Find
on
me
to pop a wheelie. Right.
I've been popping wheelie since I was uh a little little boy, three years old.
Actually
part of that I guess is, is an adrenaline rush.
And if I slow down, um, yeah, slow down. But if I stopped altogether, no,
those chunky
I'll get on that motorcycle and feel the wind on my face and that freedom that,
that motorcycle gives you
my passion and my dream. That's all I wanted to do. I raced
since the age of five and turned professional at 18. It was my career. It was
my dream to travel the country.
And so I won multiple amateur championships and
the motorcycle took me a lot of places and
taught me a lot discipline, commitment,
sacrifice.
And then I was injured doing what I loved.
I broke my neck in 1999 and was rendered quadriplegic
mama.
I
have a really good friend,
Robert David Hall who is the coroner on C SI
I said, you know, Dave, I, before my injury,
I consciously
knew
that I was willing to accept whatever life had to throw at me
except for maybe being disfigured.
And then I realized I'm talking to a guy who
has lost both of his legs
and is a burn victim.
And he looked at me and he goes,
there's always something.
Did it really come as a surprise to me the day that I received the phone call.
Um,
I suppose not.
I, I look back on it now and I realized I didn't want to go through it.
I just did not, I didn't want him
to have to go through that,
you know, at that moment laying there in the dirt on the race track.
Uh It had always been my,
my greatest fear
to break my neck
or to be paralyzed. I only remember waking up in the morning
and uh going out on my motorcycle.
I don't remember riding on that day or when I was coming home,
which is when the accident happened, I wake up and I'm in the hospital bed.
Then,
uh
my girlfriend tells me that I was
in an accident
and then I asked her then, so what happened to me? What, how bad was it?
And then she told me that I completely severed my spine.
And when she told me that
I knew
I wasn't going to be able to walk again.
It was Memorial Day 1998. I was in the Grand Canyon at Havasupai
waterfalls
and I was diving off the waterfall with friends.
Someone told me to dive off of a certain rock and, you know, I asked, is it safe?
They've been there before and it was totally safe. They dove off it before.
Totally safe.
But it was El Nino of 1998 and the water level was a lot lower.
I, I dove into shallow water my entire life
just doing a flip the second I hit the water
and I surely wasn't thinking that this was gonna be the day my life changed.
I was testing new equipment and I was excited.
I was rushing a little bit that day because it was late in the afternoon.
How is um
uh
kind of forcing things to happen?
There were things that I can recall about that day and about that,
uh the moments leading up to,
to the accident where
they were conscious decisions that I was making
that in the back of my mind I knew
could,
you know, have
uh a
bad outcome, you know, I remember it as clear as, as this moment right now
when I dove in,
it was a shock of electricity,
everything shut off.
And then I was in complete darkness,
floating,
unable to move, unable to breathe
and
just
saying, uh please don't think I'm joking.
Most of the time when there's a spinal cord injury,
there's an injury at some level of the spinal cord.
It can be up in the cervical region, it can be in the thoracic or in the sacral region
and each one has their own set of problems,
but generally the injury is just within a few segments of the spinal cord.
But everything beyond that, unless there's some other complication, all this
circuitries and the neurons and the
axons below that, they generally remain intact and, and functional to some degree
for people who are newly injured.
It's as if they've been
plucked out of their lives.
It's something that can happen to any one of us.
And one of the things that makes it so traumatic is that
you are fine one moment
and then due to illness or most of the time injury,
your life, your identity, your goals just
change.
It's difficult because
this kind of injuries happen to young men who are really active
like myself,
I was involved in a motorcycle accident when this happened.
So it's really catastrophic when this happens to you because
you are active and you're doing all these things and then
you can't walk anymore.
I also have a shoulder injury so I can even move my left arm.
You can take your hand
and on a flat surface,
put your ring finger out
and you push down through your hand
and you focus on your, on your finger
and you try to lift your ring, ring finger,
try to raise it off your,
off the surface
and you're thinking about it and you're looking at it
and you would think you should be able to raise that finger,
but it just doesn't raise
it just doesn't happen.
