Paralyzed in a racing accident nearly 25 years ago, Sam Schmidt has spent much of the last quarter century trying to prove to others that there is a way to have a meaningful life with a traumatic spinal cord injury. That was the furthest thing from his mind when he crashed at Walt Disney World Speedway in the opening days of 2000. He suffered a C3 and C4 spinal cord injury, wasn’t breathing for almost four minutes, and had to be helicoptered to Orlando.
His wife was at home in Las Vegas with their children, and when she arrived in Florida, the prognosis was grim. “We’re lucky he survived the night and if he survives the week, just find him a nursing home,” Schmidt told The Associated Press, detailing what the doctors relayed to his wife. “He’ll be on a ventilator the rest of his life.
” Schmidt's injury at the time was compared to “the same as Christopher Reeve,” in that, like the ”Superman" actor, Schmidt was paralyzed from the neck down and needed a ventilator to breathe. Reeve reached out — he'd been working with doctors, pushing them, to find ways to help trauma patients create meaningful lives post accident — and Schmidt believes it was Reeve's work that changed the trajectory of his life. “There was no internet.
My family was at the end of the hospital hallway on the payphones just calling, calling, calling, and all they were told was ‘We’ll teach him how to live with it, but that's it,'” Schmidt told the AP. It was Reeve's doctor who dema.