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.