In 1987, when she was shooting her centerfold at Playboy Studio West, Sharry Konopski met a young woman named Ellen Stohl, who was also posing for the magazine. Sharry was overwhelmed by Ellen, a spunky paraplegic who had been injured in an auto accident. "I was really shy," she recalls, "and Ellen's personality was so forceful that she kind of scared me." After their pictorials appeared, the two young women went their separate ways. Sharry returned to rural Washington State, where she married and had two children (Spencer, now eight, and Siera, six). In 1995, a tragedy similar to Ellen's struck Sharry. On what she describes as "a really bad April Fool's Day," she was driving home from work when three deer suddenly appeared in the road. She swerved, hit loose gravel and rolled her Mustang.
"I lay out in the woods all that night," Sharry recalls, "and God and I had a few choice words. The staff in the trauma unit at the hospital where I was taken told me that if I'd been out there another 20 minutes, or if the temperature had been a few degrees lower, I would have died." She is paralyzed from the spinal cord injuries she suffered and will never walk unassisted again.
"I just picked myself up, dusted myself off and am continuing on," says Sharry today. "I'm giving safety talks to local students, telling them what happened to me, how I survived the trauma and how to prevent injuries." One thing she has learned is that "the only thing that you can really count on is change." One such change: Her marriage is breaking up. "Some people can't deal with adversity," she observes. "My husband is a wonderful father, but sometimes things just don't work out." Meanwhile, Sharry gets on with her life, with a little help from her fans--and from Playboy, which sponsored a fund-raiser for her in Los Angeles (among the guests: Ellen Stohl). She works out with trainer Steve Mansfield, building strength in her upper body so she can manipulate a set of braces. After stories about her plight appeared in regional newspapers, Robert Owens, an orthotist in Salem, Oregon, donated his time to build braces for her. With their aid, Sharry took her first steps on October 21, 1996. Things, she says, are definitely looking up.
