Amy Van Dyken-Rouen's biggest step

It's Walking Wednesday for Amy Van Dyken-Rouen.

She's seated in a sunny corridor, an enclosed pedestrian bridge that spans Third Avenue in Phoenix. She is a lifelong athlete, a dominating force who has risen to every physical challenge ever put in front of her.

She's wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt.

Time to do this thing.

"I'm well-rested," she says. "I've gotten a lot of sleep the past few days." Today's a good day for walking.

There was a time when it would have been hard to imagine a simple walk would be a challenge for Amy — that's the Amy Van Dyken, the one who was an Olympic champion, a six-time gold medalist. The one who pushed her coaches' buttons just to make them work her harder. The one who faced down every outrageous workout, every asthma attack, every shoulder injury, every doubter and said, push me.

But then, there was a time when it was hard to imagine walking at all — for Amy, the one whose spine crumpled in an instant in the crash.

The one who was unconscious after the ATV went over the embankment that night.

The one who was awake the next day before surgery — awake to hear the doctor's recommendation: Tell your husband goodbye now, just in case.

The one who the doctor couldn't imagine would ever walk again.

And now, one year later, she's here, on this bridge that links one side of the Dignity Health campus to the other, with a cluster of physical therapists and some high-tech gear and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, for the weekly visit she calls Walking Wednesday.

And because she's Amy, she's ready to push some buttons.

The workout started with hip-strengthening exercises downstairs. Physical therapist Al Biemond, the taskmaster, counts her reps.

Amy: "Where did you learn to count? You didn't watch 'Sesame Street.' "

Al: "OK, because of that, that was one. I'm counting the ones you do right and you're not a smart-ass."

"At first he didn't know how to handle me at all," Amy says. "He was very shy, very quiet, very timid. Now, he knows how to push me. I'm the type of personality where, if there is no one training me, I'll push them and push them to see how far I can push them. Then I gain respect for them if they start firing back at me."

And now she's here, this Amy — Push-me Amy — at the walking bridge. In her wheelchair but ready to stand. The Amy who never saw a challenge she wouldn't take. The Amy who, for a year, has been pushing to walk.

But the walking won't be just to push herself. Walking isn't just about Amy. Not anymore.

First, the gear. Physical therapist Luis Escalante helps strap on the bionic suit. Ekso Bionics, the manufacturer, describes it as an exoskeleton, a wearable robot. By shifting her weight, Amy can activate sensors that initiate steps. Battery-powered motors drive the legs, replacing the function she lost.

To start, all the movement can be powered, none of it Amy's. But the suit can be dialed back so the motors do less of the work — and Push-me Amy does more.

"What we've been trying to progress her into is less and less of the device and more of Amy," Biemond says.

That is, they're trying to push her.

Gear-up takes about 10 minutes — straps up here, straps down there. Next, a little more warm-up. Amy holds onto a walker. She does a shuffle step, bracing against the walker. She moves her right leg forward and back in place, then her left, maybe just a little farther.

"Very nice," Biemond says. But no, not too much praise. Push her. "C'mon, two more, Amy. Go, go."

The suit's still turned off. Push-me Amy is doing the work. "That was 100 percent me," she'll crow later.

At last, all the prep, all the warming-up is done. It's time to walk.

Doing laps is a familiar thing. One trip down to the other end, turn around, one trip back. That's one lap.

So there will be laps, one agonizing, robot-assisted step at a time. Crossing the bridge is roughly the same distance as crossing Third Avenue, six lanes wide.

Today, this time, can she make four laps? Down and back, four times?

If things aren't going well, they can always ease off, stop early.

But this is Push-me Amy.

Luis cradles the backpack straps of Amy's gear, to help with balance.

Al stands to the side.

First lap. ... Go.

Amy Van Dyken was never expected to become a breakout star, for lots of reasons.

For starters, there was the asthma that put her in the hospital as a child in Colorado, that made her wheeze and stop short halfway down the lane. She couldn't swim the length of the pool until she was 12 years old.

But she swam anyway, and swam and swam. All-American in college in 1992 and 1993. NCAA women's swimmer of the year in 1994. Training at the Olympic center in Colorado Springs.

