The Cody Unser First Step Foundation

The Cody Unser First Step Foundation Dedicated to raising awareness of Transverse Myelitis and advocating for people with disabilities.

Hey everyone… last month I launched my Substack and my first article “Wheelchair Barbie Gets a Mammogram” 🤘🏁💖This is abo...
05/27/2026

Hey everyone… last month I launched my Substack and my first article “Wheelchair Barbie Gets a Mammogram” 🤘🏁💖

This is about disability, medical trauma, accessibility, aging, early detection, and why disabled women deserve to be seen.

If you’ve ever felt unseen by medicine, this one’s for you.

Disabled women age.
Disabled women screen.
Disabled women matter.

Check it out, share it, and help spread the word. Rock ON🤘🏁💖



05/06/2026

Post-op check & these girls are healing beautifully!!! 💜🏁🤘

One thing this experience reminded me of: the patient-doctor relationship matters deeply, especially as a paralyzed woman navigating a healthcare system that often doesn’t know what to do with our bodies.

🤍 Communication is everything.

🤍 Honesty is everything.

🤍 Trust is everything.

I’m incredibly grateful for my amazing and talented surgeon and the way we worked together as a team throughout this process. That collaboration matters more than people realize.

Still recovering. Still swollen. Still tired.
But already feeling relief. More to come later…

Thank You ALL so much for your thoughts and support! I feel ALL the love and I am so grateful! Shoutout to my badass caregiver/sister holding down pit crew duties while I heal. 💜

Next up…Wheelchair Barbie’s new bra and swimsuit era…Comin’ In HOT! 💜🤘🏁 What’s new

04/29/2026

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts 💜

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts
purple lines like race tracks,
my body the course,
my will the engine.

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts because access is not just ramps and buttons, it is who is willing to touch you, believe you are worth the effort.

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts and I am still on this intense journey of physical, emotional, mental health where my desire to help others is at war with my own survival.

It is exhausting being a disability activist in a world that keeps manufacturing the “Other” by race, by gender, by ability and then asks us to educate it while we are still bleeding.

My surgeon back in 2012 & then again now

Camille Cash, MD SuperWoman
Double board-certified, precision in her hands, vision in her voice. The first Black woman in Texas with both general and plastic surgery boards breaking ceilings while rebuilding bodies. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t reduce me to risk. Didn’t look away. She saw me. Damn I love it when a positive experience with a healthcare professional happens, it’s so rare.

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts under her care not as damage, but as transformation.
Because reconstruction is not vanity it is reclamation. It is function and desire refusing to be separated.

Disabled women are still less likely to be offered care, more likely to carry pain like it’s part of the social contract.

Major reviews on equity in the plastic surgery world focus on race, gender, and socioeconomic status, but rarely include disability as a core variable. No data on our bodies yet endless decisions made about them. This Wheelchair Barbie is commanding for more research to examine the access gap of plastic/reconstructive surgery between women with disabilities and women without.

My Ni***es Bleed Hearts because sometimes advocacy feels like dragging a body through systems that were never built to hold it.



***esBleedHearts

27 years ago, life threw a red flag I never saw coming. At 12 years old, life was just beginning but I indeed thought th...
02/05/2026

27 years ago, life threw a red flag I never saw coming.

At 12 years old, life was just beginning but I indeed thought the race was over. All the hard work learning how to live with a paralyzed body redirected me to a different track — one that would take me underwater, speaking on stages to OBGYN Departments, and into the lives of people who needed someone to prove survival could still be beautiful.

These 27 years have taught me how to navigate and feel this life differently — through the red flags society waves at disabled bodies as well as the green flags that remind us the race is still worth driving.

This isn’t just my story.

This is about science, medicine, politics, disability justice, women’s health, and the body politic — because disability is not just medical…it is deeply social, cultural, and political.

My body is not just medical. It is political.

The body politic movement teaches us that how society treats disabled bodies reflects how society values human dignity. Accessibility, inclusive research, equitable healthcare, and representation are not luxuries — they are markers of justice.

Women with disabilities are still vastly underrepresented in research, reproductive healthcare design, and preventative screening access. Many of us face physical barriers, provider bias, and assumptions about our sexuality, fertility, and autonomy.

This is why I advocate. Because disabled women deserve healthcare systems that see us, respect us, and design with us — not around us.

