Developing New Strengths in Midlife

In 2002, Keri Douglass says, “I was at the top of my game.” The Waldorf, MD resident was a successful masseuse, extolled by her many clients for her contributions to their health and well-being. After her two kids left for high school each morning, she walked to work, looking forward to helping even more people ease their stress and pain.

Then one day she unplugged an electric cooker from a strip cord at work, not noticing that the counter it sat on was wet. She got a shock, but she didn’t think much about it and went right back to work.  The next morning, she was paralyzed from the waist down.

The paralysis didn’t last – it just came and went. “Sometimes I’d be driving and my leg would just refuse to move and I’d have to pull over until the feeling came back. I loved my work and I tried to continue, going from full time to part time, but that didn’t work very well, either. Many days I’d deal with just a couple of clients and then the next day not be able to move,” she says.

But the hardest part for Keri wasn’t the off- and- on paralysis – it was getting a diagnosis and finding out what was going on in her body.  For the next 18 months, she continued to work more or less full time, but it was increasingly difficult for her to keep up the pace.

By the time the doctors figured out that the shock had caused a brain injury and that Keri also had fibromyalgia, she says, “I wasn’t that surprised. I’d been trained to understand how the body moved and worked. I knew I was going to have to put my hands up and say ‘enough.’ In actuality, though, lots of times I couldn’t lift one of my hands,” she says.

Once her brain injury was diagnosed, Keri was sent to the Maryland Department of Rehabilitation for counseling and physical therapy.  “I was way too young and too active to retire – I was only 45,” she says. “I needed to find something else I could do.”  She took a battery of tests. Keri had thought she wanted to go into marketing and sales, but after viewing the test results, an occupational counselor convinced her otherwise.

“She said to me, Honey, you’ve got it all wrong.  You don’t want to sell things. What I’m seeing in these test results is a remarkably talented artist,’” Keri says. “So she took me off the business track and led me to the creative track instead.  I am so grateful to her!”

From childhood, Keri had loved photography. “Capturing and seizing the moment was always easy for me, and then my career in health and wellness really helped me understand the movement in photography,” she says.  “I found myself turning back to it after my brain injury, and eventually people started hiring me to take pictures and shoot videos. I was so lucky, because I could rest between assignments – I didn’t have to work every day.”

Thirty years after she had dropped out of college in 1978, Keri went back, this time to the College of Southern Maryland.  “I started small.  I had to stay very close to the counselor to understand not just being disabled, but being an older person going back to school,” she says.  She learned how to use a computer, but since her vision is somewhat impaired and she is unable to multitask, she also uses headphones to shut out the noise and a lighter screen to see more clearly.

For Keri, the hardest part is the technology.  “With a brain injury, the quick recall isn’t always there, and trying to figure out how something works is a great challenge,” she says.  “But then, when I think about it, I never was that interested in technology – I much preferred the gratification that comes from making people feel better,” she says.

She’s grateful, though, that she grew up when she did.  “I’m as old as color TV.  I remember when the remote was invented. I’ve seen technology shift from a much larger reference point than young people today have. We went from a mimeograph to a Xerox to a scanner and digital photo, and we learned how to do shorthand.  When you think of it, texting is nothing but shorthand. I understand hacking because we had party lines. In fact, last year I got an iPad because of its magnification capabilities, and all I can think of is that I finally have Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio –it’s just not strapped to my wrist,” she says. “Being my age really has its advantages.”

Keri has learned to take her disabilities in stride – most of the time.  “Sometimes I forget. I still feel like a 12-year-old inside, and I want to climb rocks,” she says. Because her disability is not physically apparent, people don’t recognize it.  “Just the other day, I got cussed out because I parked in a handicapped space,” she says.  “I just looked at the guy for a minute. Then I said, “What you don’t know is that I have a walker in my trunk, and it’s there for a reason. Sometimes that’s the only way I can get around.” 

In 2010, Keri got her first AARP Foundation scholarship, which allowed her to transfer to Washington’s Howard University and pursue a double major in photography and filmmaking.  “I was so glad that you didn’t ask me to write about dead artists on my application,” she says.  “You asked me to write about the artist who is me.”

She reapplied in 2011 and received another scholarship for this year’s studies at Howard. “I can’t even begin to tell you how much the AARP Foundation scholarships mean to me.  Your support has been so wonderful – someone is always calling me or emailing me to check in and see how I’m doing, and that has been so important to me,” she says. 

“I’ve realized that emotional support becomes more important than ever when you grow older, or at least that’s how it has worked for me,” Keri says. “I want to be standing with people who have life challenges they never saw coming, who didn’t have the resources to deal with them and who had to find their way back out of nowhere.  That’s what happened to me, and I bet that’s what happened to the other scholarship winners, too. AARP Foundation has given me a new way of life – or maybe I should say ‘a new life.’ I will always be grateful.”