Sunday Vibes

Kimi-possible: A tragic accident never stopped this spunky woman from living her best life!

"THIS road I'm on, feels like there's a wall I can't break through," sings Nur Ashikeen Iqbal, her eyes closed and her hand holding on to her headphones. "When hope is gone, I will make myself grow stronger…"

A Million Stars is Ashikeen's story — the one she's telling the world. Her strong voice belts out poignant lyrics about having to overcome insurmountable challenges. "I decided the most effective way to express my feelings was through song," she confides, shrugging her shoulders.

Yet, it's abundantly clear that her voice is far from the only strong thing about her. Ashikeen (or fondly known to her family and close friends as Kimi) has been a wheelchair user for more than a decade. A result, she says, of a tragic accident that occurred in Singapore.

It helps to think of it as the day her greatest adventure began, she tells me with a wide smile. That it has brought Kimi many other positives — increased empathy, good friends, a new perspective — is what she thinks about often, even if she also describes it as "the most traumatic day of my life".

She sparkles with a kind of calm but intense energy, even when remembering what she describes as her lowest point; when doctors told her she wouldn't be able to walk again. "I remember just crying for a while."

Her family went home and she remained in hospital, dealing with this news and contemplating a future that felt extremely bleak — because this was what she thought life as a wheelchair user would be.

In the 14 years since, Kimi has had to unpick a lifetime of negative messages about people with special needs. Now, she's focused on showing that the very fact of her "existing — living a happy, normal life — is activism in itself".

"I keep telling myself that I can do just about anything," she says with a determined tilt to her chin. And judging by her list of achievements, she's certainly done well for herself. Author, singer, beauty queen, runway model, entrepreneur — those are just some of the things she's accomplished over the years.

Kimi took part and won the title 'Ms Wheelchair Queen Malaysia' in 2018. In 2019, she took part and won the 'Ms Charity Queen 2019' crown. She also joined Don Management as a model since 2018. Her book, Wheels of Success, closely parallels her life, with the protagonist being a wheelchair user as well after a tragic accident.

"That's where the similarities end," she declares grinning. "It's a love story and fictional!" Her face grows serious again. There's still a lot to accomplish, she continues. "This," she points to her wheelchair, "doesn't stop me from anything."

Not that it has been easy. At the beginning, it felt like a "huge loss". "I couldn't imagine myself having a good life in a wheelchair, because I just don't think there are enough examples of that anywhere," she says, adding: "The only thing that kept me going was the strong family support I had and the fact that I knew I was going to have to live my life anyway, no matter what happens."

UNFORGETTABLE DAY

There's clearly two parts to her life, bisected by an event that would lead to the second part of her life as a paraplegic. Eyes faraway, she speaks of an "idyllic" childhood in Singapore. "Sometimes, I wish to relive those years all over again," she confesses half-wistfully.

Her parents divorced when she was 11. "That had an impact on me," she confesses. "But it was an amicable divorce. My parents remained friends and I had a bigger family circle as a result of that."

She was never alone, she adds. "I had friends everywhere. I was never alone." She was a precocious child, she admits. "I was outgoing, friendly and I loved everything about my life. I had so many ambitions. I wanted to be a singer, a psychiatrist, a lawyer. See? I've got lots of ambitions!" She breaks into laughter.

Life was good. Kimi had supportive parents, great friends and big ambitions. The private school student also excelled in sports, representing her former school, Compassvale Secondary, in running competitions.

"You know how it is," she muses. "You think you've got life all figured out. You've got friends, family, a great life, big dreams and then everything gets upended at a blink of an eye." A pause, and she shakes a head, murmuring: "It's crazy, you know."

The day of her accident was uneventful. The then-17-year-old Kimi had gone out to meet a friend. After her meet-up, which ended late in the evening, she hailed a taxi to head back home.

"But I had a friend who insisted that he wanted to give me a lift back. He didn't want me to take a taxi by myself. So he convinced me to get off the taxi and meet him. You know lah, boys wanting to be gentlemen and all!" she recounts with a wry grin. "A boyfriend?" I ask curiously. "Oh no! I mean, he did like me but…" her voice trails off as she breaks into a girlish giggle, shrugging her shoulders.

She stopped the taxi at the bus-stop and waited for him to arrive. Her last memory was of the young man helping her strap her motorcycle helmet on. A speeding van had hit the two youths standing by the side of the road.