By 1996, she was bound for the Summer Games in Atlanta.

Sports Illustrated had predicted Amy would take three silver medals: one in the 50 freestyle, her best event, and two silvers, assuming she swam on the 4x100 free and medley relays.

Instead, she took gold in all three, and another one in the 100 butterfly. Four gold medals in one Olympics. She was the first American woman to do it.

The next four years were not kind to her body. Her right shoulder was trouble, and she had one surgery to fix it. Seven months before the next Olympic trials, she had another.

A lot of people didn't expect much after that. Too many shoulder problems, too late in the game. Maybe she wouldn't make the 2000 team at all.

The same years, though, were kind to her heart.

Amy had been married before the Olympics, then divorced in April 1998.

"I'm looking for a boyfriend," she said in a July 1998 Denver Post story. "If you know anyone out there, let me know. At the Olympics I was married and a lot of people think I still am."

Later that year, she met Tom Rouen, a punter for the Denver Broncos.

"We chatted a long time and figured out we lived across the street from each other," she says. By 2000, they were engaged.

Through the Broncos, Tom knew a biomechanical specialist he thought might be able to help heal Amy's shoulder.

"She was determined to get that shoulder healthy and go back and win another gold medal or more," that specialist, Greg Roskopf, says now. "That to her, just like right now, was a challenge. 'I'll prove them wrong.'"

Amy went to trials and made the team. Just before, she talked to reporters.

"It was like when people told me I couldn't swim and I'd never make it to the Olympics because of my asthma," she said. "I was like, 'Oh yeah? Watch me.' "

Watch me. Push me.

In Sydney, she swam the relays again and took home two more gold medals. The next year, she and Tom went to Maui and got married.

Life after Sydney was golden, too. Amy's medals — still the second-most golds for an American woman — put her into the U.S. Olympic Committee Hall of Fame in 2008. They also gave her an aspect of lifetime marketability. Tom's 13 seasons in the NFL included two Super Bowl championships. Together, they were a golden sports couple, and by their early 40s, they were aloft in the long, comfortable arc of life after competition.

They settled into the Grayhawk community in Scottsdale and kept a second place in the high country. Tom worked in real estate, Amy in the media.

She dedicated herself to getting into the best shape of her post-swimming life.

The strength training she did then, she is convinced now, helped her to survive June 6, 2014.

There's a chair at one end of the pedestrian bridge. It's there waiting for Amy, who's allowed to take a rest at the end of each lap.

Amy's on the move now, in the exoskeleton, slowly. Daylight glows through the towering glass windows that line both sides.

Look out the southern windows, far — farther really than you can see, even from up here above the traffic — and you can imagine you can see across the desert to Tucson, to the University of Arizona, where Amy got her start in collegiate swimming, where she first made All American, first made her connection to this state.

Look out the northern side, even farther, you can imagine you can see up and over the mountains into Colorado, Amy's childhood home, and Colorado Springs, the Olympic training center.

One end of the bridge points east, into a hospital hallway, and if you could see past that you'd see mountains there, too — see way out east toward the high country, toward an Arizona town called Show Low.

But Show Low is behind Amy now. She's headed west, down the walkway.

Luis gently steadies her from behind when necessary. Al walks next to her. He's not there to cheer, he's there to study her stride.

And to give her a hard time. That Hello Kitty T-shirt, for example — he doesn't like that shirt.

Push-me Amy just takes another step.

Sometimes, on Walking Wednesdays, Amy flashes back to Colorado Springs before '96, with famed Olympic coach Jonty Skinner.

"Jonty would do his little evil laugh and say you're going to do ten 400s with 30 seconds rest," she says. About 2¹/₂ miles in all.

"That's what this is like," she says. "You want to stop. You can't stop. It's hard, everything is burning. You just want to shut it down, but you know there is greater good. Except then I was doing it against the Chinese girls as opposed to going against myself. It's the same but different."

Amy makes her way back toward the resting chair, sharing the work with the machine. The exoskeleton beeps at her when she shifts enough weight for it to drive the next step forward. That's a good beep. There's a different-sounding beep when she's not working hard enough or meeting the expectations set for her leg. That's a bad beep.

