Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
to Pennsylvania to visit my dad. I got a temporary job with UPS, and on Memorial Day I went to a party. It was an outside barbeque by the pool, and someone threw a Frisbee to me, but it curved off to the side so I dove after it. I didn't realize I was at the shallow end. I remember being in the water and needing to breathe, and the sensation of giving my body instructions and my body not obeying." Fortunately, his friends were smart enough to realize he wasn't playing or faking. His neck was broken at C6 and C7 and they had to pull him out. The young man who wanted to make his living, as he put it, "in the church of the outdoors," was 25 years old and paralyzed from the neck down. "I spent three weeks in intensive care, and then the doctors sent me home. They told me the nerves were bruised, not severed, but there was nothing more they could do for me. They thought I'd never be able to walk again . . . or work, or move." His father, his girlfriend, his friends, all pitched in to help care for him. He had to be fed by hand, cleaned, bathed, everything. "There's nothing to do, nothing you can do," he told me. "You lie there and watch television until you can't take it anymore and then you watch the hands of the clock and wonder what's in store for you. I tried to stay positive because I knew if I lost the will or drive to go forward it would have a detrimental effect, but there were times when I would lie there and just weep with frustration." The days turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, and the months piled up, a year and two months almost exactly. And then . . . "I woke up one night, about two a.m. and I felt something in the toes of my left foot, something like the pins and needles you get when your foot's asleep, only about ten thousand times more painful. At first I didn't know if it was a dream or a S P O R T I N G C 146 L A S S I C S