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I still remember the very first time they sat me into one of the wheelchairs. This was one of the hospital's, not the one I would use full time later, because my measurements had not been taken yet. It took two people, including Big Tony, to move me into the wheelchair. Big Tony was nothing short of a giant, half nurse, half bear, but a hundred percent gentle. But despite me having lost tons of weight, he couldn't do it alone. I was having a total freakout and was spasming and twitching all over. When I sat in the wheelchair, Big Tony held me upright, while the other nurse made sure my splinted legs were on the footrests before strapping down my legs across my thighs, and they put two more belts around my mid-section.

When Tony released his grips on me, I only freaked out more and with what little strength I had, I lunged and grabbed his forearm for safety. I didn't feel anything. I could not even feel the backrest of the wheelchair on my back because my level of injury was higher than the backrest. I remember crying out while gripping Tony's wrist that they should help me; I was going to fall; hold me!

I am not proud of it, but I actually started to cry at that point and also managed to get myself an asthma attack, too. The other nurse, I don't remember her name anymore, to be honest, gave me my spray, and then the two of them each held one of my hands until I had calmed down. It felt like an hour. In reality, it was much, much, much shorter.

That was only the second time I cried during all the time in the hospital. The first time was obviously when I first woke up from the medically induced coma. Well, probably not the first time. They said I was drifting in and out of consciousness for an entire afternoon before finally waking up for good in the evening. And I remembered nothing. I woke up to a fairly dark room, the humming and beeping and gurgling of machines, and a certain busyness around me. I also couldn't move at all. My brain failed to connect dots, because some were missing. To this day I still remember nothing beyond packing my bag in the morning to take my green Kawasaki for a spin up the 101. I remember leaving the house, giving a shoutout to the two boys from across the street that were playing hoops in front of the garage, and then it just ends. And then I woke up in a foreign bed and couldn't move. The police told me later what had happened, that a soccer mom had run a red light with her pickup truck because she was distracted by her buzzing phone. I had a green light, and I apparently saw her barrelling into the intersection, but it was already too late. I must have tried to brake and slide sideways to kill speed, but I smacked into the pickup's left side with my own right side.

After a few life- and limb-saving surgeries, the endless months in the hospital began. The doctors apparently knew right away that I would never walk again. The two fractures each in my right femur and my pelvis were pretty horrendous, apparently, but a determined patient might have been able to overcome those. My right arm was also broken pretty badly, but they somehow managed to piece it back together, put some screws in it, and secure it all with an external fixator. But the worst thing was a spinal cord littered with bone fragments from four broken vertebrae. It was sliced into so many pieces and bits that when I woke up they told me right away that I would never, ever walk again and would spend the rest of my life using a wheelchair.

That was all quite hard to comprehend that first evening. I lied there, motionless, and cried my eyes out. I couldn't even see my broken body, because then I still wore a neck brace. I was only told about the rest of my injuries that evening and that my right arm was externally held together my metal rods, and that from my nipples down I was in a huge body cast slash one-and-a-half hip spica cast. Two days later they showed me with a mirror. It went all the way down to my toes on my broken right leg, but ended above the knee on my left leg, with a rod between the left thigh and right knee included in the cast. In between, what had been my favorite toy had been turned into a socket for a catheter to help drain urine from my body. The only thing I could faintly feel and move was my left arm, which was nevertheless covered in needles and accesses and what not all to suck blood, inject this and that… I was told to not lift the arm to my face if at all possible because there were like ten tubes attached to it.

So I lied there motionless and let the tears flow wherever they wanted to flow while I cried my eyes out for the entire evening. Merely 18 years old and crippled for life. I had been Daniel, the center of every party, and everybody's go-to guy to hang out with. Now I was Daniel, the cripple. A useless cripple. My life was over. I cried and cried and weakly screamed for hours until exhaustion overcame me and I fell asleep again.

The next time the crying was over. I won my first battle against being paralyzed and temporarily one-armed. A nurse fed me a small portion of pudding and I managed to eat all of it. Victory was achieved! The following day I came out of ICU and was moved into a normal room.

I spent three months in casts in that room and in a hospital bed. Because of the pelvic fractures the doctors would not let me sit up - and with the body cast I could not sit up anyway. Normally they try to get people with severe injuries like that mobile as soon as they can, but I had to lie down still for three months because my pelvis had to grow back together first.

During that time I went through two cast changes. The first one I was in when I woke up from my coma was white. About four weeks later that one was removed and my entire body was imaged to check the healing progress, after which they put me into a second edition of the same cast. Toes to nipples, but this time I got to pick a color. I got pink! Another four weeks later that one came off, too, and I got a blue one, but with red and white stripes on my right leg. That was about two weeks before Independence Day, so I felt like dressing up as a flag. That third cast only went from my toes to my stomach and for the first time in two months they would ever so slightly incline the top end of my bed so that I could actually see something other than the ceiling.

