Donna Rock: Inspiring, Witty and Wise

by Karen Gibbs

Forget “Rocky” and Stallone. If you want to see a real champion in action, check out the short feature, “Rock ’n’ Annie.” You won’t find it at Blockbuster’s, however. The project of a college coed, this film has limited distribution, but offers unlimited inspiration. It’s about a farm girl named Donna Rock who works in the big city, is into dog training and—oh, yes—is armless.

I first met Donna three years ago. At that time, I watched her run agility courses with her Doberman, Annie, and was immensely impressed with Donna’s ability and Annie’s agility. Donna’s agility and determination, however, are even more impressive.

That became evident when we recently met again at Donna’s home. She arrived at her tree-shaded yard driving a van—a regular van with no special adaptations. She’d just returned from New Orleans, where she works as an accountant for the federal government. (As I describe the next few minutes of Donna’s activities, remember that she does all these things with no arms.) She jumped out of the van and unlatched the gate with her toes. “Follow me!” she said, as she climbed back in for the short ride to the house. Opening the sliding door of the van, she called to Annie, her service dog. Annie, wearing a specially fitted backpack that serves as Donna’s “purse,” jumped onto the grass.

The three of us walked to the back door, where Donna slipped her left foot out of her white lace-less sneaker (“I’m left-footed,” she explained.), and retrieved the house key from her shoe. In the process, a couple of coins fell out of the shoe and, with the deftest of toes, Donna picked up each one, returning them to her shoe. Nimbly inserting the key into the keyhole, she unlocked the door, turned the knob with her foot and invited me inside.

“I keep my mail on the floor,” Donna said, waving her foot at the neat stacks of envelopes around her dining room chair. She removed Annie’s backpack before joining me at the table. Settling in for our interview, she cradled her chin with her foot just as I was resting my chin on my hand. She was the most limber person I’d ever met—and the most accommodating.

She answered my questions—too many “How in the world do you…” queries. And with each response, Donna rose in my estimation. Not so much because of her agility or ingenuity in handling everyday situations like brushing her teeth, or folding clothes or hooking a bra (I still marvel at that one!). No, what really impressed me about this petite powerhouse was her attitude. She wants neither pity nor accolades, because, in her mind, she isn’t doing anything special. She is just being normal. As she described growing up on her family’s 460-acre farm in Iowa, I began to understand why she has this remarkable outlook.

“I was raised on a farm in rural America where I had to figure things out for myself,” she began. “Nowadays, kids [with disabilities] are put in physical therapy and taught everything instead of being allowed to figure things out for themselves.”

As a child, Donna had chores just as her siblings did. She washed and dried the dishes each night. A typical farm child, she loved animals and had a pet female hog she named Arnold. “Arnold was my best friend,” she laughed. She learned to drive by steering a pick-up truck while her dad threw out hay to their 75 head of cattle. In Donna’s family, being armless wasn’t any different from having blue eyes or blonde hair. Likewise, folks in her community treated her no differently than any other child.

“So, when did you realize that not having arms was unusual?” I asked.

Scratching her chin with her toes, Donna turned her head to the side and said, “That’s a tough question.” After a short pause, she continued, “I guess it was in fourth grade. That’s when kids stop including those who are different.” Proactive, even at that young age, she thought that if she were a troublemaker, kids would like her. She was right. Acting this way made her a lot of friends, and she wasn’t an outcast. “But I was horrible to my teacher,” she admits.

In her senior year in high school, Donna’s dad died. Up to that point, she had not given much thought to pursuing higher education. “I don’t remember any talk about my going to college,” she recalled. But Donna was very interested in horses and horseracing, and she looked into a college in Kentucky that featured horseback riding. Her guidance counselor was not encouraging at all, so Donna wrote to the college herself, applied and was accepted. In the end, it was the best thing for her. She majored in accounting and was hired by the federal government as a bookkeeper in Washington, D.C.

“Are you a CPA?” I asked.

“I didn’t say I was a good accountant; I said I was an accountant,” she quipped, her self-effascing humor coming to the fore.

