She Couldn’t Stand After Diving for a Volleyball. A Year Later, She’s Creating Masterpieces With Her Mouth.
©️ By Sophie Lewis | Shadowborn
Eastern Kentucky, USA — Brittany Marcum holds a paintbrush between her teeth and leans towards the canvas. White specks. One at a time. Falling like snow across a violet sky.
Her neck aches. Her jaw aches. The position most people couldn’t hold for five minutes, she maintains for hours.
Three red-capped mushrooms glow against the darkness. Soft grass rises from earth. Every stroke deliberate. Every detail earned.
She calls it “Night Garden.”
Brittany is 35 years old. Eighteen months ago, she was playing volleyball and scuba diving in Florida. Today, she can barely move her fingers.
ALS took her hands.
So she paints with her mouth.
January 2024: The dive
It started with volleyball.
Brittany dove for the ball during an adult league game and couldn’t get back up. Her legs just… wouldn’t.
“I thought I was out of shape,” she told her husband Shane later.
Around the same time, she was finishing her scuba diving certification. Shane had to help her in and out of the gear because her legs weren’t cooperating.
She did the dives anyway. Over 50 feet deep.
Shane remembers: “In the water, the weakness wasn’t as obvious.”
The search
By June 2024, the twitching started. Thighs. Arms. Constant.
MRI after MRI. Bloodwork. Neurologists. Specialists who looked at her charts and had no answers.
Her 34th birthday came and went whilst doctors searched for what was stealing her strength.
Then came the hurricane evacuation in Florida. When they returned, Brittany went straight to the emergency room in Sarasota.
She was admitted.
She stayed for 34 days.
“The mystery patient”
October 2024. Brittany spent the entire month between hospital and inpatient rehab.
When she finally left:
- She needed a wheelchair
- Couldn’t stand on her own
- Couldn’t put her hair up by herself
Still no diagnosis.
The hospital staff started calling her “the mystery patient.”
By November, Brittany couldn’t work anymore. Shane missed shifts constantly to care for her. Friends showed up with food, with company, with whatever they could carry.
In December, Brittany’s parents, Diana and Donnie Oaks, drove from Kentucky to help.
That’s when the decision was made: they were going home.
7th March 2025
After settling back in Kentucky, Brittany and Shane travelled to the Cleveland Clinic.
Three days of testing.
Finally, after more than a year of searching, a doctor looked at Brittany and said the word they’d been chasing:
ALS.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. A progressive neurological disease that attacks nerve cells controlling muscle movement.
No cure. Only treatments to slow progression.
The diagnosis Brittany had been hunting for and dreading, finally had a name.
What happened next
March 2025: Manual wheelchair
April 2025: Power wheelchair with hand controls
Now: Motorised wheelchair with head controls because her fingers barely move
Every 90 days, Brittany visits the ALS Clinic at UK Hospital. They adjust medications. They monitor decline.
The medical advice remains almost insultingly simple: Stay positive. Enjoy life to the fullest.
Most people would’ve stopped trying at this point.
Brittany picked up a paintbrush with her teeth and kept creating.
The art
Mouth painting is brutally difficult.
You hold a standard paintbrush between your teeth. You control every stroke with your neck. You maintain positions that would exhaust most people in minutes.
Brittany works for hours.
Look closely at “Night Garden.” The detail shouldn’t be possible. Individual blades of grass. White specks with dimension. Mushrooms with depth and shadow.
But here’s what breaks me: she didn’t just paint it.
She wrote a poem to go with it.
Night Garden (poem by Brittany Marcum)
In the quiet hours,
when the world grows still
and the sky turns deep with stars,
life continues—
softly, faithfully, unseen.Even in the dark,
roots remember what to do.
They reach.
They hold.
They grow.Not every strength is loud.
Not every victory is bright.
Some miracles happen low to the ground,
in silence,
under moonlight.This garden blooms at night
to remind us—
hope does not wait for daylight,
and neither do we.Where darkness settles,
growth still finds a way.
Read that again.
Now remember: she’s living with ALS whilst writing it.
That’s not inspiration. That’s defiance.
