View From the Chair

This article was written for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine spinal cord injury newsletter. A PDF of the full article will appear on the website in the next few weeks.      Part III: Starting Over When I returned to work at IBM in May 1982 -- 17 months after my surfing accident -- I really didn't know whether I could be a productive employee again. I don't believe my new management team knew either. But my former IBM manager, John Perissi, had encouraged me to come back to work -- and my new management team was willing to give me a chance. My greatest concerns had to do not with whether I could do the job, but with whether I would fall out of my wheelchair or suffer some other embarrassment in my office. I'm still concerned about that. But I now can handle the fear psychologically because my confidence has improved. Confidence. It was the key to my comeback. As my confidence in myself grew, my performance at work -- and my capacity for work -- improved. I made

This article was written for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine spinal cord injury newsletter. A PDF of the full article will appear on the website in the next few weeks.  Part II: Road to Recovery     The surgery eventually would let me hold my head up without a neck brace. The operations stabilized my condition, but I remained paralyzed. I was flown home, and spent the next seven months in the New York University Medical Center 's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation. There I learned just how much my spinal cord injury would really change my life.   I was paralyzed from my chest to my feet. I had limited use of my arms and wrists, but I could not use my fingers. I had lost sensation below my chest and I had no control over my bowel or bladder functions. I could not walk. I couldn't even roll over in bed. In rehabilitation, physical and occupational therapists taught me how to care for my paralyzed body. I was taught to look for red marks on my skin that could lead to sk

This article was written for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine spinal cord injury newsletter. A PDF of the full article will appear on the website in the next few weeks.      "Jim!" I could hear my sister yelling at me. "Jim," she was saying, "are you fooling around?"  "No!" I said to her inside my head, unable to speak because I was underwater -- and unable to lift myself out. "Lift my head up, for God's sake!" I felt her hands on me. As she lifted my head out of the water, I gasped for air. Don't let me go," I told her. "I think I broke my back. Call for some help, and be careful when you move me." We were just off the shore of Condado Beach in San Juan , Puerto Rico . It was Dec. 31, 1980 -- New Year's Eve. I had gone to Puerto Rico with the City College of New York swimming team during winter recess. I was 25 years old, and was an assistant to head swimming coach Marcelino Rodriguez, a fellow Ro