Since becoming paralyzed at 12 years old, my life’s race has been about expanding quality of life, adaptive scuba diving, disability education, and shifting how medicine and society understand the disabled body.

Transverse Myelitis itself is rare, unpredictable, and often misunderstood. It is a neurological condition caused by inflammation of the spinal cord that interrupts communication between the brain and body. It can cause paralysis, sensory loss, chronic pain, bladder and bowel dysfunction, and life-long medical complications.

No race car driver crosses the finish line alone. And I could not have driven 27 years down this unpredictable track without my pit crew. My family especially my amazing mom, friends, caregivers, medical professionals, the dive community, disability advocates, and mentors who refuel me when the tank is empty, change tires when life blows one out, and help rebuild my race car after every yellow caution and red flag.

You are the reason I am still in this race & you know who you are. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

27 years ago, I thought my story was ending. Instead, I was handed a different track — one that took me deeper into humanity, into the ocean, into advocacy, into community, and into purpose.

The red flags taught me what must change.

The green flags remind me why I keep racing forward.

The race continues. Rock ON! 💖🤘🏁

Transverse Myelitis and Paralysis Resources:

Johns Hopkins Myelitis and Myelopathy Center: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/transverse-myelitis

UT Southwestern Medical: https://utswmed.org/conditions-treatments/transverse-myelitis/

Siegel Rare Neuroimmune Association: https://wearesrna.org

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation: https://www.christopherreeve.org

American Spinal Injury Association: https://asia-spinalinjury.org

🏁 TO THE DISABILITY COMMUNITY OF NEW MEXICO—START YOUR ENGINES 🏁Every movement needs a pit crew. Every race needs driver...
01/07/2026

🏁 TO THE DISABILITY COMMUNITY OF NEW MEXICO—START YOUR ENGINES 🏁

Every movement needs a pit crew. Every race needs drivers willing to take the wheel. And every fight for justice ends with the same goal: that checkered flag where our rights, stories, and lived experiences are finally seen and heard.

We are a vast, powerful disability community—disabled people, caregivers, families, allies—and we are strongest when we line up on the same track. Our bodies, minds, and experiences may be different, but our destination is shared: dignity, access, independence, and equity.

I’m fired up to join members of the New Mexico Disability Coalition, caregivers, families, and fellow advocates this Saturday for the Pre-Legislative Forum, as we prepare for Disability Rights Awareness Day on February 11th at the New Mexico State Capitol.

🏁 This is where the pit crew comes together.
🏁 This is where your voice matters.
🏁 This is where we race toward real change.

Start 2026 by using your voice. Bring your story. Bring your lived experience. Bring your fire. Advocacy doesn’t require perfection—only participation. When we show up, we change policies, shift narratives, and remind lawmakers that disability rights are human rights.

✨ EVENT DETAILS
-Pre-Legislative Forum: Saturday, January 10, 2026: CNM WORKForce Training Center at 5600 Eagle Rock Ave NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113.

-Disability Rights Awareness Day: February 11, 2026: New Mexico State Capitol Building

Whether you’re a first-time advocate or a seasoned activist, there’s room for you on this track. We all need a pit crew—and New Mexico, this one is ours.

Let’s roll. Let’s race. Let’s cross that checkered flag together.

Check out the link below and See ya there!
💖🤘🏁

https://givebutter.com/Y2leKt

12/01/2025

It’s PADI Adaptive Dive Week! 🌊🧜🏻‍♀️🤿

In a world full of NO…Scuba Diving told me YES.
Back in 2017, The Cody Unser First Step Foundation took a group of young adults with spina bifida & cerebral palsy to Key Largo, FL for their PADI Open Water Cerification. This journey first started in the most ordinary place — a Summer Camp in Indiana — where they took their very first breaths underwater.

That spark led to a trip to the Denver Aquarium, where confidence grew. And finally… to the open ocean, where everything shifted. They earned their PADI Open Water Certification, but what happened next was even bigger. That YES underwater turned into these young adults telling their parents:
“I want to go out of state for college.”
“I want to learn to drive.”

I know that feeling.
When I first became a scuba diver a year after becoming paralyzed, all the doubts & fears I carried about being paralyzed — all the noise of living in an ableist world — were silenced. Not erased, but replaced with something stronger: Freedom, Independence, Possibility.

