Hunting for a Miracle, Grasping at a Chance

Part I

It was only a chair, but it had become his purgatory.

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(Photo: AP Images / Denis Poroy)

Marci Pou, right, holds hands with her husband John Pou as they watch other clients trying to walk during an open house at Project Walk in Carlsbad, Calif. Friday, Nov. 10, 2006.

Each day that John Pou spent in the wheelchair, his spirit seemed to die a little more. It was a perpetual reminder of the calamity that had brought him and Marci, even the kids, to this place.

The chair stood for all that was lost: A promising career as a policeman, a vigorous life spent in karate classes and fishing the lakes of his beloved North Carolina, future plans conjured when things were perfect — plans that seemed irrelevant and impossible now.

Their home, too, the dream house John had worked on with his own hands, felt like a taunting monument to his inadequacies: The pool where he could no longer swim or play chicken with Chase and Kacie, the garden he could no longer tend, the front door he couldn't enter without a makeshift ramp for his wheelchair.

That chair, affixed to him like an unwanted limb.

It had been eight months since John shattered his C-5 vertebra diving over a wave during a family vacation. Eight months spent in either a hospital bed or that detestable chair.

Eight months, also, for Marci to hunt for the miracle that just might bring him and their family back from despair.

And now, staring at her laptop, she prayed she had found it.

On the video, a quadriplegic was doing leg pushes on a Total Gym, riding a stationary bike — walking, even, with support crutches in each hand. His wheelchair was parked behind him.

Marci clicked on another link, and saw a paralyzed man working his legs with weights and lifting himself, using a ballet barre for assistance, from a sitting position to standing.

John couldn't even reach for a glass of tea without losing his balance and flopping forward in his chair.

"How are they doing that?" Marci thought.

She studied the clips again. Then again.

It was an April night in 2006, and John was in bed with a urinary tract infection and a fever of 104.8 degrees — their latest taste of misery. But sitting at her kitchen table, looking at videos of the clients at this "recovery" center in California, Marci felt a trace of optimism return.

"This is it," she decided. "This is what we're supposed to do."

She read about the five-phase program that promised added muscle mass, fewer health problems, greater independence and restored function — all through intensive exercise. There was no talk of learning to cope. No bleak predictions about skills that would be lost and never regained.

This place wasn't about learning to live in the chair, but trying to get out of it. For good.

Even its name inspired hope: Project Walk.

"He could be one of those guys," Marci thought that night — and again the next day, as she rolled her husband up to the computer and played the videos for him.

For the first time since the accident, Marci had something to hold onto. All she could think was, "He's going to walk."

If only she could get John to grab hold of the dream, too.

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When tragedy and life intersect, do you accept the hand you're dealt and adapt — or do you refuse to resign yourself to what may be inevitable, despite what the doctors say and what your own demons whisper when the doubt returns?

In searching for answers beyond day-to-day clinical advice, John and Marci looked deep into themselves, then talked through what they found there. They opened themselves, and their family story, to an Associated Press reporter, speaking freely over 18 months of interviews and sharing intimacies — from personal journals and dinner-table debates to extensive medical records.

This tumult was new for Marci and John, despite their in-the-line-of-fire jobs. He served in the Army during Desert Storm and was a 10-year veteran of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department; she had worked 20 years at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, N.C., including eight years in the ER.

But she was an information technology specialist, and he had never had to fire his weapon as a policeman. Tragedy seemed remote.