At some point in life, everyone hits a wall.
It might come from an unexpected diagnosis, perhaps a personal hardship or even a mental challenge that makes the future feel uncertain. For many Pepperdine students, life is not defined solely by academic achievements or personal milestones, but rather shaped by personal hurdles encountered along the way.
Sophomore Ernest “Aidan” Sunkel was diagnosed with cancer when he was 3 and depression in high school. Senior Hannah Schendel has pushed through a late diagnosis of scoliosis in high school that is still impacting her. Senior Matthew Aizawa sustained a spinal cord injury during winter break, placing him in a wheelchair.
But through perseverance, community and an unwavering belief in their own strength, all three said they have found ways forward.
“You should take this setback and pain and use it as motivation for your future,” Schendel said. “Because if you can get through something as hard as this, you can get through anything, and I feel like getting through something like this [scoliosis] makes you realize that.”
Overcoming the Past and Facing the Present
Sunkel, an English major, said he has lived with the weight of survival ever since the day he could walk. At just 3, he and his family received life-altering news.
His family took him to the hospital because he was feeling fatigued with swollen lymph nodes. After some tests and a few days, his family received the call: Sunkel had leukemia.
“I was so little, I didn’t really understand what the stakes were,” Sunkel said.
For three years, Sunkel went through chemotherapy until he was 6, when he entered remission.
As a nondenominational Christian, Sunkel said his faith helped him make sense of his survival.
“Long after the fact, I realized that not many people get to say, ‘I beat cancer,’” Sunkel said. “I deduced that I’m alive for a reason. I think God wouldn’t have kept me around otherwise.”
While his body healed, another struggle emerged, one that felt even harder to put into words, Sunkel said. In high school, depression settled in, bringing thoughts that were impossible to shake.
“I knew that people loved me, but I just didn’t have any reason to believe it,” Sunkel said. “That was the biggest struggle of ‘Who really wants me alive in their life?’”
Those thoughts lingered in his mind even though he said he could logically name people who cared about him — his family, his friends. But depression does not always respond to logic.
“I could definitely name people,” Sunkel said. “But I didn’t fully believe it, because I didn’t want myself.”
“Depression is a common and serious mental health disorder that negatively affects the way people feel, think, act and perceive the world,” according to the American Psychiatric Organization. Depression can occur at any time or any age, but on average, it first appears during one’s late-teens to early 20s.
Sunkel first told his parents about his battle during his first year of high school. He said he severely struggled with asking for help, but his health deteriorated to a point where he was forced to confide in them.
“If I hadn’t been somewhat honest with them, I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of it,” Sunkel said. “I wouldn’t have been here.”
Sunkel said he masked his pain so he wouldn’t burden others, forcing smiles and laughter while suppressing anything that might disrupt the moment. He pretended because he loved and cared about his family and friends — he never wanted to disrupt the vibe.
By his senior year of high school, the weight became unbearable, Sunkel said. Unbearable to the point that Sunkel told his parents he did not want to live anymore.
“That was even harder because I know it’s selfish, and I know it sounds ungrateful, because you guys have given me life, and now I don’t want it anymore?” Sunkel said. “But at the same time, who else am I going to tell that’s going to get me help?”
That honesty was his first step forward. Through this, he decided to give therapy a shot, and he said it was exactly what he needed.
“That helped a lot just on the note of being able to talk to someone consistently,” Sunkel said. “Because I could tell my parents how I was feeling in the moment, but it’s hard to tell them how I’m doing all the time.”
During his first year of high school, he started taking medication. Sunkel took Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) for four years.
Sunkel said he stopped taking the medications on his own accord because he felt disconnected from his emotions. He did not want to have to take medication to be considered “normal,” in addition to hating the feeling of having his mood regulated.
Sunkel said this disconnection led to self-doubt. He worried about whether people cared about his true self.
“Do they like the mask that I wear?” Sunkel said. “Do they like that persona? Or do they really like me; me for who I am?”
At Pepperdine, Sunkel said his depression has improved.
“I find comfort in being at a Christian school in a community of believers, which I don’t really have at home,” Sunkel said. “Being able to go home and have a roommate who is so cool and will grant me alone time when I need it, or [who] is always willing to console me and specifically remind me that God is good and that God became a human and died for me — that wasn’t for nothing.”
Living With A Lifelong Challenge
Everyone is clumsy.
Growing up, senior Business Administration major Hannah Schendel was often labeled as clumsy, falling over countless times.
“I think I was on crutches like seven times,” Schendel said. “From when I was little to freshman year of high school.”