#TeamBrittany
Brittany doesn’t do this alone.
Her parents moved their lives to be with her 24/7. Her husband Shane – married 18 years, best friends for 23 – documents everything publicly on social media.
Not for pity. For awareness.
Beyond family, there’s an army. Friends. Prayer partners. Tattoo artists. Former coworkers. Strangers who became family.
They call themselves #TeamBrittany.
Shane posts honest updates about the devastation and the hope. They believe in miracles. They believe God works through medicine and doctors’ hands.
There are promising ALS trials happening in the United States and Israel right now. Some researchers believe ALS may behave like an autoimmune disease – which could transform treatment approaches entirely.
Shane wrote recently: “This feels like (A Life Sentence) -ALS-“
Then he listed everyone standing with them anyway.
They’re not backing down.
4,000 miles
In December 2025, Sian Williams in South Wales saw Brittany’s work online.
Sian is my best friend. She knows I love mushroom imagery – it’s woven through my shadow work practice, my research, my life. When she saw Brittany’s first red-capped mushroom painting, she thought of me immediately.
She reached out to Shane. Could Brittany create something similar?
Brittany said yes.
Shane posted about it recently:
“This painting is travelling internationally — from our tiny little town in eastern Kentucky all the way to South Wales, UK. That honestly blows my mind… and somehow doesn’t surprise me at the same time.”
He wrote that seeing Brittany’s work inspiring people not just locally, not just across the United States, but clear across the ocean is more than he ever imagined.
“I’ve always known how amazing Brittany is,” he said. “And now the world is seeing it too, one person at a time.”
The painting is.. Crossing an ocean. Carrying something more than paint and canvas.
My best friend saw beauty being created by a woman with ALS and thought: Sophie needs to see this too.
That’s how art travels. That’s how connection happens.
And that’s why I’m writing this.
Why this matters
Most people know ALS from Stephen Hawking. From Lou Gehrig. From the Ice Bucket Challenge that dominated social media in 2014.
What they don’t know is what people living with ALS are still creating.
Brittany’s hands stopped working at 34 years old. So she learnt to paint with her mouth.
She didn’t just adapt. She’s thriving.
Twelve original mouth paintings so far. Each one accompanied by poetry. Each one proof that disability doesn’t end creativity, it transforms it.
“Some miracles happen low to the ground, in silence, under moonlight.”
That line from her poem isn’t about ALS. It’s about her.
What you can do
Support ALS research and patient care:
- The ALS Association (als.org)
- Team Gleason (teamgleason.org)
- Local ALS clinics and support networks
Follow Brittany’s journey:
- Search #teambrittany on Instagram and Facebook
- Follow hashtags: #bitestickpainting #kickingalsbooty
- Shane Marcum posts regular updates
Share this story.
Let it travel the way “Night Garden” is travelling right now – from a small town in Kentucky to wherever you are.
Because some stories deserve to cross oceans.
And some artists deserve the world to see what they’re making.
From the author
I’m Sophie – the one receiving “Night Garden.”
The painting hasn’t arrived yet. It’s somewhere over the Atlantic right now, making a journey I still can’t quite believe is happening.
I haven’t held it in my hands. Haven’t seen the texture of the paint or the way light hits those mushrooms in person.
But I’ve already been undone by knowing it exists.
By knowing Brittany held a paintbrush between her teeth for hours to create something beautiful for a stranger on the other side of the world.
By knowing that when everything was working against her, she picked up that brush anyway.
That’s what Brittany’s work does.
It reaches across distance – across oceans, across diagnosis, across despair and reminds you what human beings are capable of when they refuse to stop creating.
Growth still finds a way.
Brittany Marcum is 35 years old. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her husband Shane, her parents Diana and Donnie, and an entire community who refuse to let ALS define her story.
She paints with a brush between her teeth.
And she’s just getting started.
For interview requests or commissioned artwork enquiries, contact Shane Marcum through #TeamBrittany on social media.
This article was written with deep gratitude to Brittany Marcum, Shane Marcum, Diana and Donnie Oaks, Sian Williams, and the entire #TeamBrittany community.
