HIGH POINT – Having played soccer almost all of her life, including at the high-school and college levels, Lauren Field knows a thing or two about scoring goals.

But life has taken some strange twists — some mighty strange twists — for the 28-year-old High Point native. Once a stellar athlete who earned a soccer scholarship, Field no longer dreams of scoring goals — she dreams of achieving them.

“I’m gonna run down the soccer field again one day,” Field says softly. “Yep, I sure will.”

She knows, however, that before she can run, she must learn to walk — something she has struggled to do since suffering a debilitating stroke about a year and a half ago that left her paralyzed from the bottom of her rib cage down. Don’t sell her short, though — she’s learned well how to navigate the broken road.

To understand fully the road Field is now on, though, you have to see the road she’s traveled to this point. She began playing soccer at age 4 and never quit. She had an outstanding career at Southwest Guilford High School, where she won individual honors and a state championship before graduating in 2001.

“I didn’t even date much in high school,” she says, “because I wanted to be on the soccer field. That was my passion.”

Field also played softball, tennis, basketball and ran track at Southwest. She earned a soccer scholarship at the University of Utah, where she also played softball.

It was shortly after arriving at Utah that Field’s troubles began. As a result of homesickness that curbed her appetite, coupled with three-a-day soccer practices in the heat, she lost nearly 20 pounds in no time.

“Then I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my fingertips, and my first thought was that I must be having a deficiency of some vitamin since I’d been so sick and nauseous,” she recalls.

A series of tests led to an unexpectedly grim diagnosis — a brain tumor.

“They told me I probably had about three months to live,” Field says.

A friend from church gave her a special blessing and prayer, and at her next scan, the tumor had disappeared.

“I don’t know if it was a mistake or some glitch in the machine that had made a spot on the film, or if it really was a miracle,” Field says, “but I saw both scans, and the tumor was gone.”

Other symptoms, however, remained: The numb fingertips. Migraines. Short-term memory lapses. Numbness on the entire right side of her body. Then, in May 2002, she went into convulsions on an airplane and was determined to have suffered a mild heart attack.

She had a similar episode about a year later during study hall, and subsequently began having them every couple of weeks. Only one of those episodes was determined to have been another mild heart attack, Field says.

“It could happen on the soccer field or sitting in church — there was no rhyme or reason to it,” she says. “They would test me for epilepsy and all these things, but everything kept coming back OK. It was almost five years before Dr. (Zan) Tyson here in High Point figured out that I was flat-lining every time that happened. I would flat-line, and I wouldn’t get any blood or oxygen to my brain, and that’s what would cause the convulsions.”

Doctors implanted a pacemaker in July 2005, which has helped significantly. She also has undergone three cardiac ablations for irregular heart rhythms.

It was May 5, 2010, that Field suffered what’s known as a spinal-cord stroke, passing out while working in a sales administration job for a Greensboro company.

“When I woke up, I saw people touching my legs, but I couldn’t feel it, and that’s when I knew something was very wrong,” she recalls.

She was paralyzed from the bottom of her rib cage down. As she explains it, her heart rate had raced so high and her blood pressure had bottomed so low that the blood flow to her spinal cord stopped, triggering the stroke. The stroke affected her right side more than her left, but she still has no sensation below either knee.

“But I don’t care if I can feel them as long as they work,” she says with a chuckle. “The other day I was in this room where there was a big ball, and I was like, ‘I wanna kick that ball so bad!’”

Therein lies Field’s primary goal — to get back on the soccer field someday. Some of the sensation has returned to her upper legs, and she has been in physical therapy trying to relearn how to walk. The process began slowly as she used forearm crutches to steady herself, but a relatively new device known as a WalkAide (see accompanying story) has helped tremendously and given Field new hope.

Now, it’s a matter of patience, persistence and faith.

“I will play soccer again,” Field says. “Any doctor can tell me that I won’t be able to - that physically, scientifically, it just can’t happen — but I will.”