After one too many falls, she said she was determined to find answers. She underwent a series of MRIs with doctors first checking her legs, suspecting uneven growth. When that wasn’t the answer, they scanned her hips, and still nothing.
Finally, they scanned her spine, and they found scoliosis — a sideways curvature of the spine that most often is diagnosed in adolescents.
“The options are either you wait it out, and it gets worse as you get older,” Schendel said. “Then, eventually, it can get so bad that it can crush your lungs. So they were like, ‘You should do something about this now.’”
She had to choose between undergoing surgery or physical therapy.
“If I did surgery, I’d have to live the rest of my life with iron rods in my back,” Schendel said. “Then I wouldn’t really be able to bend over, like, I wouldn’t have a bunch of mobility.”
This led her to a rigorous physical therapy program near her home in Northern California. She said people from all over the world come for this treatment, but for her it was just a 30-minute drive each day.
Her drive was the easiest part.
“The treatment was really, really difficult to go through,” Schendel said. “The first time I went, I was there for three weeks straight, so I had to miss three weeks of school. It was like a 9 to 5, but physical therapy and treatment.”
It was here Schendel said she was introduced to a special back brace specifically made for scoliosis treatment, a Boston brace. She wore it regularly, even while sleeping.
At school, she said she felt self-conscious and did her best to hide it. But sometimes, she couldn’t hide the pain.
“I would sit in class sometimes and just sit crying because it was so painful,” Schendel said.
Alongside the constant physical therapy, she said she endured a series of other grueling treatments, all aimed to help stretch and realign her spine.
She said she spent 42 minutes a day strapped into a scoliosis traction chair, her waist tightly bound while a knob was pressed into her spine before she was flipped upside down. Another exercise, spinal weighting, required her to balance on a bosu ball while weighted down, all while enduring the constant pressure of a spinal knob.
The final machine, she said, strapped her to a table, inverting her legs to counteract gravity and stretch nerve tension in her spine.
All the while, she said she was forced to miss class and quit swimming and water polo, sports she said she loved. The mental toll was heavy.
“It was really hard, because I felt like I was trying to figure out who I was,” Schendel said. “Then it was just like, bam, you have this disease that suddenly consumed my entire life.”
Right before her diagnosis, she was scouted to be a model. Although the diagnosis didn’t prevent her from modeling, she said the experience felt different.
“I always felt like an imposter, because I was like, ‘Wow, there’s all these beautiful girls, and then there I am,’” Schendel said. “I would always hide my brace whenever I went and I just felt like I didn’t belong.”
The Path to Recovery: A Comeback in Motion
In an instant, everything can change.
For senior Chemistry major Matthew Aizawa, this change came unexpectedly while skiing in Mammoth in December 2024, a sport he was no stranger to, he said. It was the last day of the trip, basically the last run of the trip, he said, and he wanted to clear a ramp before heading home.
He watched people hit the ramp a couple of times before taking his turn to dive in. He thought to himself the people weren’t going fast enough, not clearing it at all. He said he thought he had to go faster than them.
“Of course, my last words,” Aizawa said. “I ended up flying like Superman, horizontally in the air and then landed straight on my back. I got knocked out. Once I regained consciousness, there were a ton of people around me — ski patrol, my friends — trying to figure out if I could feel my legs or not. I was like, ‘No, I don’t feel anything.’ And that’s when it got serious.”
From the moment he lost feeling in his legs, a new chapter began in his life, a chapter he said he could have never imagined. He was airlifted to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada and taken to the intensive care unit.
“That’s where I had my [initial] surgery, and I stayed for about a week,” he said.
He was diagnosed with a T6 spinal cord burst fracture. In other words, his spine was compressed, leading to pinching in his spinal cord.
For Aizawa, he described hearing the news as an overwhelming wave of uncertainty. He is currently in a wheelchair, uncertain if it will be required for the rest of his life.
“I’m still trying to figure out what to think, but initially it was a complete shock, like no way this is happening,” Aizawa said. “Honestly, it didn’t feel real, I was like, ‘This is crazy. I feel like I’m living in someone else’s life, this is nuts.’”
Aizawa said he is taking a leave of absence from Pepperdine this semester, but despite it all, he said he decided he was not going to let his circumstances define him.
“I’ve always been more of a ‘glass half full’ kind of guy,” he said.
He said this positive mindset became the foundation for his recovery. He focused on the parts of his life he could still control: his determination and outlook.
“I had to relearn almost everything about my life, so that was hard, but also kind of interesting for me,” Aizawa said. “I thought of it as a challenge. Like, OK, once I get through this, I’m going to be so much better the next day.”
Aizawa said the toughest part of being in a wheelchair has been asking people for help, especially since he said he would rather help someone else.