There's no connection.
Now, imagine that through all four limbs,
this injury doesn't just happen to an individual.
It happens to everyone around that individual.
The time spent in the hospital, um,
each day felt like 10 years.
I am the handicap sign come to life.
There's no hiding that wheelchair.
When people look, there's definitely guilt.
There's fear. There's wonder how did that happen
and, uh, a
reminder,
you know. Wow, my life is not that bad,
but everyone who comes in believes he's going to walk out.
And
it takes a while before that realization dissipates.
I knew what
I was capable of providing as far as motivation, what was in my heart?
What was in my mind?
I knew that if I
was proactive and persistent
at challenging the prognosis,
that um
you know, who knew what was possible.
Our first conversation was he, he was just grateful for his breath.
It was really quite stunning,
was immensely stunning.
And I think in some ways that actually helped me set
the course for how we were going to deal with it
because he wasn't fighting it.
He was just grateful to be
looking at
me,
his sister, his father,
his loved ones
and with that kind of spirit,
my goal became immediately my goal was to help him
maintain that spirit because that spirit was a fighting spirit.
One of the things that's very important is that
is not to define oneself by one's injury.
You know,
a lot of times people say, oh, hello, what level are you?
That is part of who you are.
But, uh, that is not all of who you are. The doctors were giving me general statistics
based on
inactive,
um, unmotivated
people, generally speaking.
And I knew that I didn't fall into that category.
So, who were they to prognosticate my future?
Yes, we knew that the
diagnosis or prognosis was grim.
It was a severe injury.
Um, however,
I had the family, I still do
and the friends
and the clinicians that were surrounding me,
uh, very optimistic, very proactive and they provided me the opportunity
to, uh, to keep this injury last. And that's what we've been doing.
Exercise in general activates multiple systems.
It activates your system that controls blood pressure,
it activates your metabolism, activates your heart, your breathing.
So all the systems are
made to function at a higher level with the exercise
that's for
someone that's disabled or someone that can't
bear weight, they get up and move around
probably is much more important for them than it
would be for a person that's not injured.
There's really only so much I can do to stay in shape.
I need somebody to stretch me every day
to keep from atrophy.
How do I lift weights?
If I can't grab the weight on my own?
If someone's not there to keep me from falling, if someone's not there to help me,
you know, guide my muscles in ways
that, that I can't do on my own to challenge the muscle to work harder.
It's, it's nearly impossible to do on your own unless you have the right equipment,
the right equipment
costs a lot of money.
Unless you have somebody assisting you and someone assisting you costs money.
And if the insurance is not willing to cover it, then how do you get it covered?
Uh, it goes anywhere from um
probably $500,000 to, you know, upwards of a million.
Um
Aaron was 20 years old
and um
I'm just iii I say this very, very proudly.
Uh I had Blue Cross Insurance in the state
of Oklahoma which I found out after the injury,
it didn't cover him
because you, he, he wasn't actually residing with me and out here,
you know, he had lived here for three months, so my insurance did not cover him
and he became, um, you know, what do you call it? A ward of the state?
The California children's services was available to him as well as me.
And I have to say, II I don't know what we would have done without those services.
Um
Can't even begin to think about that.
The fact is that the services were there, they were in place and
they worked for us in the way that I know
those services were originally set up and intended to,
to work.
So,
um
I, I mean, there's just no question about it.
The, the, the costs are beyond devastating. How do you recover
to have your family?
Uh In
and in my case, my mother
primarily
to uh to stand behind you and,
and support you through this tragedy
through this adversity.
Uh I think
I know
is the most important, the most vital aspect of this process of healing
because it is without her
that none of this would be possible.
It really would not matter how motivated or how excited I would be to,
to work out or to,
to try to recovery without her
at my side
assisting me,
feeding me,
bathing me.
Um
loving me, the
none of this would be realized. You feel hopeless
and then um
you don't know what to do.
It's like you're lost
in this new world because I mean, it's really like being born again.
Yes.
One of the major things is independence and transportation
and
you have to relearn how to drive. You have to relearn everything.
