Friday, May 16, 2025
Rebecca Koltun’s life turned upside down after she took a terrible fall on a Vermont skiing trip with her friends in March 2021.
While the 25-year-old Plainview woman doesn’t remember the fall, for which she was treated at a New Hampshire hospital, she does recall finding out from doctors that she was paralyzed from the neck down, and needed a ventilator because she couldn’t breathe on her own.
Koltun, who was 21 at the time, had sustained a C1-C2 spinal cord injury, which is considered the most severe of all spinal cord injuries because it is often fatal, and leaves most of those who survive it completely paralyzed.
On Wednesday, Koltun came to the Oyster Bay Life Enrichment Center, where she spoke with more than a dozen senior women about phone accessibility. The center, on East Main Street, offers a variety of programs and services for active older people, including exercise and social services.
Beth Spickler Lerman, the center’s social work coordinator, invited Koltun to speak with the Women of the Ages group. “It’s a supportive group of active woman who have a lot to say,” Spickler Lerman said. “I know Rebecca Koltun from my home community, and what a remarkable and inspiring young woman she is. I wanted my women’s group to benefit from learning from Rebecca.”
Koltun taught the seniors how to use Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant, Siri, and other voice-activated applications — and they asked her about her life and how she manages her disability.
Koltun spent two and a half weeks in the intensive care unit of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, before being transferred to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. There she underwent four and a half months of intensive rehabilitation, got off the ventilator, learned how to operate a wheelchair with a straw and became acquainted with assistive technology.
Koltun spent another four more months at Glen Cove Hospital, continuing her rehabilitation before being discharged to an assisted-living facility while she waited for renovations to her house to accommodate her use of a wheelchair. A crew from “George to the Rescue,” a home renovation TV series on NBC, hosted by contractor George Oliphant, did the work, installing a ramp, an elevator, modified the doorways and other living spaces and installed a variety of voice-activated technology.
Though she requires 24-hour care — from one nurse during the day and another at night — Koltun uses the technology for many of her daily activities. And for the past two years, she has shared what she has learned about phone accessibility with those who can use the help.
“I think that my community has been so supportive of me, so I have to give back to them,” she said. “I benefit a lot from talking to people about phone accessibility because I could see how much it’s affected my life, and how it made it so much easier.”
Now, four years since her life-changing fall, Koltun remains busy. She has over 200,000 followers on Instagram and over 130,000 on TikTok, and she shares stories from her life on both platforms.
While she was recovering, she began painting, by holding a brush her mouth, as a form of therapy, and now she is selling the paintings. “I live at home, and I paint with my mouth,” Koltun said. “MadebyMouth,” her page on the online marketplace Etsy, lists 17 paintings for sale.
She plans to continue conducting workshops on voice-assisted technology across Long Island. “In general, I like educating people on life with disability,” she said, hoping to “open people's minds.”
In addition, Koltun plans to sell her artwork at Art in the Park, in Oyster Bay’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park, on May 17. She will also participate in the fourth annual Rally For Rebecca charity 5K run and fundraiser this May.
The race attracts hundreds of participants and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Help Hope Live, a crowd sourcing website for medical bills. To learn more about her, you can find Koltun on Instagram, @rebecca_koltun.
