42-year-old Julie Stonestreet has to be careful of every little thing she does. A sneeze could mean a broken rib, and rolling over in bed at the wrong angle could mean cracking a vertebra.
Stonestreet has osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetically inherited bone disorder that causes a person to have extremely brittle bones that break far too easily.
For Stonestreet, this has meant being in constant recovery mode for her various injuries.
At birth, she already suffered from 14 broken bones and had to spend ample time in a full body cast between the ages of 13 months and five years. When Stonestreet was 10, she’d already broken 60 bones. By the age of 26, she had undergone 26 surgeries to install metal rods on some of her bones, just to keep them from breaking yet again.
Now 42, Stonestreet has suffered from over 100 broken bones total – many of which happened when she once fell out of her wheelchair at work, breaking her pelvis, ribs, and multiple vertebrae all at the same time.
Despite Stonestreet’s obvious setbacks, she refuses to let her fear of breaking more bones get in the way of her goals.
Her main occupation is to be a teacher, but on the side, she also works at various charities and serves as a volunteer for organizations supporting people with disabilities.
“People with disabilities are the same as everyone else,” is one of Stonestreet’s favorite sayings. “We have the same dreams and goals, it's normal to have a teacher who is in a wheelchair.” She does her best to speak at talks at various places, including abroad and other states in America, where she currently lives.
Many people tend to underestimate Stonestreet because of her evident disability, but she is – proudly – a self-sufficient person who cooks, cleans, washes, and even drives herself around. “The only difference,” she likes to joke to her students, “between me and your other teachers is that I'm sitting down!"