And so a lot of times there's a vocational rehab
and your case manager will put you through vocational rehab, which will then
guide you in the right direction to get classes to drive.
Um and hopefully get funding for vehicles.
But again, it's ex it's expensive. It's long, it's uh
it's a process.
If you asked people with spinal cord injury,
if they could have anything back, how would they prioritize
walking is not the first thing that people say, they say bowel and bladder control,
but a lot of, uh,
people with spinal cord injuries don't talk much
about that outside of rehab our family.
But it is
so emasculating
and infantilizing.
Obviously, a huge thing is, is the bathroom,
you know.
Um
I gotta know ahead of time when I'm going somewhere.
Um, where am I gonna go to the bathroom?
You know,
because I, I'm not gonna do it in public.
It's, for me it was more an, an emotional change.
That was a physical change because I mean, you're still adapting.
You still have those days
when you feel so bad. You don't wanna get out of bed
and
you just want to,
and go to sleep and
wait until maybe next day it will be better.
And I mean, it's tough.
God forbid someone came in and,
and, uh, raped somebody or hurt somebody or, um,
did something bad to somebody that I loved and
I could not
physically do anything about it.
That would be a,
uh,
uh, nearly impossible situation for me.
12 years later,
I don't know that I'm any better at dealing with it today than I was in the beginning.
Uh, they're scary
and, uh, to be absolutely
as open
and exposing as I can be. I don't say this often because it's,
um, I don't like to admit it,
but
there's, um,
you know, there's a part of the, the longer you live with an injury,
the more familiar it becomes
and in the same token,
it can be very wearing.
You get tired.
That's no joke.
One day is beautiful, the next day can be
really hard and dark.
And
all I can tell someone
is to allow it,
they come to rehab after they have survived
and are well enough to do the exercise.
Uh The goal of which is to be as independent as possible.
That's why 26 years ago I started the
support group that is still ongoing at Northridge
because people used to get discharged from
the hospital and fall through the cracks.
It was a very non accommodating world.
Uh They had no connectedness and one of the things,
all the research shows is that group support
is really vital to psychological recovery from trauma.
People need to see it, they need to feel it,
they need to hear it,
you know, stimulate them.
So
it gives people hope
when they actually see other cases, other people,
other um
are the ones dealing
with uh
similar things or even harder things.
It's tough because sometimes you feel
you have it the worst in the whole world
and you're carrying the heaviest cross.
But in reality, there are people who have it worse than you
because you know that there are people
that might have the same injury as me or, but they live in another country
and they don't have a wheelchair
or they don't live in a place where they can go to the movie theater
because they only have steps and they can go up.
So it's, it's
those mixed emotions all the time
been over the same problems as you and
is able to understand what you're going through.
If I can help just at least one person
uh to feel better and realize that
yeah, they have a chance at life. Then
I, I have done something
when someone has a spinal cord injury,
usually is not just the spinal cord that's injured.
There are many things happen, there are fractured bones all over the place. There's
many problems.
After spinal cord injury, you have blood pressure problems, there's
all the systems are affected.
So the person has to recover from all of these traumas.
But once
the primary care is taken
uh to to to make sure all of those
uh functions are ok,
then
that's a reasonable time to then start an intervention
that can begin to facilitate the recovery. Insurance has a that great word plateau
and once you plateau, they sort of cut the funding
on your physical therapy.
And so for me, it's a scramble of
moments of of of finding ways to stay
physical
when you're deemed rehabilitated by an insurance company.
It means that they feel as though the maximum potential
has been reached and that there will be no further progress
and therefore there's no further coverage.
Um that was about the scariest time
of all
and most certainly for Aaron, that is when
he suffered. His absolute darkest days,
the spirit that I was talking about prior,
the the love in his eyes, the willingness it all went away.
I knew that I would bring the motivation to the table,
but we had no outlet.
So I had all this,
you know, fire, this fury ready to go, ready to work.
Um But nowhere to go.
And so like I said before, where it became a destructive force
with no health, it
it began to turn on me and turn inside me.
