Dennis Byrd goes home to Tulsa today, able to walk out of Mount Sinai Medical Center on his own, a medical miracle that still leaves his doctor shaking his head.
Two and one-half months ago, Byrd suffered a broken neck in a football accident and was wheeled into the hospital paralyzed in his arms and legs.Two and one-half weeks ago, he walked with crutches for the first time.
"His recovery is truly spectacular," Dr. Kristjan Ragnarsson, chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine at Mount Sinai, said Thursday. "I am astounded. He's beaten the odds many times over."
Angela Byrd was not surprised.
"I told you so," she glowed at a packed press conference Thursday. "I told you he'd walk again. I knew. I just knew Dennis would recover."
It has been an excruciating effort with progress measured in
inches, the promising first twitch of his toe, the gradual return of feeling and function gained through gruelling rehabilitation.
Byrd said from the beginning he was convinced he would walk again.
"I knew I could do it," he said. "This was something I felt in my heart. It was something I set my goals to. I'm grateful and thankful.
"Physical therapy was very gratifying. Things come back on a daily basis, and that makes it much easier. It was very strenuous. It's difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been through it. I had to rehabilitate every muscle from my chest down."
Byrd thanked the doctors and staff at Mount Sinai and talked of the erncouragement he had drawn from other patients, people like Ken Rosenblatt and William Moyer.
"Ken is a parapalegic in a wheelchair," Byrd said. "I looked to him for strength. William Moyer has unbelievable courage. He doesn't have use of his body from the neck down.
"Those people are heroes to me. These 21/2 months will be branded in my memory for the rest of my life."
Byrd recalled the first tentative steps taken in a hotel room with his wife and mother-in-law at his side.
As Byrd took those tentative steps, his 2-year-old daughter Ashtin watched. Angela Byrd recalled the moment. "She said, `Are your legs better, daddy? Are your legs better?"'
"The most meaningful steps for me were those with the crutches," Byrd said. "They meant a lot of freedom. There was no water assisting me with gravity, no parallel bars. It was the freedom to walk where I want to walk and do what I want to do."