She drifted in and out of consciousness. Bright lights assailed her as her eyes flickered open. She heard someone tell her: "You've met with an accident. How can we contact your parents?" She drifted off again and when she opened her eyes, they were attempting to slide a scope down her throat. "You have internal bleeding. We have to check," a doctor told her. "Everything felt so surreal," she says, shuddering.

She asked for her phone which was surprisingly intact despite the horrific accident.

"I still have that phone to this day. It's the old Nokia flip phone!" she tells me blithely. She managed to give her parents' telephone numbers to the medical team before sliding into unconsciousness again. Her mother was devastated. Her father, who was away in Kuala Lumpur, rushed to Singapore to be by his daughter's bedside.

While her injuries were substantial, the young man who was with her managed to escape life-threatening injuries. "He got away with scratches, and here I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) battling for my life," she remarks wryly. "I had horrible facial injuries, a fractured nose and a fractured spinal cord."

She recalls seeing her distraught parents before being wheeled in for an operation. "I remember looking at the both of them, and murmuring that I was happy to see my family united and that God could take me now! I think it was the drugs talking!"

She chuckles a little but then says softly: "But I also think I was prepared to die then. I didn't think I'd end up in the wheelchair."

She had an eight-hour operation on her spine. There were tubes stuck on either side of her, draining fluids. She spent the next two weeks in the ICU with nurses having to turn her every two hours.

PICKING UP THE PIECES

She kept asking her father why she couldn't move her legs. "What's worse, I kept asking him why I was constipated. My bowels weren't moving. I was bloated like a pregnant woman!" recalls Kimi. "I felt so suffocated."

She couldn't tell when her bowels were moving or when she finally managed to defecate. "I couldn't feel anything," she tells me bluntly. "I could only tell by the smell. I kept asking the doctors and the nurses what was wrong with me but no one would say anything. I was a minor after all."

Her father eventually broke down and told her the news. She couldn't walk anymore. "I remember crying," she says softly. "But I quickly stopped. I wasn't sure why I wasn't as emotional. But perhaps it hadn't sunk in yet." The first time a doctor showed Kimi her MRI scans, squashed in a room with her parents, it was "the first time I really was faced with the reality," shares Kimi.

She was eventually moved to another hospital with rehabilitation facilities. There, she stayed for another five to six months. On the first day of her rehabilitation, Kimi was asked by the physiotherapist on what she wanted to achieve. "I told them I wanted to be able to have a bath," she says drily. "I hadn't had a decent bath since the accident. There were still flecks of blood left in my hair!"

"Was that your only aim?" I ask incredulously. "Oh no!" she replies. "I also told my physiotherapist that I wanted to walk. I told her that I'd walk again." But the therapist was brutal in her answer. "You're never going to walk again!" she told Kimi bluntly. "My father is going to take me to India for alternative medicine!" shot back Kimi tearfully. "You can try. It'd take a miracle to get you walking again. Your injuries are too severe," replied the therapist matter-of-factly.

"That made me cry," recounts Kimi soberly. She hadn't realised what a life-altering injury she'd experienced. There was the denial: "You never think you're going to be the one that gets this sort of injury. I just felt like, 'Well, no, this isn't me, I'm not meant to be paralysed,'" she says. Kimi had to be prescribed anti-depressants to deal with her injuries.

The first month was the hardest, she confides. She spent the first few months just learning how to sit up. "It was so hard," she admits. "It took quite a while for me to be able to sit up without fainting."

She learnt how to insert her own catheter every four hours. "I learnt how to take a shower, manage my bowel movements with medication and a host of other things to help me become independent. It was frustrating having to relearn basic life skills, but I just wanted to get on with my life," she shares.

A lot of people in her position would feel anger, though, or at least self-pity. Did she ever feel either of those emotions? "There was never any anger, no. There was sadness at the beginning and there was definitely some kind of, 'Why me?'"

There were a lot of what-ifs: what if she hadn't stopped the taxi and met her friend? "But I find it so exhausting, and I hate feeling like a victim and self-pitying because it doesn't feel like it gets me anywhere," says Kimi, adding: "I just had to keep an open mind and learn to live my life anyway."

