First, her family was told she wouldn’t survive. Then, she would be paralyzed from the neck down.
Three months after Joanie “Angel” Sandoval was fighting for her life in an intensive care unit following a house party shooting, the Englewood High School student, 16, can not only move all of her upper extremities. She’s starting to regain movement from the waist down.
“Being an incomplete (spinal) injury’s really good because that means obviously, the injury’s not complete,” her mother, Lynette Sotelo, said. “There’s still room for her to grow and be able to use her muscles. Right now, that’s kind of where we’re at. It’s not that she’s paralyzed forever because her injury’s incomplete. She has total feeling in the lower bottom half of her body. It’s the muscles that need to be retrained and she has been working very hard since she’s been at Craig with therapy to get her muscles moving. She does have her own movement in her right foot, so she’s working to get her movement back in her left foot.”
A tale of tragedy, born from senseless violence, has become one of regeneration and hope. Now, Sandoval is determined to return to sports that she loves so much: cheer and volleyball. In the meantime, through her physical therapy classes at Craig Hospital, Sandoval has learned that a wheelchair can’t — and won’t — hold her back until she’s fully healed and back on the court.
“I don’t want to set my mind to having to do something in a wheelchair,” she said. “I want to set my mind that this is just temporary and that I’m going to walk again instead of putting my mind to, ‘This is permanent.’”
Even through hardship, she’s served as a light in the EHS community, cheering on her teammates and other fellow athletes from sidelines and taking on the heart of a fighter. Sandoval has inspired her teammates, friends and classmates through her battle, and they returned the favor when she needed it most.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the EHS community sprang into action.
Cheer coach Ginger Rode and her girls wasted no time collecting items and donations they believed would make Sandoval’s elongated stay in the hospital a bit more enjoyable. They put together a gift basket with clothes, robes, slippers, lotions, hair and nail accessories, snacks and so on. They gave her gift cards for restaurants for the days she didn’t want to rely on the hospital cafeteria.
The cheer team joined forces with the volleyball team to make cards, posters and a quilt crafted of Englewood, cheer and volleyball T-shirts, as well as put together some donation drives via ducky tosses and chocolate sales at games.
They wanted to return the love and energy she gave them from the first day she stepped on campus.
“Her being a freshman and coming in, she had just a big personality,” volleyball coach Erika James said. “She would just step up and do anything that was needed.”
In the last two months of her semester, Sandoval’s teachers helped her complete her coursework remotely so she wouldn’t fall behind in school and could return to the classroom as normally as possible.
Though Sandoval admits she was nervous about the community’s response to her return to the building, she was pleased when, at her first basketball game following the incident, everyone in the gym was thrilled to see her on the mend.
Rode worked with CHSAA to ensure Sandoval could take part in the full experience of the state cheer competition at the Denver Coliseum, something that lifted not just her spirits but that of the whole team.
“I know the team was very, very excited when she was there,” Rode said. “It’s very inspirational, because we had to rearrange our whole routine without her. We had a routine and then the accident happened so we had to rearrange our routine for competition. It was great to have her there.”
As she continues her road to full recovery, a process that could take up to two years, Sandoval has been grateful for the love she’s received from the community she holds so dear. She knows it will be there for her, up until the day she steps foot on the cheer mats and volleyball court once again.
“Having a lot of support from Englewood High School is a big help and knowing that I had that support made me want to do more to get better,” she said.