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Lexi and Eric’s SMA love story: Figuring it out as they go

Lexi Villa and Eric Mercado share the story of their relationship, from meeting in elementary school to eventually getting married. Lexi discusses her perspective as someone living with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), and Eric shares his point of view as a partner and caregiver. Both share humorous stories from their many years together.

Transcript

Lexi Villa: Hi, I’m Lexie.

Eric Mercado: I’m Eric.

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Lexi: We met when we were eight years old.

Eric: We’re 30 now.

Lexi: Yeah. I can’t believe. We’re 30 now. Um, so we met as children. We grew up together. We actually didn’t start dating till, like, college, which is nice. We had time to be dumb children, which is great.

Eric: Let our frontal lobe develop a little bit. So in third grade, little kids running around during recess, I would always notice a pretty girl, you know, just never really going out to go play. Me being kind of direct and blunt, I was like, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? Why don’t you walk?” And basically the rest is history from there. Just became really good friends.

Lexi: So we weren’t quite dating yet. It was like our senior year of high school. I’ve always been, like, very sheltered. And he was like, “Well, if you want to do something, let’s do it.” Which is really helpful to me because I have a lot of anxiety, and he’s like, “No, if you say you want to and you’re able, like, we’re going to.” There was this hiking trail that everybody went to. It was the cool thing to do.

Eric: Everybody would go up there to go tag up the water tower. There was a water tower that was abandoned up there.

Lexi: Obviously, as a wheelchair user, hiking is not an option. And it was getting towards the end of her senior year and he was like, “Let’s go.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “We’ll go see the sunset. Like, we’ll basically go do what everybody does.” And I was like, “How are we going to do this? It’s not possible. It’s not going to happen.”

Eric: We’ll figure it out once we get there.

Lexi: And that is the response for everything. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.” And I’m like, “Well, we’ve come this far. Whatever. Like, let’s go.” We park up at the top of the hill and it’s a steep hill to get to the water tower.

Eric: And definitely hiking terrain.

Lexi: Yeah, like slippery, like dirt and mud. It is not doable. Like, or it shouldn’t have been doable.

Eric: And it was doable.

Lexi: It was. He technically dragged me backwards up that hill.

Eric: It took a good, like, 25 minutes to get us up there. I was definitely working up a sweat.

Lexi: I was like, “This is how I go.” We made it. We did. We made it. And I have — I have the best photo. Like, we made it right before the sun started to set. So I got the perfect view, and I was like, “Wow, I’ve never been up this high before” and never — had never been hiking, never had a view like that.

Eric: Yeah, we definitely took it all in for a while. And then, um, she kind of just looked over at me and she’s like, “How do we get down now?”

Lexi: That was a whole other piece. And he’s like, “Just enjoy this. We’ll figure that out.” And that’s always just been the answer — “We’ll figure it out.”

Eric: There was this one time we went to the beach. Same thing — a year or two out of high school.

Lexi: Oh no, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Eric: Getting her out onto the beach — nice and easy. Set the blanket down, right? Enjoyed the beach for a little bit. At one point, I did take her to the water to go put her feet in the water.

Lexi: It was also the first time I had ever put my feet in the water.

Eric: It was leaving the beach — that’s where things got funny. Being that there’s three of us there, we each got a corner of the blanket, and we just had Lexie in the middle of the blanket, laying down.

Lexi: Like a hammock.

Eric: Like a hammock. And we’re just walking through this residential area till we get to our car. An older couple passes by and they’re just staring at her and she’s just like, “Hi, I’m OK, don’t worry.”

Lexi: They were like, “Dragging a dead body off the beach.” It did not look good for them.

Eric: Just being — just being an outsider, looking at us, leaving that beach. Yeah. You’re definitely concerned.

Lexi: “What’s going on there?”

Eric: A number of reasons, right? Like, you really do got to think on your toes and find different solutions to a problem in front of you, whether that’s just something physical that you’re trying to do or it can come down to, like, medical too.

Lexi: Like, don’t take things too seriously. I feel like that’s one that was probably the hardest for me to learn as the person with SMA. Like I said, I have really bad anxiety. I always worry. Brought up in a space where the disability is a burden, and I think that’s a lot of our internalized ableism.

A lot of us deal with that. You kind of — it’s unfortunate, right? Because there’s no other way to put it. You kind of have to get over it. Realize, too, that nothing we ever have done in our life has been, like, by the book or by the norm or, you know, and you just kind of have to laugh at things. If you take it too seriously, it’s going to be a damper on everything. And if you just laugh as you go, it for sure makes life a thousand times easier.

Eric: You definitely deserve this. You deserve love. You deserve that opportunity. You deserve to fail at love. So put yourself out there. Like, you know, it’s scary for sure. It’s definitely scary. But you’ll come across the right one, and you’ll know. You’ll know.

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