Fernando's journey

I was tired. That's the only reason I wasn't driving the day of the accident that put me in a wheelchair. We were on vacation and I had been up late the night before, visiting with my brother-in-law Nik. When we set out the next morning, my wife, Michele, volunteered to take the wheel.

It was warm and sunny when we left Nik's place in Phoenix and headed to Las Vegas, where Michele's other brother, Lucas, lives. I relaxed and enjoyed the desert scenery -- a contrast to the skyline in Toronto, where I now live -- while our eight-month-old daughter, Taryn, chattered away in her car seat.

A few hours into the drive, Taryn let us know with a cry that she was hungry. Michele pulled over at a truck stop and I got into the back with Taryn and her bottle.

Little did I realize that those few steps -- from the front to the back -- would not only save my life but also be the last ones I would ever take. I was about to undergo a bizarre backward metamorphosis, like a butterfly reverting to a caterpillar. I would be forced to reinvent myself.

I had longed to be a dad who would wrestle and run with his daughter. I was confident that some day I would take Taryn skiing, snowboarding and maybe even scuba diving because those were the types of activities I loved so much. That life was about to be taken away. But we can't see the future, so I climbed into the back and fed my baby. She nodded off. I did, too.

When I woke up, I heard screaming. I couldn't move but somebody was telling me not to worry, a helicopter was on the way. I tried to see if Taryn was still beside me, but I couldn't see anything or feel anything, not even pain.

I had no idea what had happened. I found out later that a pickup truck had been travelling in the opposite direction and gone out of control. It smashed into our car but not before colliding into four other vehicles and killing one of the drivers. When it finally hit our rental car, it struck the passenger side.

Michele escaped bruised, sore and cut by windshield shards. Tiny Taryn bit her own lip but was otherwise unscathed. My seat belt sliced into my stomach and intestines, and the impact broke my neck, severing my spinal cord. Now I'm paralyzed from the chest down, but because of where my spine was hurt I have some feeling in my arms. Technically I'm a quadriplegic, but I'm one of the lucky quads, if such a thing exists, in that I have almost perfect arm control and just the loss of motor function of my right fingers.

Astonishingly, it could have been worse. The truck crushed the front passenger compartment where I had been sitting before Taryn cried for her bottle. If I had been there, I would have been killed.

It was in a hospital in Las Vegas that I realized I was in rough shape. Through the haze of my pain and semiconsciousness, before I could actually figure out what was going on, I heard my mom's and my brother Jorge's voices. The first thing I recognized was a poster of Taryn that my brother-in-law Lucas had made. I could see her big brown eyes and they were looking right into me. I'll never forget that poster. I had no idea how badly I would need Taryn's smile to give me that extra strength that would help see me through some of the longest, darkest days of my life in the months following the accident.

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