Because underwater, there are No Limits.

“Changing Lives One Dive at a Time” became more than a motto for Cody’s Great Scuba Adventures.
It became a calling.
A heartbeat.
A mission.
What began as my YES became an invitation for Dive Professionals everywhere to step up and get trained in adaptive teaching — to expand who gets access to the ocean, who gets to feel weightless, who gets to experience possibility.

The PADI Adaptive Techniques Course was created for exactly this reason:
To make diving more accessible for disabled people worldwide.
To shift the culture.
To raise expectations.
To create YES where the world so often says NO.
And the tide is changing — finally, beautifully.
More instructors.
More divers.
More belief.
More YES.

I am SO here for it!
Happy PADI Adaptive Dive Week, let’s celebrate the world of Possibility together!

Here’s to every diver who has discovered their power One Breath, One Descent, One YES at a time. 🌊💙🤿

To learn more about PADI’s Adaptive Techniques Course, visit this link: https://store.padi.com/en-us/ns/courses/adaptive-techniques/p/adaptive-techniques/


My ribs are bruised, maybe a hairline fracture. After my “Wheelchair Barbie Goes to the Gynecologist” presentation on Th...
10/11/2025

My ribs are bruised, maybe a hairline fracture. After my “Wheelchair Barbie Goes to the Gynecologist” presentation on Thursday, roared in at 2:30 am. Heart rate through the roof. Chills. Vomiting. Headache. My pain had hit the red flag. I ended up in the hospital for pain management. Living with paralysis means you’re always racing on data your body sometimes hides. Sometimes it’s internal. Other times, it’s the race car (your wheelchair), a cushion off, a wheel misaligned, a pressure point you can’t always feel.

So to my single wheelchair peeps flying solo, especially those with or related autoimmune disorders, this is a tip to have your “Pit Crew” check your race car. Whoever’s in your corner, have them sit in your chair once in awhile. They’ll feel things you can’t, even when you’ve done your own inspection. In racing, performance depends on teamwork, technology, driver input, & specialized roles. Engineers & mechanics study the telemetry: lap times, braking, tire wear, fuel usage. The driver gives crucial in-car feedback. Together, they find what needs fixing before it fails. Living with paralysis is the same kind of engineering. Our telemetry comes from pain spikes, spasms, bowel/bladder issues, sleep disturbances, skin breakdown, etc. Our family, friends, caregivers and doctors are the race engineers who interpret our signals when we can’t. But let’s be real, it’s exhausting to constantly monitor, manage and decode our own systems. To keep racing through chronic pain, medical complications in an ableist world that was never built for us. To stay strong, brave, and inspiring not just for ourselves, but for everyone watching. Still, that mission to educate, to represent, to make a difference…is my race fuel! The engine oil, transmission fluid and brake fluid that keeps me going when the body wants to stall.

This driver is extremely grateful for her “Pit Crew”. I know not everyone has one. I don’t always take my own advice to slow down. My DNA runs through my veins like the mountain winds at Pikes Peak or in the heartbeat of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I was built to go full throttle, not idle.

The Lived Experience has more truth than any book. Any theory. Or Any religion could ever have. It’s the state of the hu...
10/09/2025

The Lived Experience has more truth than any book. Any theory. Or Any religion could ever have. It’s the state of the human condition where we find absolute resolution.

But when it’s combined with an academic understanding…I Dare You to challenge me!

“Where research has failed to notice there are no answers, we will shout our questions louder. Where training has failed to teach the right solutions, we will teach each other. Where clinics have failed to let us in, we will speak truth to power.”-Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)

Ocean Pressure. Sky Altitude.Two paralyzed bodies. Zero fear.She finds freedom underwater. He finds it in the air.Cody U...
10/06/2025

Ocean Pressure. Sky Altitude.

Two paralyzed bodies. Zero fear.
She finds freedom underwater. He finds it in the air.

Cody Unser, the woman who turned paralysis into purpose — PADI AmbassaDiver, Women Divers Hall of Fame— joins Michael Glen, the world’s first paraplegic hot-air balloon pilot and host of “Born to Fly”, for a mid-air podcast at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta 2025 on Saturday October 11th.

Ocean pressure meets sky altitude.

Disability doesn’t define the limit — it is the launch pad. Let’s Fly! Rock ON! 🤘

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