“Having to ask for help to get out of bed, get changed, take a shower, like, all that,” Aizawa said. “It was real tough for me. Like, I would call my nurse again to help me get up or move my bed. So that was real tough in the beginning mentally, because I had to be real dependent on other people, which was so different.”
The mental and emotional challenges proved to be more demanding. Aizawa said he’s faced many ups and downs in his recovery process, with days when the weight of his situation feels unbearable.
He’s found support in the community he has found at his rehabilitation center at Renown, the hospital he was taken to for his initial surgery.
“I made a lot of friends here who are also in the same situation, around the same age,” Aizawa said. “You just kind of bond, being able to see them and see how they’re progressing and see how you’re also progressing. It definitely helps keep me motivated.”
On top of this, the support he has received from his family, friends and Pepperdine faculty have helped push him through this time in his life, he said.
“My friends and family — oh my gosh — if I didn’t have them, I don’t know,” Aizawa said. “Things would be way different. They push me to be a lot happier than I am.”
The Mental Side of Resilience
Injuries, in general, are not just physical setbacks. They carry profound psychological impacts that can disrupt a person’s sense of identity, confidence and mental well-being.
Lina Chmiel, a sports psychologist for Pepperdine Athletics and the Counseling Center, works closely with athletes to navigate the mental challenges that arise from injuries.
“Whether you’re an athlete or not, you are losing your function, your daily function, of how you move to the world,” Chmiel said. “You’re having to accommodate a lot.”
When someone is in the midst of an injury, the isolation from friends, the disruption of their daily schedule and the uncertainty of recovery can compound these feelings of loss. Accepting and understanding the grief is the first step toward recovery, Chmiel said.
“Naming this grief, naming the anger, naming the sadness, naming the depression of it, naming the despair that you will never get back to where you were,” Chmiel said. “But going through those and allowing those feelings, it helps you move through it and not be stuck.”
Moreover, Chmiel stresses that injuries are not just physical traumas, but emotional and psychological traumas that require intentional healing.
“It stays with us, the trauma,” Chmiel said. “The injury is a trauma, it is. It’s a physical trauma, it’s a mental trauma, it’s an emotional trauma. So we really have to treat it as such to be able to, in a way, attend to the seriousness of it and the time that it needs to heal.”
Sunkel said his journey provided him with a greater sense of empathy for others who have similar conditions, knowing firsthand how difficult it is to speak out, how isolating it can feel. However, he said he has also grown frustrated with certain stigmas around mental health, specifically with how casual people throw around depression and suicide in everyday conversations.
“People crack jokes a lot, but whether they’re funny or not is up to debate,” Sunkel said. “Like, ‘This assignment is so hard, I’m gonna kill myself,’ like OK? Having actually wanted to do that, it’s not that deep, you don’t want to do that. People might not realize that that joke is insensitive.”
His personal struggles have shaped his journey in life, but they have also given him a strong passion for advocacy for both mental health and cancer research.
“The reason I care about both cancer research and mental health is because no one deserves to experience either in the first place,” Sunkel said.
He said he sees parallels between the two battles, and although cancer may sound more grave since one’s life is at stake, he can say the same thing about depression. Ultimately, his biggest takeaway is one of hope.
He knows firsthand what it’s like to feel as if things won’t change, that you won’t get better. But he said he also knows that’s not true.
“You can get better,” Sunkel said. “That’s the main idea. That’s something everyone deserves to know. That’s something everyone deserves to hear from God.”
From the day she found out she was diagnosed, Schendel felt broken, and her negative thoughts kept adding fuel to the fire.
“Now that I’m older, I realize it made me so much stronger — mentally and physically,” Schendel said. “I also realized that it didn’t define me and that people would still love me for who I was.”
Schendel used her former identity as an athlete as a motivator to get well.
“I wanted to get better as soon as I could so I could go back to running around, swimming, doing all the things I loved,” Schendel said. “I needed that motivation to fight through everything, otherwise, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Aizawa said he is the same person as before, just with a wheelchair and an interesting story to tell. He is attempting to confront his adversity with resilience and courage.
“Be positive and be thankful for what you have, because when it’s gone it’s like, ‘Dang, that sucks,’” Aizawa said. “And more than anything, I wish I had expressed my love and gratitude to the people around me more, because you never know when you might need to lean on them. I just want to thank everyone who’s been supporting me through all of this. That’s the most important thing I want to get across — there’s no way I could’ve made it through this whole journey without them.”
_________________
Follow Currents Magazine on X: @PeppCurrents and Instagram: @currentsmagazine
Email Justin Rodriguez: justin.rodriguez@pepperdine.edu
