Lawyer Max Lewis finds inspiration after injury

One moment on a scorching June day in Pettis County, Max Lewis dove off a bridge into Muddy Creek, 21 feet below.

The water was only 2 feet deep.

The next moment …

“I was face-down in the water,” Lewis recalls. “I was there for dead.”

Co-workers pulled their unconscious friend from the water. Lewis, then 19, was placed on a gurney and raised by a rope to the bridge to meet a waiting ambulance. When he regained consciousness in a neurosurgical intensive care unit at University Hospital, where he’d undergone a 10-hour surgery, a surgeon delivered the worst news of Lewis’ life.

“Max, you’ve been paralyzed, and you’ll never walk again.”

That was June 1986. Lewis said he really hasn’t spent a lot of time replaying that near-fatal dive.

“It was just a miscalculation and an error in judgment,” he said. “Nobody pushed me off that bridge. This was my doing.”

Lewis also can’t recollect languishing in self-pity or being angry at God. He does remember times when the lights were turned out in the NSICU.

“Those were the loneliest times I had in my life,” he said.

Lewis tells his story with a determination that indicates how he would move beyond his “miscalculation” and the cervical spinal cord injury that threatened to rob him of life.

“I did not want that to be the last paragraph in my life story,” he said. “I felt I had something to contribute.”



Source:
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2011/sep/20/lawyer-max-lewis-finds-inspiration-after-injury/