And
as light,
uh as I was, I became very dark
and dark for a long period of time,
he went
into suicidal mode.
And for
a number of weeks,
I had,
I was walking around the house as though I were he looking to
kill myself and I removed any glass object,
had towels over his mirrors,
you know, thinking about the ways that he might be able
to hurt himself
because that wasn't an option.
I just, I there was no way, no way I was going to allow him to do that.
And so the last
uh
the last week he went on a hunger strike, he stopped eating
and it was during that period that I
um heard about Taylor Isaacs at Cal
State Northridge.
Whenever we work with the client,
we conduct a comprehensive evaluation
from the evaluation,
we form
an impression and then exercise recommendations.
We
plan an exercise program.
At the end of 12 weeks, we re evaluate all those variables.
So we have specific tests to measure
the changes in functional outcomes.
The process of walking independently.
I would say it was within the first
2 to 4 years
of gaining independence
where
I began walking,
like I said, with the modalities and the assistance,
you know, within that first two year period.
But that was in a really controlled environment.
I was with physical therapist.
That's what with water involved, eliminating gravity
harness, assisted walking on treadmills.
A long, you know, really highly involved process
evolution and progression. That's what I do
on a regular basis in order to continue my recovery process to stay healthy,
fit and to see what my potential is.
This bicycle that you see me riding today or
tricycle is an evolution of my cycling process.
I recognize that I needed to be able to do just this and that's to sit
and rest. When I'm fatigued and tired, I can
keep my feet clipped in and remain balanced.
Uh I identified
uh this axle that you see in the back with these two wheels.
I had it manufactured in England
and my bike sponsor today which is Castro.
Uh Fortunately,
I was able to marry the two together and now I
have this completely unique one off bike that allows me to
ride and perform and, and ultimately race.
So there's lots of obvious experiments that need to be done
but in general, in response to your question, I suspect
that there's gonna be a lot more people
that will be able to experience much better recovery
than is uh realized today.
I completely entertain the notion of walking again.
I wanna fly.
I want the same as as I did before.
Give me some super powers. I'm not just gonna reach for walking.
I wanna reach for the skies. I want
all of it. Am I optimistic that I'll walk again?
Yes, I think that the technology is there. If they can clone me,
they can sure fix me.
But
the money is in the wrong hands.
The technology, the science, the, the medicine is not being shared
and until it's shared by the scientists until
insurance companies get rid of the word plateau.
Until the media
focuses more on
disability
and equality,
then
we're all gonna be sort of stuck in the mud a little bit.
But
will I at the end of my life
be in a wheelchair? I don't know,
but I sure hope that
I'll have taken a few steps
before
that happens.
I hope that I have regained
as much independence as I possibly can
before that happens.
We don't know what we're capable of until we find these limits.
Like the
our spirit and the
the will to survive is, is
incredible. Once you tap it,
my main
dream is to be able to have a, I mean, a regular life like everybody else I like to.
I mean, I'm married now, luckily.
So, I mean, I like to have kids and have a job
and do the everyday things that everybody else does.
But to me, I mean, it's, it's a big dream, a goal because
I'm not at the same level as able bodied people.
So if I can get that family with kids and a regular job,
I can't ask for anything else.
I need to keep going.
I need to
create,
build and share. That's it.
You know, whatever my next goal is,
wherever this journey takes me,
I just want to keep going.
Have I popped a wheelie?
Um
I've performed on almost every stage
on the Sunset strip.
I've played at the hard rock cafe on New Year's Eve,
made amazing friends
that take care of me and
are willing to be there for me.
I have a wonderful family who loves me unconditionally and
doesn't treat me any differently today than they did,
you know,
on the day I was born.
Um
So those wheelies I'm popping constantly.
This is my second opportunity. My second chance at life
every night, every day.
The blue
by
you.
You feel the sea
time
that you smile?
See.
Yeah,
I
don't know that I've come out of the wheelie.
The metaphorical wheelie is,
is a wonderful place to be.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Hear
me
one ever. We
sees all the
so we stopped
and the
once
a
while.
Yeah,
Yeah.