Celebrating a rebirth and a journey of resilience
By Robert L. Thomas
Happy birthday! Happy birthday! June isn’t the month in which my mom gave birth to me, but it is what I consider my “reborn month.” Thirty-four years ago, on June 3, 1991, I was injured in a diving accident, which left me a level C5/6 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down.
On that particular day, I can recall exactly what happened. But let me back up a little bit to the night prior. A group of my Army squad members and I went over to the post exchange (PX) to grab a few snacks. Once we arrived, we noticed that the parking lot was full and there were only one or two spaces left, which were disabled parking spaces.
I decided to park in the space and asked one of the guys to stay in the car just in case they needed to move it. Unfortunately, everyone ended up in the PX, and once we came out, the military police (MPs) were there ready to issue a ticket. I tried explaining that I was only in the PX for a matter of moments, but to no avail. The MPs just handed me the ticket and explained that I could go pay the fine first thing in the morning if I wished.
The next day, after the morning muster and being released from work, we didn’t have any equipment back from the desert yet. So, the members of my squad and I decided to go fishing on the property one of the guys was purchasing. After being there for several hours, with no luck catching any fish, a few of us decided to go swimming. Boy, was that a bad idea.
Three of us dove in one after the other, with me being the last one. The next thing I knew, I was saying to myself, “You’d better move something or you’re going to drown.” At that moment, my squad members began to pull me out of the water and onto the shore. While lying there on my stomach, I asked them if my legs were bent in the air or if they were still in the water. They told me they were still in the water. I tried to get up, but the only thing I could move was my shoulders; my arms wouldn’t move. My legs didn’t move again — just my shoulders flopping around like a fish out of water.
To this day, I’m still unsure how the paramedics got there so fast because this was the early 1990s, and I don’t recall anyone having a cell phone at that time. I was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the hospital at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but upon arrival at the emergency room, the doctor immediately turned the ambulance around and sent them over to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center just down the road in Fayetteville, N.C.
As the paramedics began to push me through the halls of the emergency room, I remember being met by the doctor who had what looked to me like a drill, but it could’ve been a set of clippers. The next day when I woke up, I was lying on a bed that rotated or tilted left or right, with 90 pounds of weight hanging from my head.
While there, I underwent surgery to stabilize my neck. They called it a cervical 5/6 corpectomy, where they took a piece of bone out of my hip and placed it in my neck with a plate behind my esophagus.
I also had to go through the rigorous exercises of blowing in a machine to get a ball to move to ensure I didn’t catch pneumonia and to prevent my lungs from collapsing. I was told that I would probably never walk again, and I was given the choice of being transferred to either the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., or the Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spinal cord unit in Ohio to begin a more extensive rehabilitation process. I chose the Cleveland VA because it was closer to family, and I knew that having family as my support system would help me get through it all.
This is also where I realized that my life wasn’t over, it was just changed. I was starting my life as a quadriplegic veteran, which opened the door to numerous opportunities and experiences in the next 34 years and beyond.
