'Don't hate yourself': Landon Sachs overcomes family tragedy to find joy in adaptive tennis
The boy didn't want to talk at first.
It was flu season in early 2014, no visitors allowed in the rehab center at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. Manny Gomez, a 15-year-old with an incomplete spinal cord injury, grew lonely. Most patients would stay for a week, faces cycling in and out, nobody going through Gomez's same months-long process of physical therapy.
Except for one boy named Landon Sachs, 8 years old, who shared the same spinal cord injury. The kid didn't say much, even when Gomez tried to engage him. The older boy respected it. He figured it was a don't-talk-to-strangers thing.
It was bigger than Gomez could've known.
Eventually, though, Landon opened up. Maybe, Gomez thought, it was seeing another kid in a wheelchair smile. The two became fast friends, grabbing onto each other's chairs and wheeling down the hallways. The boy got Gomez to try Clash of Clans, and Gomez got him to try
