Hope Happens Here: Lisa & Sergio
Sergio Echeverria and Lisa Lardi’s meet-cute in Miami unfolded like a romantic comedy come to life.
First, they were colleagues trading telephone calls – Sergio ran a photo lab, Lisa oversaw a production company — with each slightly vexed by the other.
“He didn’t like me,” Lisa laughs. “I yelled at him all the time.”
Then one day she unknowingly attended a diving class that Sergio, a passionate scuba diver, was helping teach. The minute he heard her voice, a lightbulb went off.
“I realized, ‘This is the Lisa,’” Sergio says.
Something shifted in the water. The two became dive buddies who sailed fearlessly through 20-foot waves and grilled lobsters at sunset. A surprise goodnight kiss eventually arrived -- and they married in 1998.
Their life together, revolving around family and the ocean, was happy and full until a devastating accident changed everything: in February 2021, on a trip to upstate New York, Sergio sustained a C6-C7 spinal cord injury while driving an all-terrain vehicle.
“I hit a patch of icy water,” he says. “And that was the end of that.”
After a terrifying week in the hospital, Sergio returned to Florida for rehabilitation; it was there that the shock truly hit them. The injury meant he would need assistance with daily living, but Lisa’s own health limited her ability to help. Born with osteogenesis imperfecta, sometimes called brittle bone disease, she’d recently had spinal surgery herself.
“I was losing it,” she says. “I had no idea what to do. It was so overwhelming”
She scrambled to find a home health aide, feeling increasingly panicked. And then her phone rang: an Information Specialist from the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation had learned of Sergio’s injury and was calling to see if they needed help.
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“They were my angels,” Lisa says. “To this day, they’re still my 911 call.”
Reeve became a lifeline, a place Lisa could call day or night. And she did, reaching out nearly every day for months to untangle the red tape around insurance, to make sense of Sergio’s secondary conditions — to simply share her fears.
“You really can feel pretty alone,” she says. “But with Reeve, we knew we could call anytime, and we knew someone was going to pick up and talk to us calmly for as long as we needed.”
Reeve’s Information Specialists sent stacks of booklets and factsheets in English for Sergio and Lisa, but also in Spanish for Sergio’s home health aides. Throughout that first, difficult year, when Sergio broke his leg, was rushed to the hospital with sepsis, and suffered countless urinary tract infections, Reeve counseled the couple through each challenge.
“The Reeve Foundation anticipates a lot of things for us,” says Sergio. “And when they don’t have the answer, they know where to go or who to call to find the solution.”
This summer, Sergio made his long-awaited return to adaptive scuba diving as Lisa cheered him on. Both remain grateful for each other – and for the help and hope the Reeve Foundation has provided as they forge a new path forward.
“Nothing is impossible,” Lisa says. “It’s extremely important for the world to know if, God forbid, this terrible thing happens, the Reeve Foundation is there. They will help you through every step of the way. They will walk you through every one of your questions and fears. You will always have a person to talk to. If we didn’t have them, I don’t know if we would be here today.”
Connect with an Information Specialist here.