Push-me Amy keeps it on the good beeps. One step at a time. Beep. Beep.

The whole contraption is enough to remind everybody on the bridge of the Terminator. Amy finishes the lap. "I'll be back," she says with a menace once she reaches the resting chair.

But not too much rest. Maybe when everything is burning, you want to shut it down. But Push-me Amy knows there is greater good ahead.

Second lap. ... Go.

The accident might never have happened at all had they driven that night. Instead, they took the motorcycle and the ATV.

It was just another summer evening at their place in Show Low. They rode to Torreon Golf Club. When they finished dinner, they left to ride home. Amy climbed aboard the ATV.

What happened next, she doesn't remember. The ATV launched forward, over a curb and down an embankment.

By the time Tom reached her, he remembers, she wasn't breathing at all. He raised her neck. She started gasping.

Soon came paramedics, and then the flight to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center.

Amy hadn't been wearing a helmet, but the damage was to her spine, not her head. The crash dislocated her T11 verterbra, in the middle of her back, severing the nerves that control the body from the waist down.

The next day, June 7, the medical team prepared Amy for a six-hour operation to realign her vertebrae. The risks were huge: vascular injury or a spinal-fluid leak that could lead to meningitis. The doctor advised them to say their last words, as she might not survive.

If she didn't make it, Amy told Tom, he should have a happy life, find love again.

If the suffering was too much, Tom told Amy, it was OK to let go.

And that was when Push-me Amy replied: Nope.

Eleven days after the surgery, as Amy was preparing to fly to Denver for rehabilitation at Craig Hospital, Dr. Luis Tumialan briefed the media.

"The question is whether there will be any return of neurological function," he said. "It is difficult to imagine."

Then, an MRI revealed a thread of hope. Ten percent of her spinal cord still was attached.

Rouen called on an old hand once more: Greg Roskopf, the Colorado specialist who had helped heal Amy's shoulder more than a decade before.

By late August, something new was happening. Technicians were applying pressure to parts of Amy's lower body, and Amy's muscles were starting to push back.

Amy and Tom stayed until September, but Arizona was home now, and they were ready to go home. There, somehow, everything started to fit into place.

A TV show host and a group of local contractors moved by Amy's story worked overtime to make over their Scottsdale house.

Roskopf came too, for visits every four to six weeks to work on Amy's treatment. He had long wanted to collaborate with a Colorado clinic that used a treatment called Regenexx, injecting stem cells to stimulate injury recovery. Amy's pain clinic in Arizona had a license to use the treatment.

Everything kept fitting into place. There's Amy as grand marshal of the Fiesta Bowl Parade. There's Amy at physical therapy. There's Amy on TV, giving tours of the house so many volunteers helped remake for her: lowered stove and countertop, widened tub, ramps to the pool, all so Amy could reach them from her wheelchair.

She was the same Amy as ever. She cracked jokes about learning not to ride an ATV. She howled with delight at the buzzer alarm on her new stove.

But she had so many people ready to help. Amy's Army, they called themselves.

Somewhere along the way, Amy started to see a greater good.

Starting her own foundation, Amy says, was "a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I probably should have waited until I was fully healed because it was a lot right off the bat." She did it essentially with the help of the women in her book club.

Then the Parsons Foundation and Fiesta Bowl donated a combined $40,000.

In April, it was time to give someone else a push.

The skeleton is creaking with each step, and Amy's in pain. It shows in her face. Lap two done, she sits for a rest.

"This is the most we've ever done," she says. "I think we're showing off."

The walking bridge is wide enough that Amy's small group can stick to one wall and the business of a hospital can pass by freely along the other. Lab coats, scrubs, visitor badges — most pass by without much notice.

One person walking by, a woman wearing glasses, sees the group. She stops to watch, quietly.

Al wants more data from the exoskeleton to analyze. In the next few weeks, the leg braces they have ordered will arrive, and she will start walking with those and a walker.

Al and Amy both know they're racing against another measure, too, with each visit: Insurance will continue to pay for Amy's therapy at Barrow Neurological Institute only if she is making measurable, functional improvement.

Al isn't letting up: "You've got at least another run in you."

