Rebecca Koltun uses dark humor and a large TikTok following to educate on life with a disability

‘I’m still here.”

Rebecca Koltun is reminded of that whenever she’s on the Jones Beach boardwalk, her favorite spot on Long Island, and feels the wind on her face.

The Plainview resident, 26, is still going to the city, concerts, the movies and coffee shops with friends.

She took milestone flights the past two winters, and a cruise over the summer.

She has entertained hundreds of thousands with her popular, darkly funny and enlightening videos across social media.

And she has made an impact through various speaking engagements, including to the Nasdaq Accessibility Network in Times Square in June and at the 2025 Spine Research Symposium, hosted by Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Illinois, in September.

When Koltun became a quadriplegic in March 2021 after a near-fatal skiing accident, all of this seemed impossible.

But with a strong support system, a generous local community and her own enduring resilience and sense of humor — her mother Audrey Koltun calls her a “fantastic anomaly” — Koltun has not only survived but created a new, fulfilling life with her disability.

‘I LIKE BEING BUSY’

“I didn’t go through all this for nothing,” Koltun said last month in her first-floor bedroom, renovated in 2022 by the WNBC/4 show “George to the Rescue” to fit her accessibility needs, including a glass elevator that allows for quick transport upstairs to the family dining and living rooms. “I like being busy, and don’t like having too much free time. Having a purpose is so much better for the mind.”

Koltun operates her power wheelchair by breathing into a straw, blowing to move forward and sucking the straw to go backward; turning depends on her leaning left or right on her headrest.

Wearing a pair of adaptive glasses called GlassOuse — a hands-free mouse controlled by head movements and a bite switch for full screen usage — she does part-time social media, website and graphics work for a local business and a medical company.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

She also records and edits her own videos on her account, @notparalyzedjustlazy, which has 138,000 followers on TikTok and more than 11,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Koltun is a voracious reader, active in a book club with friends; practices speaking Spanish via Zoom; and paints mountains, beaches and desert landscapes, using only her mouth, in an upstairs studio. Her art, all sold on Etsy, has been made into notecards, coasters, mugs, T-shirts and birthday cards.

And yet, Koltun, as persevering as ever, said, “It’s not enough for me personally,” with goals to find a stable, full-time career in the future. She said she’s thought about writing a memoir or fantasy romance novel, and wants to do more public speaking at medical and physical therapy schools.

“I’d still choose not to be disabled and to not have to do any of this, but if I’ve got to make something out of it, I’m glad I have,” she said. “You can adjust to a lot more than you think you can. It takes time, but it will become your new normal. In the hospital, I saw no future for myself. How could I? But now I do.”

SKIING SINCE AGE 3

Koltun doesn’t remember much from that day in 2021. She was a premed student in the final months of her senior year at Binghamton University, and already interviewing for medical school, when she and her friends took a weekend ski trip to Stratton Mountain in Vermont.

A lifelong athlete, she’d been skiing there since she was 3 years old. But a fall that day left her unconscious and without a pulse in the woods.

“It was a lot of shock and disbelief,” said her brother, Erik Koltun, 28, who was also there skiing and planning to meet up with her. He had to deliver the news to their parents.

Their father, Scott Koltun, said, “Our lives, within one phone call, one day, completely transformed.”

She regained consciousness a few days later in an intensive care unit, having been airlifted to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, paralyzed from the neck down with a C1 spinal cord injury, and attached to a ventilator to help her breathe.

For the first three weeks, she couldn’t talk or eat.

Her oldest friend since toddlerhood, Lauren Fern, 26, a speech therapist, was able to communicate with Koltun when she was still having difficulty speaking and could only mouth her words.

“Rebecca would always joke, ‘You’re the only one that can understand me,’ ” Fern recalled. “We grew up instinctively leaning on each other, and she’s truly a vital part of my life.”

COPING THROUGH JOKES

Koltun was transferred to a specialized rehabilitation hospital in Boston, where for 4 1⁄2 months she received a diaphragmatic pacer that stimulates the phrenic nerve to help her breathe, and then to Glen Cove Hospital for four more months of intensive therapy before going home in 2022.

