Rachelle Friedman Chapman hopes to walk again

Rachelle Friedman Chapman hopes to walk again

A North Carolina woman who got married last summer after a poolside accident left her paralyzed isn't walking yet, but she hasn't given up on learning to move on her own again.

Rachelle Friedman Chapman is stronger after training for almost three weeks in October at Project Walk, a spinal cord injury recovery center in Carlsbad, Calif. And the 26-year-old from Knightdale, near Raleigh, hopes to return for more training that could help her walk for the first time since the accident just weeks before her original wedding date.

"You see people standing up out of their wheelchair, people who are relearning how to walk," Chapman said in a recent phone interview.

It was on May 23, 2010, that Chapman was pushed into a pool by a friend at her bachelorette party in Virginia Beach, Va. She fell into the shallow end and awkwardly hit the cement bottom. The injury to her vertebra left her with no feeling from the chest down and feeling on the inside of her arms but not the outside. Her wedding had been scheduled for a few weeks after the party, but she and her fiance postponed it by more than a year.

She has never revealed the name of the friend, who was a bridesmaid when the wedding was finally held in July 2011. The cruel timing of her injury and her enduring positivity landed her story in newspapers, websites and television reports around the world.