Push-me Amy gets up, but she's hurting more than she'll say. Later, she'll confess, "I was about ready to pass out."

Here, on the walking bridge, she just grits.

Third lap. ... Go.

Taylor Stuart was 17 in August 2012. She was just starting her senior year at Southwest Georgia Academy. She was an all-region basketball player, and she was on her way to school.

The air was heavy with fog that morning as she drove up Georgia Route 45.

When her Jeep Wrangler left the road, it went into a ditch, then struck a culvert and vaulted, rolling over until it finally came to rest on its roof. Taylor was trapped, partly inside, partly outside.

Today, she's 20, a nursing student at Valdosta State. She's trying to play basketball again, in a wheelchair.

She is a T10 paraplegic. That's one vertebra higher than Amy. Her spinal cord is 95 percent severed. Unlike Amy, she has not regained any movement below the waist.

"In the beginning, it was very difficult because you had all these people looking at you and you didn't know what to think," Taylor says. " You have to not have pity for yourself."

She can walk up to 500 feet using braces and a walker. But she and her family can afford only so much. When her aunt heard about Amy's foundation, she applied on Taylor's behalf.

The foundation, for its first grant, paid $15,000 for an electrical stimulation bicycle. Its electrical pulses trigger Taylor's muscles.

"It's been helping a lot with leg strengthening and cardio too," Taylor says. "Amy has pretty much been my inspiration to know I can one day possibly walk again."

Dr. Luis Tumialan, the surgeon who repaired Amy's spine — the one who couldn't see how she could ever move again — knows patients like this, too.

He talks about how he tells them they're injured, they're paralyzed. They absorb the news of this diagnosis. And then they look at him and say: You need to be wrong, like you were wrong about Amy.

Amy rolls her eyes when she hears it, he says, but it's true. "People with spinal cord injury," he says, "need a person like her."

The third lap has been a punisher.

Amy's still keeping up with the machine's beeps, but the banter is gone. It's all focus now.

The rest of hospital life comes and goes, but the quiet woman wearing glasses is still here, standing off to the side, as Amy wills herself forward.

Beep. Step. Beep. Step.

"This is hard," Amy says. "I can't do it."

A step, and another. Such tiny steps for a onetime champion.

Amy's 42 now. She has an old tattoo on her left ankle, Olympic rings that have been there since her first Games, and a newer one on her left wrist, a mythological phoenix rising, made from the waves of her heartbeat on an EKG.

Still, how did she rise so quickly? Walking Wednesdays must sometimes feel like something worse than starting over. This is the Amy Van Dyken. She won six gold medals. Now she struggles to even take a step. Doesn't she, at least sometimes, see the whole thing as a cruel twist of fate? A tragedy?

Amy sees it a different way.

Maybe the point hadn't been to face all that early effort and agony — the asthma, the pain, the shoulder surgeries, the pushing, pushing, pushing — so she could win those gold medals.

Maybe the point had been to win those gold medals so she could do this.

So she could raise money to help people without their own army. So she could be a face for spinal cord research.

So she could be a face that someone in a hospital room somewhere could see, and see some hope.

"This is my calling," she'll say. "Perhaps this is my destiny."

To take one step, and then another. To push herself and everyone else.

But wait, she's still only on lap three.

The hallway feels longer than ever. Beep. Step.

"Why is this so hard right now?" Amy gasps, finally, her push just about gone. "I'm dying!"

This time the comeback doesn't come from Al.

"No you're not!" shouts a voice from the edge of the walkway.

It's the woman wearing glasses. She has been standing, watching silently, but not now.

"You came so far!" she shouts. "You're not dying."

Amy heaves forward again, step, step, until she finally reaches the chair.

The woman approaches, quieter now. She knows who Amy is, of course. But the encounter is one of random chance.

The woman is here in the hospital because of her own husband. He had been in a coma. Today, he walked for the first time.

"I'm so proud of you," the woman says to Amy. "You're an inspiration to all of us."

Then she's gone, across the bridge and out of sight.

No one even has a chance to get her name.

Anyway, the workout's not finished yet.

Fourth lap. ... Go.

Reach the reporter at jeff.metcalfe@arizonarepublic.com.