…”, she confessed from her wheel chair. The road back to December 15th, 1999, makes the young girl’s face turn pale. “I don’t know if it was cloudy. I don’t even know if it was [in the] morning. I was on the junior team at Onesti. I started the training session on floor. Then , I went on to vault,” she said. ‘I ram up to the horse, pushed off, and got lost in the air. I took a hard fall. When I tried to get up, I couldn’t do it.” Andreea laid unconscious for two weeks in a hospital in Iasi. “She was delirious. Her fever was up to 104 deg F [40 deg C] and she would get chills that were so strong that I had to wrap her in damp towels every 5 minutes,” recalls her mother Adriana Chelaru. “After the surgical procedure to the injured vertebrae, she had perfusions done through her arms, than her leg and she was in a cast up to her waist.” One morning, the two of them were loaded in am ambulance and sent to Bucharest to see a specialist surgeon, Dr. Dan Exercian. "He told me the surgery done in Iasi resulted in an infection, but he won’t open Andreea up unless I assume full responsibility,” said Adriana Chelaru. “Rather than see her turn into a vegetable, I closed my eyes and signed.” Months of rehab followed. In the fall, Andreea went to school in the wheel chair she has been confined to. “I enrolled at school here in Zărnesti, in 8th grade. But it’s not the same as it was Onesti", she said. ‘My classmates copy their notes for me and after I study them, I only take oral examinations," said the youngster. ”Before, I wanted to be a great gymnast. Right now, I just dream about getting a computer, so I could at least finish high school through correspondence courses.”

On New Year’s eve, Andreea found out she will have a chance to walk again, following a surgical procedure she will have done in March in the city of Bordeaux, France. “The Dubosi family that she stayed with during an exchange program with the Onesti gym club, offered to help her with everything, including the rehab,” said the girls’ mother. In order to do that, she’ll have to go to a public notary in Brasov next week and sign a release form translated in three languages, handing over custody of her daughter to the French family for 3 months. “Next year, I could throw away this [wheel] chair,” joked Andreea. She laughs for the first time. When she was young, she would remain glued to the TV set, absorbing every move in Nadia Comaneci’s routines. She would always jump up and down in her arm chair. That chair was thrown away a long time ago, after all its springs broke.

Several weeks ago, Andreea re-learned to use a fork and pen. Her parents stick them inside her almost lifeless hand and she grabs them tightly with her middle fingers. ‘"Thank God I can still move my arms. That, my neck, eyes and lips are the only things I can control,” said the girl. With a couple of abrupt movements, ignoring the annoyingly tensed-up muscles, she managed to write a message for Pros port’s readers. This took her over 15 minutes, but the final results brought a content smile on her effort-flushed face.

In the summer of 2000, the year after the accident, Octavian Belu gave Andreea 10 boxes of Pampers diapers as a gift. “ he spared us 4 months’ worth of spending. Since our daughter cannot move, or go to the bathroom without help, she needs to have a diaper on all the time,” explained her mother. “That is an even more pressing need because she contracted a urinary tract infection that she’s never gotten over. She goes through periods when she has to urinate very frequently. Her temperature will shoot up to 104 and she is bed ridden and fed through IV’s, which is what happened before Christmas.”

The Chelaru family has to pay around 800,000 (almost $30) lei every month for Andreea’s prescription. ‘That’s an awful lot. I work as a lathe operator at the 6th March factory, and I think I’ll get laid off this month. My husband, a chemical products operator, was let go when one of Dinamo club’s sponsors, Vladimir Cohn, took over the paper factory in Zărnesti", said Andreea’s mother. “We don’t get more than 2.5 million lei ($85) coming into our household now.”

Andreea does 4 hours’ worth of rehabilitation exercises every day, taking turns working out on the bike and the make-shift rib stall in the hallway. “I tie her feet down to the pedals and I turn them, trying to imitate normal motion,” explained her mother. The young girl throws a resigned look in the direction of the rib stall, where the rags used to tie her arms are now hanging down. At 7, she was chasing her mother around the train station in Onesti asking all the cab drivers where the gymnastics training center was. At 11, she was winning medals at the elite level. Now, she’s having a hard time reaching the pile of medals that are messily laying in her lap.

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