(NEXSTAR) — Team USA Paralympian alpine skier Kelsey O'Driscoll says there aren't a lot of words to express what being in Cortina means to her. It's the athlete's first time at the games. "I've dreamed of this since I was a little kid," Driscoll told Nexstar. "Although the plan was to go to Olympics for running, I'm thrilled to be here for Para alpine." While she says the experience up to the games and through the games has been a rewarding process, her journey did not come without some bumps. "I had a particularly difficult off-season. I was having some shoulder pain on both sides, which we thought was just an over-use thing — which would make sense — but it turned out that my humorous bones were actually dying. So I had to get surgery on both shoulders over the summer to try to stop the bones from getting any worse. [We tried] to get the bone to regrow, which was luckily successful." And if that wasn't enough, O'Driscoll says a week before she was supposed to leave for the season in Utah, she contracted a virus and ended up in the ICU with severe asthma exacerbation. Thankfully, she says, it was a quick recovery. She says she hopes family, friends and strangers back home take away from her place at the games a message of persistence. "You can get knocked down a heck of a lot," Driscoll told Nexstar. "But if you figure out how to use your own stubbornness to your advantage, and you can stand back up and keep going, you can chase dreams you didn't think were possible." The Milan Cortina Winter Paralympics officially opened Friday.