Man with SMA visits 55 countries across all seven continents after being rejected for job because it required travel

Cory Lee knows how to prove a point.

By the age of just 35, he has done what most people will never do in their lifetime, having visited 55 different countries and counting, across all seven continents.

What makes Cory's incredible feat even more impressive is the fact that he has done it all while wheelchair bound due to having spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the same muscular disease Jesy Nelson's twin girls have just been diagnosed with.

And, while Cory says seeing the world is the ultimate escape for living with SMA, he admits his thirst for travel began as a need to prove someone wrong, after he was rejected for a job because it would've required him to travel.

"I went to a job interview, and they told me that I could not have that job because it involved travelling, and he thought that I couldn't travel because of my disability," Cory told LADbible. "So they immediately turned me down."

At the time, Cory, who hails from the US, was planning his first international trip to Australia, and he realised there wasn't much information on the internet about how to travel as a wheelchair user.

With a desire to prove the hiring manager wrong, while also providing vital resources for wheelchair users, he created his blog, Curb Free With Cory Lee, back in 2013.

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Since then, Cory has travelled all over the world, from India to Egypt and Italy to Thailand, meticulously planning and researching each trip from anywhere between six months to a year before travel.

While globe-trotting, he has ridden a camel in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, paraglided in Switzerland and floated in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, but his bucket list is far from complete.

As a wheelchair user, every trip comes with its fair share of challenges, but according to Cory, the trickiest bit is always travelling by plane, as he's forced to separate from his wheelchair.

"I would love to be able to stay in my wheelchair on the plane, so like creating a wheelchair spot on planes would be my ultimate dream and I would fly even more than I already do," he said.

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"Whenever I'm flying, I'm constantly worried about whether my wheelchair is going to be damaged or not, because it's stowed in the cargo hold with all of the luggage. It is very frequently damaged during flight and then I can't get around independently, so it's a catastrophe."

With all Cory has achieved, it seems hard to imagine some of the battles Cory faces behind closed doors, having been diagnosed with SMA type 2 as a toddler.

"At the age of two, my mom started noticing I would try to take a few steps and then I would just fall down. So she started getting pretty concerned and took me to a doctor," he recalled. "They did a muscle biopsy and discovered that I had SMA."

At the age of two, Cory could take a few steps, but by the time he was four, he couldn't take any steps at all and began using a power wheelchair full-time. Over time, his muscles get weaker, and now he can no longer straighten his legs or lift his elbows off the armrests of his chair.

Although medical science has made phenomenal leaps in recent years, such as the advancement in gene therapy, like the treatment Jesy's twins recently received, Cory had no treatment options following his diagnosis.

"Back in the 90s, we had no treatment, so I just went to pull therapy to stretch the muscles, go swimming, see a therapist, but that was pretty much it," he said.

"It's definitely exciting to see like now when children are diagnosed, there are finally treatment options. So I feel like super hopeful for like the next generation of kids with SMA that they're going to be able to maintain the muscles they do have over a longer period of time."