“I call it my gestation period because it was like the old me died and I was reborn to the world after that,” she said, adapting to her new life, with round-the-clock care from numerous nurses and aides and a profound loss of independence. “I felt like I was the saddest person in the world. But even in the hospital, I was making jokes. It helps me cope. It was important to show people that it’s OK to laugh at yourself and make light of a situation that’s very dark. I can’t have all these fun, crazy experiences like going to bars late at night, but if I can make people laugh, that’s something.”

When Tara Stark visited her high school friend in the hospital for the first time, she recalled feeling anxious, not knowing what to expect. “I turned the corner into her room, and she just looked at me, smiled like her normal self, and was, like, ‘Hi!’ ” Stark, 26, said. “I just immediately felt better. She was, and is, the same exact person.”

20 MILLION VIEWS

It was at Glen Cove Hospital, where staff treated her like their own daughter, she said, that Koltun found her main creative outlets: painting with an art therapist and posting TikToks about her journey.

The videos range from educational — how she operates her chair and paints; wheelchair accessibility at various restaurants; and “what you can say to a disabled person besides ‘it’s so good to see you out’ ” — to the comedic, self-deprecating videos that have since turned her into a viral sensation.

Reflecting now, Koltun said some of her favorite posts involve stitching a preexisting video: “A popular one was someone saying ‘There’s nothing worse than when your headphones die at the gym’ and then it just cuts to me in my full-power wheelchair. That got like 20 million views.”

Another TikTok shows her cruising out of her bedroom with the text overlay “How I go through life unaware that I have a wedgy.” The caption reads: “Ignorance is bliss.”

She naturally recruits her own family into the videos, despite her parents’ initial reluctance. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I don’t get it . . . that’s very dark of you,’ ” she said with a laugh. “They complain about having to do different takes, but then the video comes out and they watch it 100 times. Like, so why are you complaining? Just do what I say.”

Koltun made a sincere video about how much the music and lyrics of Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Noah Kahan meant to her ahead of seeing his show at Madison Square Garden in 2024 (the lyrics to his song “Stick Season” — “And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks” — hit especially close to home). Kahan had seen her video and invited her backstage before the concert.

“I got to meet and talk to him, it was crazy. Like, ‘Wow did that really just happen?’ ” she said.

HOMETOWN SUPPORT

Since the accident and her return home, the outpouring of love from Plainview to the Koltuns, through annual fundraisers and various events, has culminated in hundreds of thousands of dollars dedicated to her care and recovery, including nursing, insurance, adaptive equipment, repairs and beyond.

All while her parents — Audrey, a registered dietitian, and Scott, a litigation attorney — took on the daunting task of becoming caregivers themselves, strengthening the family bonds in the process.

“We’re a good team, and it works,” Audrey said.

In February 2024, Team Koltun made a Herculean effort to travel to Florida to see her grandparents. The lengthy process required her to be lifted into her airplane seat, strapped in from her head to her chest. Her nurses, as well as all of her medical equipment, needed to go along. Plus, her wheelchair had to be carefully transported separately, in a van, to Washington, D.C., and then on an Auto Train the rest of the way to Florida.

“I started crying when we took off,” Audrey said. “I never thought that would ever happen, that she would ever be able to travel again.”

Her husband echoed the sentiment: “We were on cloud nine. Like, ‘We did it! We did it!’ We stayed for 13 days. The next trip was for 21 days. It’s all taught me that you can get through anything. Rebecca’s spirit carries us . . . it certainly helps me.”

ROYAL CARIBBEAN CRUISE

Through her social media notoriety, Koltun was happy to be able to pay it forward, in a way, to her family this past August. During an interview with Newsday’s “TikTawk” social media segment, she noted the hassle of flying and how she’d love to go on a cruise out of New York. Officials with Royal Caribbean Cruises offered free VIP tickets for her, her parents, brother Erik, aunts, family friends, plus nurses, to travel to CocoCay, a private island in the Bahamas.

For a week, they skipped lines for dinners and shows on the ship, were offered unlimited refreshments and had their own waitstaff and pool in a completely accessible environment. Her post about it on TikTok, made up of a collage of the family having fun together to an upbeat song, has a simple caption: “There will never be a better week.”