During this time we all found out together that my bladder would not hold any amount of urine anymore and that I would forever need constant catheterization or wear diapers all day long, while my bowels would not normally pass waste anymore. Every other day the nurses had to clean out my intestines while I didn't even feel anything about it. From about two inches below my nipples down it was all dead and remained all dead.

And finally, after three months, the final hip spica cast came off and I had surgery to remove the external fixator from my arm a week before that so I had already started physical therapy on that one. I felt so helpless as I spent hours sitting up slightly in bed, squeezing soft balls in my right hand. With the cast off, they also raised up the bed so that I was almost sitting up, or at least at a sixty degree angle. However, that didn't prepare me for the wheelchair. They rolled it into the room in the morning. A nondescript black chair, nothing special about it, no design, no art to it; also fairly bulky - about as much the same species as my new lightweight wheelchair with cambered rear wheels and a striking orange and blue paint scheme as a fattened up lap cat and a panther roaming the wild are the same species.

Because while they had sat me up in bed for two days before, then I still had the bed's support on my head, neck, shoulders, and upper body. The wheelchair gave me non of that. All the security of the well-maintained bed, always clean no matter how often I soiled it - gone! It was just my head and shoulders drifting somewhere through space while I screamed in panic as my fingers clawed into Big Tony's arm. The wheelchair was terrifying. The wheelchair was going to kill me!

When I finally calmed down, they wanted to get me at least some exercise in before I would be moved to an actual rehab facility for spinal cord injuries the next Monday. So Big Tony would walk next to me while I gingerly wheeled out of my room and then up and down the hallway a few times. It was a pathetic first drive, honestly. I didn't let the chair roll at all. I would grab the push rims, move them like three inches without ever letting them go, and then would reach back to grab them again without ever really letting go of the rims. Anything I could hold on to, really anything. Anything for a whiff of false security. I think I made it up and down the hallway twice before I was completely exhausted. Big Tony had to push me the last 20 feet and back into my room because I was hanging in the ropes… or the belts on the wheelchair at that point.

But that was eight years ago, and look at me now. I learned to live again in rehab, which took me a while because I was weaker than a newborn kitten. I built up my strength, learned to do transfers from the bed to the wheelchair, from the chair to the floor, and from the floor back into the chair. I learned to do my catheters, my bowel management, and how I could dress and wash myself. How do you shop for groceries at the supermarket, how do you cook in an adapted kitchen? What sports can you play? Rehab shows the newly disabled patients all these things. Six months after the accident, I moved into my own wheelchair-accessible apartment, and two months after that I started college and got my degree in electrical engineering, and now I've gotten into designing solar power stations. For the last seven years I have played semi-pro wheelchair basketball, and on Sundays I go for long drives on my handbike.

Does it bother me to be paralyzed at times? Sure.

Does it define my life? Nah. I am so much more than some dude in a wheelchair.

***

I reach out to grab the hand of Logan, who is sitting next to me. A cute 19-year-old blond guy with a cute tiny nose and sparkling silver earrings, certainly popular just for his wonderful looks. Logan, who has looked down at his immobile knees for most of the time, looks back into my eyes as I touch his hand. I smile at him. He very lightly smiles back.

Today is Logan's first time in a wheelchair. He broke two vertebrae in his back riding his mountain bike down a steep, heavily wooded hill. The front wheel locked up in a root and he immediately went flying over the handlebars and a good bit down the hill, right into a pile of mossy stones. If not for his helmet, he probably would have smashed in his skull and would have died, but there was nothing to protect his spine. He now was a T9 complete paraplegic, his level of injury being a bit further down from mine. He wore blue splints on his lower legs, a white plastic back brace that made him look pretty fat, and the collection bag hung from the frame of his gray hospital-issue wheelchair and the tube that wound up from the bag and snaked into the left leg of his shorts also hinted at certain issues with bladder control.

"You are feeling shit now, but it will get better", I assure him while still holding his hand.

"When?" He asks him with his soft voice.

"When was your accident?"

"Sunday", he says, with his voice almost breaking. He was clearly still traumatized. Today was Saturday.

"Come on", I say as I release his hand. "We should check out the cafeteria."

"But...!", he begins and extends his arms and then points down at the wheelchair. "I don't know how to … how to do this!"

"But the nurse walked with you as you made a few laps in the hallway this morning?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is just the same", I assure him again. "Except this time another guy in a wheelchair is with you." I turn my wheelchair so that it points at the door and look over my left shoulder right at Logan. "Come on. Both hands on the rims and then gently push. Push, release, let it roll a bit, and then push again."

With two soft strokes, I make it to the door, where I turn my considerably more nimble chair around again and look as Logan maneuvers towards the door with extreme caution.

"Don't worry"; I explain, "You can't tip over backwards, because your chair has a fifth wheel. It's like training wheels on a bicycle." I turn myself 90 degrees and open the door, then push it wide open. "Just always keep pushing", I implore Logan, "always keep pushing and always look straight ahead."