MOVING ON

Go with the flow, she told herself. "After all, that's what I've been doing all my life. Why should this event be any different?"

It took a while, she says, to get to a point approaching peace with what had happened. "I'd call it radical acceptance because I really had to embrace being disabled," she says. "As soon as that happened, my whole perspective changed. Because as soon as I felt proud of who I was, I just didn't take people's crap any more. I didn't take people's pitying comments, or feel like I needed to answer to people about who I was and what I was doing. But it took a long time to get there."

She desperately wanted to leave the rehab, and lied to her father. She told him that the doctors allowed her to leave in June. Her father arrived at the rehab only to learn that she wasn't given the green light to leave yet.

The doctors gave her yet another month of advanced rehab before finally allowing Kimi to leave in July. She decided to leave Singapore and live with her father in Malaysia. "I fought with mum lah!" she admits with endearing candour. "That's why I stayed with my dad. Of course, all's well now. We've all gotten a little older and more mature!"

For a few years, Kimi did nothing. "I wasn't progressing much except for the fact that I had friends and cousins who kept me from falling into depression." They helped her deal with the wheelchair. "They never once made me feel like I was a lesser being or that I was different. They'd carry my wheelchair over staircases, we'd have a laugh and we'd enjoy nights out," she recounts, smiling.

Her father soon insisted that Kimi make the most of her time aside from just whiling away time with friends. In Kuala Lumpur, Kimi joined the Damai Disabled Person Association Malaysia, a non-governmental organisation aimed at educating the differently-abled on the importance of living independently.

"My dad forced me to join!" she reveals bluntly, shrugging her shoulders. "He wanted me to expand my horizons, and to get to know other differently-abled people whom I could relate to, on account of my paraplegia."

Her father was right, she tells me. It helped to have people whom she could turn to for advice and look to for inspiration. "I realised that everything I'd been told was society's narrative of how a disabled person should be and I didn't need to be like that."

She learnt how to apply for the OKU card, which is a temporary identification document for persons with disabilities. She studied part-time courses organised by the association and eventually found employment at a financial institution, while pursuing her bachelors in psychology, which she completed last year.

"I plan to take up my MBA this year," she tells me proudly. "I had to take up my Masters in Clinical Psychology but changed my mind. I wanted to study something that would equip me in my goal of eventually supporting my parents and siblings."

In 2018, the association called her up to ask her to join the Ms Wheelchair Queen Malaysia pageant. "I laughed and refused at first," she recounts, chuckling. Eventually, she relented. She went on to win the pageant.

"When I got on stage, it was the first time that I felt powerful," says Kimi, smiling. "I was used to people staring at me, but they were staring at me because I was in a wheelchair. And when I was on stage, they were staring at me because I was the star."

Life didn't become small for Kimi, as she had first feared. The injury has "changed everything about me … people don't understand, but I wouldn't take back my injury, I don't think, because it's made me who I am." She's stronger, she says. And she's determined to make the most out of her life.

Today, Kimi is a senior learning consultant, marketing e-learning products. "I do a lot of things," she tells me with a grin. It's an understatement, of course. The bubbly 31-year-old has done many things — from modelling, to singing to and writing. And there's much more on her bucket list to be ticked off. "Life is good!" she declares with a wide smile. "I've much to be thankful for."

"Are you happy?" I ask her. "Yes, I am," she replies at once. "I don't dwell on anything. Why be stressed? Just deal with what life has handed you."

There are still times when she experiences grief at what she has lost, she says, but it isn't helpful to dwell on it. "I used to just be like, 'I'd be happy if I could walk again.' And I don't think that's true, so I've started to reframe desire into what's good for me: what makes me feel good? I think you can focus on what you lack in life, 'If I had this, then I'd be happy.'"

Instead, she concentrates on what she has gained — a wealth of new experiences, friends and perspectives. "Talking about disability and advocating for disabled people has become something I'm so passionate about. Without my injury, I wouldn't have that," she says.

"A million stars won't help me find my way back to where I belong in this world. Now I can sing my way home… I found my way back!" sings Kimi in her song, A Million Stars. It took a long painful road for Kimi to find her way, but she's right where she wants to be. Her ultimate outlook on life hasn't changed: "Same person, just different packaging!"

Follow Nur Ashikeen on Facebook @kimiblack and Instagram @kimiblackmusic.

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