In 2008, as the Paralympic torch was lit and tens of thousands of cameras flashed in the “Bird’s Nest,” China’s largest stadium, Cindy Ouellet was time-traveling.

Specifically, her mind flashed back to age 12. She was with her family in her hospital room. Her doctor walked in, sat on her bed and closed the door. The doctor told her she had bone cancer. Ewing sarcoma. She had a 1% to 3% chance of survival — an estimated three months to live.

The cancer stole her left pelvis and femur. Largely bedridden, she endured a year and a half of chemotherapy. She played the keyboard on her bed to escape.

But there  Ouellet was, at the opening of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, now 17 and the youngest member of Team Canada’s wheelchair basketball team. She was cruising in a custom wheelchair built by her father.

On her left arm, she sported a tattoo of the words “Carpe Diem.”

Today, Ouellet, M.S. ’18, is a six-time Paralympian in both basketball and Nordic skiing. In 2021, she was named Quebec’s athlete of the decade for the 2010s, an honor that encompasses all able-bodied and disabled athletes in all sports. And she’s also a biomedical engineer who seeks to use her knowledge of biology, neuroscience and brain-machine interfaces to do something most athletes can’t imagine: 3D-printing a new biomimetic left leg.

When asked about her relationship with numbers and probabilities, Ouellet laughs. “As a researcher, I should probably go by odds. But I think the brain is a powerful tool, and you can beat whatever you want,” she says. “So, yeah, I don’t know.”

After completing her master’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2018 at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, her Ph.D. journey was cut short due to the pandemic. But she remembers being inspired by classes with Professor Francisco Valero-Cuevas, a pioneer in the study and design of prosthetic hands.

She started imagining something new. If a robotic hand, like Luke Skywalker’s, could connect with your functioning muscles and nervous system, what else is possible? Could other amputees 3D-print new prosthetic legs that might also be rewired to their brains?

Ouellet, who seeks a return to Los Angeles for the 2028 Paralympic Games, is looking for those answers as a Ph.D. student at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. But for her, it’s not just an academic curiosity — there’s some real urgency. After 25 years, her fully reconstructed leg with donated bone is “kind of falling apart.”

“In the upcoming years,” she says, “we’ll probably have to amputate my leg. A few of the screws that have been put on have been broken. And honestly, I’ve been pretty rough with it! It’s been 25 years of bone wearing on bone.”

 

‘That dude probably saved my life’

Ouellet, who grew up in Quebec City, was the only girl at football camp during the summer of 2000. She was playing quarterback, with hopes of making her high school team one day.

A storm was brewing, and it started to rain. The coach blew his whistle, and Ouellet froze. But the defensive player behind her didn’t.

The player’s helmet smashed into her pelvic bone, fracturing her hip. When Ouellet arrived at the hospital, she learned why the bones broke so easily: a large tumorous mass.

Reflecting on the young boy who caused her injury, Ouellet comments: “I always say, when I give keynotes and stuff, that dude probably saved my life. Because the cancer would have probably spread, and I would have died within the next few months.”

At first, the doctors thought the tumor was benign. But within a few months, the bone cancer was clear. This began a brutal 18 months of chemotherapy, as well as a major surgery.

“Even then, when I was 12,” Ouellet says, “I understood the only way I could survive was taking away my [left] leg.”

Ouellet’s parents had some experience working with people with disabilities. In 1998, they had started a successful medical equipment business in Quebec, selling bath lift systems all over the world that enabled individuals in wheelchairs (mostly seniors) to independently bathe themselves. But as Ouellet notes, nothing can quite prepare you for having a disabled child with cancer.

The cancer, however, was not the hardest moment.

For Ouellet’s first two years of high school, she had to study remotely, squeezing in homework between sleep and 28 chemotherapy treatments. At age 15, she returned to high school in person and got a new kind of education.

“It was the first time I realized I was different,” she recalls.

She was skinny, pale, bald from chemotherapy and walking on crutches.

“A group of boys really picked on me for months, kicking my crutches, beating me up physically,” she says. “I didn’t want to go to school.”

Why me? Again? Ouellet had beaten cancer — and now this?

Ouellet was too ashamed to tell anyone, including her parents. It was a very dark period, including moments of self-harm.

And then there was basketball.

Ouellet had the opportunity to meet with Paralympic wheelchair racing champion Dean Bergeron, the current world record holder in the 200-meter distance.

He told me, “Cindy, you know you can go to the Paralympics.”

Ouellet had been an athlete all her life. Swimming and track were her first introductions to para-sports. But it was wheelchair basketball, the nonstop motion and competition, that helped save her again. Nearly 20 years later, in 2024, it’s the sport that put her face on the cover of Olympic-themed Cheerios boxes.

During that time, she’s competed in the Paralympics in Beijing, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Paris. She’s gone from being a role player on the Canadian national team to the team captain in 2014, leading her squad to stunning upsets of the Netherlands and Germany and a gold medal win in that year’s Wheelchair Basketball World Championship finals.

She also competed for Canada in Para Nordic skiing at the PyeongChang 2018 Paralympic Winter Games, one of the few Olympic athletes to excel in completely different sports.

‘What is essential …’

Ouellet spent a lot of time adaptive surfing and enjoying the Southern California sunshine while at USC. But she’s never forgotten the possibilities raised by Professor Valero-Cuevas. 

“I’m looking to work on a brain computer interface to bypass the lesion [the damaged tissue in her leg], so whatever nerve is not functioning right now will be bypassed with a neuro brain-computer interface. There would be a period of neuro rehab, where I might learn new things like contracting my abs to lift my foot,” she says.

Her hope? To finish her Ph.D. and have a new hip prosthetic implanted by the time she’s between 42 and 45.

In the meantime, Ouellet is already building many things.

With the help of her father and uncles, she’s built her own home. With Sport’Aide (a “safe sport” organization), she’s helped build an anti-bullying campaign that might have aided her younger self. And in 2019, along with her parents, she launched Evo Concept, a company specializing in the design of adaptive sports equipment.

Ouellet, like many top Paralympic athletes, has corporate sponsors like RGK that pay for custom wheelchairs and adaptive equipment. Adaptive sports equipment, she notes, is incredibly expensive, and she wants equipment for the community, for recreational athletes with disabilities.

The company’s specialty? A “multisport sledge” that can easily be modified for five different sports, including skiing and skateboarding.

“I work in the shop with my dad, building everything,” Ouellet says, “and in the office with my mom, handling the distribution and sales.”

The company has sold over 200 sledges within Quebec province, mostly to rec centers, rehab centers and individuals.

For her first 15 years of competition, Ouellet’s father, a farm trained handyman, built all her wheelchairs. Now, RGK, based in the U.K., has built a wheelchair that she calls “one of the greatest chairs in the world.”

“The engineering behind that chair is just crazy. These carbon fiber chairs — it’s like night and day from the non-custom aluminum chairs I used to play in. It’s very reactive to your body. Even like one millimeter can make a difference when you build a chair. So, for me, the left side of my chair’s backrest is much different than my right side. Even that makes a difference, because my disability is more on the left.”

On Ouellet’s left arm is a tattooed sleeve with many of her favorite things: a piano, representing all her years of playing in Canadian recital halls, the instrument that saw her through cancer; the birch tree, her parent’s favorite; her Sagittarius star sign; the number seven, her basketball number.

And, of course, a quote from “The Little Prince,” her favorite book:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

At age 17, amid all the spectacle of Beijing and her first Paralympics, she could not perceive her family, far up in the stands.

She saw the essential, anyway.