A New Jersey Woman’s 29th Birthday Dinner Took an Unexpected Turn, and Her Body Started Shaking the Moment She Saw What Was Written on Her Dessert
"My chair is not my identity."
Antonia Sinbaldi was celebrating her 29th birthday with friends and family in June at Blu on the Hudson in Weehawken, New Jersey. According to New York Post, she ordered an Apple Tart Tatin for dessert, and the plate came back with a message written in sauce: “Happy Wheel Chair Birthday.” Sinbaldi has used a motorized wheelchair since she was two years old, when a drunk driver struck the car she was riding in and left her with a cervical spinal cord injury. She has needed a ventilator ever since.
She posted video from the dinner on Instagram as she received the dessert. “Not to complain about a fairly new restaurant in my town, but why would you make my dessert say this?” she wrote, in a post from that night. “What was written on my plate probably set my employee off more than me. I would never expect that in my town.”
Sinbaldi says her body responded to the message before she could process it. “Body started shaking, body started spasming. My body reacted faster than my mouth or my mind,” she told WNBC. Her party confronted restaurant management afterward, and she says they were offered complimentary drinks in response. “It offended me. This whole thing doesn’t sound real,” she told the outlet.
Then the Restaurant Gave Its Own Version of Events
The restaurant later said the message came from an internal mix-up between staff after the order was placed. “Our standard operating procedure is to use table and seat numbers on tickets to identify where each dish should be delivered. In this instance, the word ‘wheelchair’ was used as a reference to identify where a birthday dessert with a candle should be delivered,” the restaurant said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, that notation was misunderstood and was written on the plate itself. There was absolutely no malicious or disrespectful intent behind the notation. However, we fully understand how seeing that word written on a plate could be deeply hurtful and upsetting.”
Sinbaldi wasn’t satisfied with that explanation, calling it a “** response.” “My chair is not my identity,” she wrote on Instagram. “Like I said, my body was reacting faster than my mind so I couldn’t leave that fast.” As an advocate for disability rights, she said she hopes people take something away from what happened. “Don’t bring my disability up in every sentence, is what people, they should know,” she told the outlet.
Sinbaldi’s condition reflects a category of injury with real medical weight behind it. According to the Christopher Reeve Foundation, spinal cord injuries at or above the C2 vertebra typically leave the diaphragm without any nerve signal at all, since the phrenic nerve that controls it originates lower, around C3 to C5.
That level of injury generally requires full-time mechanical ventilation, unlike lower cervical injuries, where a person may retain partial breathing function or need a ventilator only some of the time.
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