Santa Fe resident Buddy Hayes, 51, doesn't keep her "bling" in her living room.

"I think it's too show-offy," she said as she pointed out a select few medals on a bookcase in her office that is entirely filled with neatly organized medals of the gold and silver variety, trophies — one of which features Mickey Mouse — and pictures of her and her service dog, Ellie.

Last week, Hayes, who is a wheelchair athlete, was among those featured on WeKeepMoving.org. Hayes received the most votes, so she'll be in a documentary about extraordinary people with multiple sclerosis.

Hayes rejects the label of "disabled."

"Nobody is going to 'dis' me," she said with a laugh. "I am differently abled."

Hayes quickly zips around her spotless condominium at RainbowVision in her "good wheelchair," which sports a pink inscription on the back reading "Gimp Girls Rule," which is the name of her website. Hayes moved into the condo two years ago after reading a story about RainbowVision in The Advocate.

"I have to remember to go slow in public buildings," Hayes said. "People aren't used to seeing somebody (in a wheelchair) who can go really quick and cut a corner really quick and keep on moving. The general public is still not used to that. Sometimes people will stare like, 'Oh, no she didn't,' and I say, 'Oh, yes I did.' "

Illness takes hold

It took only one day to change Hayes' life — a Friday in October, nearly 10 years ago. The former special-education teacher at a school in Virginia was walking out of the school with her "teacher friends," getting ready to enjoy the weekend when she just "dropped like a ton of bricks."

"I just don't remember falling at all," she said. "When I fell I had no reflexes." Usually when people fall, their hands instinctively come up to stop them, but Hayes hit her head on a concrete pillar.

Her mother took her to the doctor and everything checked out. She had no cracked skull, no broken bones, only a really bad headache, some swelling and scrapes.

"I went to school and taught the next week," she said, which was the week before a long weekend. When Tuesday rolled around, she felt as though she had the flu and called in sick.

"I never call in sick — it's just not something I do," Hayes said. "But that Tuesday, I just could not teach."

She didn't feel any better by the end of the day, but was determined to make it into her classroom on Wednesday, she said, because it was hard for her students to be out of their usual routine.

That Tuesday night, she went to sleep early and doesn't remember much of what happened the next four months of her life. From what her mother tells her, she woke up just past midnight, called her and said, "I think I'm dying."

"She thought I was having a stroke because my speech was slurred," Hayes said. When her mother got to Hayes' house, she found her in the doorway having grand mal seizures.

Over the next four months, her vision became blurry, she suffered from hearing loss and she couldn't swallow. She was sent to various specialists for each problem, but they were not working together to figure out what was happening, Hayes says. She spent those months heavily medicated because she was having 30 to 40 grand mal seizures a month.

When her insurance company would no longer pay for the hospital stay she needed, she was sent home.

"I couldn't care for myself," Hayes said. "I was still able to walk but I used a walker ... I was very unsteady."

Her mother took care of Hayes. "I don't know how my mother did this. My dad had terminal cancer and she was caring for him while I was staying in the guest room."

And then, one morning she aligned her walker to get ready to do her morning ritual.

"I hit the floor," she said. "I thought, 'OK, that wasn't right,' and I tried it again. I tried it three times and went back to the hospital.

"From the waist down went overnight," Hayes said. Her health continued to deteriorate and because had choking problems, she was losing weight drastically. Doctors said Hayes would need a feeding tube, and she needed more care than her mother could provide for her at her home.

Hayes had worked as a recreational therapist and with people in wheelchairs. When her mother and sister took her to a nursing home to rehabilitate, Hayes thought she was going back to work because the home was owned by the same company that owned her previous place of employment, and the building was laid out and decorated the same way.

"I was very confused," Hayes said. "I willingly went in and thought I was going to go in and visit my patients, but instead of making a left, we made a right ... I didn't realize I was going to be a patient there until we turned the corner and I saw my name on the door."

When her mother and sister were leaving, Hayes "flopped" out of her wheelchair, grabbed her mom's legs, and begged her not to leave.

"She unpeeled me and just had to walk out of the room," Hayes said. "I got back into bed and that's the only time I cried. I cried and cried and cried and cried."

When she woke the next morning, she looked at her puffy eyes in the mirror and told herself, 'You're in a nursing home and you look like crap because you cried all night and where did that get you? Nowhere.' I got it out of my system," Hayes said.

That was the only time Hayes cried about her condition and now, she wakes up and embraces every day.

"I say two things (when I wake): 'Thank you, Jesus,' and 'It's a bonus day,'" Hayes said. "Some people didn't wake up."

New realities

Hayes embraced her time at the nursing home and made friends.

She had a little television in her room and, although it was against the rules, she would invite her friends over for Friday night movies and microwave popcorn.

"A nurse would knock and say, 'Ms. Hayes? What are you doing in there?' and I would say, 'You can't come in unless I say you can come in. That's one of my 15 rights as a patient,'" Hayes said with a hearty laugh, her blue eyes sparkling.

She became known as a "jokester" and would frequently race her wheelchair all around the home, dodging people and other wheelchairs.

"I looked at it like an obstacle course," Hayes said.

Many of her new friends had regrets. A lot of them said, "I wish I'd have done this and I wish I'd have done that," Hayes said. "That's when I said I'm making a stroke-and-croak list."

Her list, which was hatched long before the Morgan Freeman movie The Bucket List came out, always includes 50 things. She developed the list in 2002, after she got out of rehabilitation and has been knocking off things one by one — such as scuba diving, rock-wall climbing and competing in (and winning) marathons — but for every activity she does, she adds another.

Hayes has competed in several marathons and half marathons and has won first-place in many of them, including the Disney Half Marathon held every year in Orlando, Fla. The marathons and half marathons are open to both runners and wheelchair athletes. She's raced as part of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, raising thousands of dollars for the organization.

She has since had to stop doing long races because she was damaging her shoulders with the strain.

She has reigned as Ms. Wheelchair Virginia and is a champion in the air rifle event for the National Disabled Veterans Games, for which she's eligible due to her service in the Army. She is in training to qualify for the 2016 U.S. Paralympics air rifle team.

Because of her extraordinary story, she and Ellie — she got the assistance dog from Canine Companions for Independence for just the cost of a postage stamp — were featured on the Montel Williams Show. Hayes continues to do feature-worthy things. Next up on her stroke-and-croak list: skydiving.

Nuances of MS

In 2003, doctors diagnosed Hayes with multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease that disrupts communication between the brain and the rest of the body.

Hayes said somebody once told her that if you've met one person with multiple sclerosis, you've met one person with multiple sclerosis — because the disease affects everybody differently.

"It's not like diabetes where you ... know the course that it will follow," Hayes said. "With MS, you never know from day to day. I call it 'The MS Drive-by' — you can be fine one minute and the next minute your arm doesn't work or your vision goes. You never know.

"That's why I like to jam in as much every day as I can," she added. "I never know when it's going to be my last day. When you have a disease like MS, you really don't know."

For Hayes, the worst part of the disease is the cognitive problems. She carries around a notebook and writes everything down, both the things she needs to do and tasks that she's done that day — from meetings with the "Breakfast Club" at RainbowVision to appointments to with auto mechanics.

"It may look dorky, but it works for me," Hayes said.

"A lot of people just think that if you have a disability, especially a physical disability, that basically your life is over, and it's not," Hayes said. "I've done more since I was in my wheelchair than in the 45 years I wasn't."

Contact Ana Maria Trujillo at 986-3084 or atrujillo@sfnewmexican.com.