The excruciating headache hit Martin Quinn on a cold March morning midway through his second semester at Colorado College. The timing wasn’t great. He had an accounting exam in a couple hours and plans to ski the next day. He popped an Advil, hustled to class and assumed the headache would fade.
But on that winter day, something wasn’t right.
By midnight, the pain was too much to ignore. Martin went to the health center where he tried to go to the bathroom but found he couldn’t walk. That’s the last thing he remembers before slipping into a coma. When he woke five days later, he learned he was paralyzed.
It would take nearly a month before an infectious disease specialist deduced that an Epstein-Barr viral infection had settled in Martin’s brain and spinal cord, causing a rare case of paralysis. But even in those uncertain early days – and over the next six months as he relearned to walk during intense rehabilitation – Martin was guided by an unshakeable optimism that everything would be okay.
And, amazingly, it was. He returned to campus that fall and scored the winning goal in the Tigers’ first game of the season.
“Back then, I thought it all had to do with willpower and positive thinking,” Martin says. “Now, I think it was pure luck. I know how quickly it could’ve gone the other way.”
“Reeve is all about meeting people where they are and helping them have a better tomorrow,” Martin says. “It's not just about research. It’s about how you have the most productive life with paralysis. Care has an impact today and every day. That’s something I connect with.”
For years after his recovery, Martin pushed the illness, and life that might have been, from his mind. But in 2008, while living in London, he encountered a wheelchair athlete steadily pushing up the slight incline over Tower Bridge during the London Marathon.
“I was immediately emotional,” Martin says. “I was part of that community for a really short time and that flashed back to me when I saw him on the bridge.”
The athlete’s determination inspired Martin to begin volunteering with a UK-based spinal charity. When he moved back to the U.S, he knew he wanted to become more involved with the community. After hearing about the help Reeve’s National Paralysis Resource Center provided for a friend’s father who’d had a stroke, he called up Team Reeve.
“The only way I knew how to help was to run,” he says.
“That’s one of the things I’m most excited about,” Martin says. “The name recognition for Reeve and its mission is just going to go up.”
As Martin gears up for the race, he’s bracing for the emotions he expects to hit him along the way. His wife and children will travel from California to cheer him on with family members from Ireland. His father will don a bib and run with him, 25 years after he waited five days in a hospital for his son to wake up. Mile by mile, dollar by dollar, Martin hopes to make a difference for people with stories that unfolded differently than his own.
“You realize you got lucky, and you can give back a little bit,” Martin says. “When I run Boston, I know that every step of the way I’ll be thinking about Reeve.”
To support Martin Quinn’s efforts for Team Reeve, please visit his fundraising website here.
Support the rest of his Team Reeve teammates running the Boston Marathon with him:
Jeffrey Verschieiser
Josh Hoyos
TJ Booth
Annabel Silbersher
Watch Martin's video short here.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Johnnie Izquierdo