Dr. Shirlee Xie is back in a place she worked hard to reach: seeing patients and practicing medicine again at Hennepin Healthcare, nearly two years after a hiking accident in Switzerland left her paralyzed from the chest down.
Xie’s return marks another major step in a recovery that has required her to relearn many of the everyday tasks she once took for granted.
The accident happened during a hiking trip in Switzerland. Xie fell about 300 feet down a mountain and suffered multiple serious injuries, including spinal fractures and a traumatic brain injury. The injuries left her paralyzed from the chest down.
When she was first featured by WCCO at Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in late 2024, even moving between her wheelchair and a bed was difficult. At the time, Xie was focused on rebuilding her strength and finding new ways to handle daily life.
“Every moment of life I’ve had to relearn how to do things differently,” Xie said.
That process continued well beyond her initial rehabilitation. She worked on physical strength, wheelchair skills and independence while also trying to return to activities that were important to her. In 2025, one of those milestones was picking up a camera again and taking photographs of her children. She also prepared for her first airplane trip since the accident.
Now, the goal that once seemed far away has become part of her daily life again.
Xie has returned to Hennepin Healthcare and is seeing patients. Putting on her white coat and introducing herself as a doctor again has been an emotional experience, she said.
The transition also came with uncertainty. Xie wondered how patients would react to seeing their physician use a wheelchair and whether her injury would change the way they viewed her.
Those concerns, she said, turned out to be largely unnecessary.
Her office now includes familiar reminders of the life she has built with her family, along with one unusual reminder of the long road back: a calendar still marked 2024.
For Xie, returning to medicine is about more than resuming a career. Caring for people during vulnerable moments has been central to why she became a physician in the first place.
After nearly two years of rehabilitation and adjustment, she is once again doing that work.
“It feels like I’m reclaiming a piece of me that I thought was lost for a while,” Xie said.
