On Saturday, July 10, 1965, I worked a typical day, as I had every summer for the previous three years since graduating from high school — loading 100-pound bags of potatoes into boxcars in the sweltering heat of a stuffy potato shed. The next day, I got a phone call from a friend who was also home from college for the summer. A young, yet experienced pilot, he offered to fly me to a mountainous ranch on the California coast where a summer girlfriend of mine was spending the summer with her mother and stepdad. How could I possibly say no?
A week later, I regained consciousness in an unfamiliar hospital, paralyzed from the waist down from a T11 spinal cord injury and a serious scalp wound closed with 200 stitches. The small plane had crashed, and my friend was dead. Now I was waking to an unthinkable nightmare — like many of us have experienced in different, yet similar circumstances.
What I lost that day was so much more than a friend and the ability to walk. I had also lost my future, my hope, and eventually, my belief in God. Over time, my resentment, anger, and alienation grew. At five years post-injury, I was a complete wreck — depressed, full of remorse, survivor’s guilt, and fear, suffering from PTSD before the term had ever been invented. I frequently blacked out from drinking and was adrift from drug abuse, a complete failure. My parents, attempting to help, moved me back home, but my strange, irrational behavior was beyond their coping ability. Secretly, they made plans to have me committed to a state psychiatric hospital.
My biggest fear — being strapped down and zapped with electric shock treatments — loomed before me. When I learned of their plan, I snapped and refused. That was the beginning of my fighting back.
I demanded to see a private psychiatrist of my own choosing instead of being institutionalized. To be fair to my parents, the shrink diagnosed me with drug-induced paranoid schizophrenia. After three visits, I voluntarily quit the shrink, threw away the mood elevators, broke down and cried my guts out, begging the same God I had blamed for my accident to forgive me and please help me. I did not do this out of faith or belief. I prayed out of raw desperation.
To this day, more than 60 years after my plane crash, that turning point still amazes me, even though I’ve had many crises since then. What I’ve learned is that praying exercises a muscle. The more you pray out of a sense of gratitude and humility, not desperation, the stronger your faith muscle grows, even if your prayers are not answered. But I’m not here to preach. The obvious truth is I might have died in the plane crash, just as I might have lost my mind before my parents tried to rescue me, or I could have died on the operating table during open-heart surgery in 2005.
Those of us with paralysis face ongoing health challenges throughout our lives. Lung infections, skin infections, UTIs, flap surgeries, shoulder surgeries, caregiver fiascos, you name it. In time, bone infections took both my legs, one below the knee in 2012, the other slightly above the knee in 2025. Yet somehow, with prayer and persistence, each crisis also cloaks a new opportunity, a chance to begin anew.
And there is much more involved than prayer alone.
Several years ago, I learned about a very real phenomenon that many of us may be experiencing as you read this — PTG — Post-Traumatic Growth. The theory, put simply, is that many people who experience loss through trauma — physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually — begin to grow in remarkable ways through years of struggle and confronting challenges. In our community, we call it adapting. Each time we struggle against a new obstacle, it can make us stronger, more resilient, better able to adapt to future challenges, which in turn creates confidence, hope, and more ways to appreciate life than we ever thought possible.
The theory of PTG also recognizes the importance of family, friends, and peers. Our ability to enjoy life grows when we feel we are part of a community. We are not meant to live our lives alone. We are here to help each other, not only as people with disabilities, but as people of all kinds. We are all humans. We all belong to the same family.
In March of 2026, I will turn 81, and I have much to be grateful for.
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