In the spring of 2000, Donna transferred to Louisiana, “where I could purchase ten times the land for one-half the price in D.C.” Shortly thereafter, she bought a three-month-old Doberman puppy she named Annie. Two months later, Donna signed her up with Julie Hill’s Fido Finishing School for obedience training. Now, Annie is one of the top twenty Dobermans in the United States for agility and obedience. Donna says that like Arnold, the pet pig of her childhood, “Annie’s been my best buddy ever since.”

During my earlier interview with Donna, she reflected on her future. “I wish I could figure out what I like and enjoy,” she confessed. She had no way of knowing that three years later she would fulfill her wish at a most unexpected time.

A distraught woman approached Donna recently and told her of her teenage son’s disabling illness. She described his depression and lack of will to live. Hoping that Donna could penetrate the gray cloud of despair that held her son, she asked her to pay him a visit. Donna arrived at the rehab facility, and, as she prepared to sign in, was taken aback by the receptionist’s offer to help Donna sign her name. “If you work at a rehab facility, you need to assume that people can do things for themselves,” Donna told me. She added that many people—especially those with disabilities—are not self-driven and need someone to push them forward; as long as someone is willing to do things for them, they’ll never figure out how to do them on their own.

With the receptionist’s remark still fresh in her mind, Donna reached the room of the disheartened boy. An aide was spooning food into his mouth because the boy said bending his arms was painful. “I asked him if he wanted to depend on someone to feed him [forever],” Donna related. Sharing wisdom gleaned from her Iowa farm-girl experiences, she exhorted him to look for his own solutions to his problems. “It gave me a rush of adrenalin to help this kid,” she shared. “It allowed me to be myself and be blunt. When this opportunity came, it was neat…enjoyable.”

“So, now this is your passion,” I interjected, caught up in her emotion.

“My passion? No!” she said, surprisingly. “I never wanted to help people. Don’t you go making me sound like I’m a good person,” she teased. As she continued revealing her ideas, however, she sounded like a very good person, indeed. She wants to be a motivational speaker…to encourage people who have suffered life-changing injuries and to guide their caregivers and therapists. “I’d like to talk to school children about having more sensitivity toward people [with disabilities], about handling their discomfort when dealing with [them]. I could also talk about other things, such as using Annie as my service dog.” Her eyes sparkled as the dream took shape.

“When I was in college, for sociology class I used myself as a prop to see the responses of people of different ages to me. I went to classrooms and drank from a mug or tied a shoe. The primary grade kids thought I couldn’t do these things, but were they surprised!”
“Does it ever bother you when people stare?” I asked.

“Sure it does,” she responded candidly. “One day I laugh it off, and the next day it really hurts, but I get over it.” Donna then related a recent incident that took place at a Mandeville gas station. “I was paying with cash and set my money on the counter with my toes. The cashier moved back about 10-15 feet. She acted as if she was disgusted with me. It hurt that she didn’t even want to be near me. Walking out, I turned to see her using a folder to push the money I’d just given her into the drawer. When I got into my car, I wanted to cry.”

“Do you have any hints as to how we should respond to people with disabilities?” I asked.
“Yes. Don’t make that person invisible. Talk to them. Offer to do things for them. For example, I hate to go clothes shopping. I have a hard time reaching up and seeing the price tag. Going to the grocery is hard for me, too. No matter what I want, it’s on the top shelf. So I either do without the item or wait until someone goes by and ask for help. In this area, so many people are nice about helping me. By the time I get to the checkout, someone empties my cart. I go to the van and a kid will come up and help unload the groceries.”

Donna also welcomes help—no, she insists on help—in one area in her home. Changing light bulbs. That’s one condition for every guest who visits. If there’s a light bulb burnt out, she asks them to change it.

Other than that, Donna’s a remarkably self-sufficient, independent, ingenious and resourceful young woman. She realizes that she does have limitations, but hesitates to depend on someone for a task she or Annie can do. “The less you do, the less you can do,” she says, opening a DVD case with her toes and inserting it into the player. We settle back as “Rock ’n’ Annie” plays on the screen. One scene shows a pretty, young Donna with her left foot atop Arnold, her porcine pal of the past. Meanwhile, Annie snuggles next to Donna on the couch, relaxing as Donna tenderly scratches her back. Rock ’n’ Annie—best friends forever.