By Alex Kuffner, Providence Journal
May 19, 2007
BRISTOL — Yes, Jeffrey Delgado says, he does feel fortunate to be graduating from college today. But is he surprised at his achievement? Not really.
Even though Delgado cannot walk and has the use of only one hand, going to college was always a goal, regardless of his disability. And even though he dropped out his first year because he was so sick, he knew he would go back and finish his degree in business management, no matter how long it took.
So don’t expect Delgado to get too emotional this morning when he maneuvers his electric wheelchair across a stage at Roger Williams University to collect a diploma that has been six years in the making.
He didn’t do the impossible, just what he expected.
“It’s going to be a good accomplishment,” the Taunton, Mass., native says casually. “But the way my mother raised me, I believe I can do anything I want.”
He believes other students with disabilities can too, but he knows how difficult it can be. So he has established a nonprofit trust that aims to distribute the same computer software he relied upon to get through school. He hopes that if he works hard enough, he can make it a little easier for others.
“After graduation, I’ll still be busy,” he promises. “I have a business to take care of.”
Delgado, 24, has Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease he was born with that has wasted his muscles. His parents knew something was wrong when he was a baby. He had trouble learning to walk and speak. He was diagnosed at 3 years old.
By age 10, he lost the use of his legs. The following year, he had surgery to fuse his spine. He was a teenager when his hands started to fail him.
“It just happens,” he says. “One day you can use your hands. The next day you can’t.”
He enrolled in Bristol Plymouth Vocational High School to study computer science, but with a weakened immune system he was susceptible to pneumonia. The bouts were frequent, severe and required hospital treatment. He estimates he missed one out of every five days of school, but he still graduated.
The pattern continued after he finished high school. He even had pneumonia the day he took a placement test at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, but it was the last day the exam was offered that year. He refused to wait another 12 months to sit for it again and somehow got through it.
Despite the frequent absences, by taking four courses a semester, instead of the usual five, he received an associate’s degree in three years.
It was at BCC that he first came across C-Print, a speech-to-text software program developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The program was designed for deaf students, but Delgado discovered that it was perfect for someone like him with only limited use of one hand.
He hired Liz Tidwell, a Westport woman trained in the form of shorthand that the computer program uses, to accompany him to class. She would take notes for him on a laptop and then e-mail them to him every evening. At home in Taunton, he would use those notes to write papers with the help of speech-recognition software.
In the fall of 2004, Delgado transferred to Roger Williams, but again his health failed. At the end of his first semester, he suffered his worst case of pneumonia and dropped to 78 pounds from his usual 130.
For the next six months, he would return to the hospital every few weeks for treatment. His family persuaded him to take the rest of the year off. It was a frustrating time. He wanted to go back to school, but he couldn’t.
He finally returned the following fall after agreeing to use a feeding tube at night to take nutritional supplements. His body grew stronger and his health improved. He joined a national business fraternity and started going to concerts and Patriots games.
Above all, he could focus on classes without having to worry about getting sick again. Tidwell had continued working with him after he transferred to Roger Williams, and with her assistance he got through the next two years of classes. The two joke that maybe she should be getting a degree today too, he says.
She isn’t the only one who helped Delgado. Because of his disability, he needs personal-care attendants to bring him to school from home. He has seven people who work for him in shifts and are paid by the State of Massachusetts.
“We don’t look at it like he has a disability at all,” says Amy Hebert, an attendant who has known Delgado for a decade and accompanied him to campus on a recent afternoon. “We go to the movies. When we go to dinner, I take a bite then I give him a bite. He’s like any other friend.”
Delgado is contemplating graduate school, but for now he’s focused on his nonprofit, Freedom Access Captioning. He aims to use grants to offset the cost of the C-Print software package so other disabled students throughout New England can buy it at a cheaper price. At the same time, the organization will train people to do what Tidwell did for Delgado.
“I think I have an entrepreneur in me,” he says. “You have to take risks to reap the rewards. I want to get this up and running.”
He tells a story from when he was a teenager. He badly wanted his own paper route. Knowing that he couldn’t deliver the newspapers himself, he partnered with a friend who made the deliveries while Delgado took care of all the accounting.
His mother still laughs about that.
“He’s not the norm,” Gail Delgado, a beauty consultant, says. “He has something a little extra special.”
She will be at the graduation ceremony today along with Delgado’s younger sister, Melissa, a student at Bridgewater State College, and his father, Sam, a Taunton firefighter.
They’ll see Delgado finish what he started.
“There are times when I’d say, ‘Why me?’ ” he says. “I try not to do that. I just look at what I can do, not what I can’t do.”