Born Competitor: The Ed Ziegler Story

“When I woke up from my coma,” says Ziegler. “There was utter panic and confusion, nothing was as I remembered. My memories were of 'yesterday,' and scuba diving with my best friend. Unbeknownst to me, that was eight weeks previous. I couldn’t move because I was paralyzed, I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t think.”
 

The year was 1982 and Edward Ziegler was involved in an automobile accident that left him with traumatic brain injury shortly before Mother’s Day. He was in a coma for two months. What he had taken for granted up until that point in life -- talking, swallowing, eating, rolling over in bed, using the bathroom, and walking -- had to be relearned and modified.
 

Rehabilitation at Johnson-Willis Hospital took years. Yet despite daily pain and constant rehabilitation, Ziegler remained the energetic spirit who held a Scuba certificate and never backed down from a challenge. Not long after Ziegler entered the Richmond Marathon, the Super Cities Walk for MS, and the Walk Through the Clouds to raise public awareness of brain injury. Local media began to catch on, as newspapers and TV stations were captivated by his determination to compete in, and complete, all of these events. In the years since his accident Ziegler has continued to demonstrate this kind of willingness to learn to adapt his strengths to overcome his new challenges. In 1985, Ziegler was introduced to his first computer as a Christmas gift. He had severe ataxia in his left arm and a nonfunctional right arm, making it impossible to write or type.
 

After several college writing courses, Ziegler not only learned to write, but also found that writing helped to retrain his thought processes. Despite the therapeutic benefits, it was time-consuming to say the least. Writing a one-page paper, for instance, took days to accomplish. With the advent of speech recognition technology in 1991, Dragon Dictate 1.0 became his “research project.”
 

As Ziegler began to seek out new and improving assistive technology he slowly began to become known in technology circles for his ability to recognize and utilize the very best in assistive devices. Though he lacked sufficient use of his hands, Ziegler became a whiz at surfing the Internet and all things technology related. The freedom he found in such technology lead him to a new calling – teaching others with disabilities how technology can improve their lives too.
 

Working as an IT consultant, today Ziegler teaches large corporations about the benefits of utilizing assistive technology to improve working conditions for their employees with disabilities as well as reaching a new customer base – consumers with disabilities.
 

As Ziegler excelled in his professional field, he shattered previously held myths about people with disabilities. He has proven recent research true, demonstrating that an employee with a disability can outwork and outperform a non-disabled employee when provided the right accommodations.

To further expand his career, Ziegler participated in – and graduated from – Partners in Policy Making, an innovative advocacy program that provides competency based leadership training programs for adults with disabilities. Ziegler’s motivation was twofold: to teach best practices in disability to others, and to develop the competencies to influence public officials. Since graduating from this program he has joined an international network of community leaders serving on policy making committees, commissions, and boards at all levels of government. Ziegler relates much of leadership, volunteering, and trendsetting manner to his days running marathons shortly after his accident. “I like to read a poem that my grandmother gave me in 1986 when I participated in the first Richmond Newspapers Marathon,” explains Ziegler. “It is a notion has been a meditation ever since:

"I am only one, But I am one.
I cannot do everything, But I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”