An A-Plus in Attitude : Student’s Life Active, Cheerful Despite Multiple Handicaps
If you see Alex Montoya and wonder about his prosthetic arms, go ahead and ask him what he’s all about. He likes that.
But you’ll have to compete. The hip, romantic-eyed 16-year-old says hello to someone every 10 feet as he walks the hallways of San Diego High School, sometimes stopping to exchange lively teen-age witticisms with friends. The real wonder is how he makes it to class on time.
“I try to greet everybody that I can,” he said. “And I try to make sure people know me for who I am.”
Like other teens, Montoya grapples daily with the trials of young adulthood, only for him the challenge includes having two prostheses for arms and a prosthesis for a right leg.
Even so, he is more active at school than most students. The junior class vice president helps organize school functions, takes advanced history, English, and writing classes, and keeps up a busy social life. He writes articles and poetry for the school paper, and also serves as section editor for it’s “creative pages.”
In many ways, Montoya considers his handicap a blessing. Although every day is a struggle for him--it takes 30 minutes just to comb his hair--he feels his attitude has an important effect on other people.
“People have a bad day, and see me being a happy person,” he said. “If they see a person ‘like me’ being positive, they think ‘why can’t (I) be positive, too.’ ”
Montoya was nominated by his high school principal to appear on a local television program featuring young people with positive attitudes. He appeared on another show shortly after that.
The attention was because of his openness about living with a handicap, he believes, and he welcomed the opportunity to deliver a message to a wide audience of both handicapped and able-bodied people.
“My message to handicapped people is to be friendly, not spiteful or bitter,” he said. “To answer questions, and show people who you are . . . A handicapped person can get a bad attitude early on. It’s not that they pity themselves, just that they get really frustrated.”
Montoya encourages able-bodied people to speak to handicapped people, and not be afraid to ask questions. He said people who show pity make handicapped people feel awkward, and added that offers of help, such as holding open a door, is a much more positive and welcome gesture.
Montoya doesn’t just talk about having an open attitude. He wrote an article which appeared in the latest issue of “The Russ,” the school newspaper, which described what it was like to get a new pair of arms.
The ordeal to get them, driving back and forth to Los Angeles and missing school, pays off in the end with the “exhilarating feeling” of having a “shiny new pair of arms,” he wrote.
This semester, Montoya is struggling to balance the time he spends on the paper and with friends, on one hand, and his school work on the other. Through most of his days at San Diego High, he has been what he calls an average student, though last semester he was a B-average student.
Now, however, Alex says he is danger of slipping again. He knows he must concentrate on his studies in order to fulfill his dream, attending the University of Notre Dame.
“Alex is probably the most productive person on the staff,” journalism teacher Gary Jimenez said. “He sets the standard in terms of what gets done. And it’s because he is so focused. I just can’t say enough about him.”
Montoya said he wasn’t always so outgoing, and has come a long way in getting people to see his inner self.
“When people stared at me, I used to stare back,” he said. “But I realized I needed to talk to them so they would feel more comfortable around me, and be more educated. I thought maybe it would help when they met the next handicapped person.”
The pointing fingers and an occasional horrified expression on a youth’s face once filled him with insecurity, “but the more I talked to people, the more the shyness wore off.”
Montoya was born to a poor family in Colombia, South America. His aunt, whom he lives with in southeast San Diego, remembers how doctors put Montoya on a table after he was born in order to display him to colleagues, instead of cleaning him and wrapping him in blankets. They were so sure he would die.
It was this kind of attitude toward disabled children that drove Montoya’s family to send him to the United States.
Doctors now guess that Montoya’s condition may be the result of something his mother may have been exposed to at work, when she assembled artificial Christmas trees in Columbia. Her pregnancy was normal, and she was not on any medications.
He admits that sometimes, when he’s struggling to button his shirt, or make a sandwich, he feels defeated. But only momentarily.
“I realize that some have it worse,” he said. “And I’m not going to get anywhere by complaining. I just have to work at it, and work at it. . . .”
“The way that I survive is to take things day by day,” he said. “If I worried about problems, I would just stress myself out.”
Alex knows the future will bring many challenges. So does his aunt, Lucia Callahan. When Montoya turns 18, he will no longer be eligible for free services at Shriners Hospital in Los Angeles, which provides therapy and prosthetic devices free to minors. Callahan worries about finding money to cover for his medical expenses. She is also worried about finding money to send him to college.
But Montoya remains optimistic.
“I feel blessed,” he said. “Whatever hardships have come my way, I’ve been able to overcome them.”
