In search of a miracle
John was skeptical when she showed him the video clips she’d found online.

“They can do a lot these days with cameras,” he told his wife.

But with the help of John’s mother, Marci persuaded him just to visit this Project Walk place. Soon, they were on a plane.

The center sat in a nondescript business park in Carlsbad, Calif., north of San Diego. A reception area opened into two sprawling rooms filled with workout equipment, some of it specially suited for the disabled — things like a gait trainer, a machine that uses ski-like foot plates to simulate walking.

There were also Total Gyms. Step climbers. Leg cycles. Equipment that any able-bodied person might use. And trainers were constantly hoisting clients out of their wheelchairs and onto equipment.

The wheelchairs sat empty.

They spoke with a man from Tennessee who was paralyzed playing football. He relocated three years earlier with his parents. He wasn’t walking — “yet,” he said — but he wasn’t about to give up.

They chatted with another man who moved from a nursing home in Montana to Carlsbad to begin the therapy in 2003. The client, Donny Clark, was paralyzed in an ATV accident, a C5-6 injury like John. Now, four years post-injury, he was taking steps in a walker, with trainers helping to move his legs.

“Are you planning on staying?” Marci asked them.

“We bought a house,” said Donny’s girlfriend, Kathleen.

A Wish to Walk: Told in a 3-part series Part 1: One man's quest to walk again Advances offer hope for spinal injury patients Part 2: Facing roadblocks when learning to walk Part 3: 'I can 't believe that it couldn't happen'

When John and Marci met with Ted Dardzinski, one of the founders of Project Walk, he warned them the process would be long — with no guarantees.

“But we’re going to do everything we can to help you get better,” he said.

Seeing had Marci believing. These clients were for real, she thought. And they were having fun. Rock music was blaring. The atmosphere was upbeat.

“This is where we need to be,” she thought, “with people like us.”

John wondered how he was supposed to use all that equipment when his body felt like cement. Even so, Project Walk seemed to him like a glimmer of light in a world that had gone dark.

The next day, John and Marci went apartment hunting.

When they returned to Iron Station, they sat the kids down and tried to make it sound like a grand adventure. California was far, true, and they’d be leaving their home, their family.

“But this is a place,” Marci explained, “that might be able to help Daddy walk again.”

A year, the couple had decided. They’d give it a year.

It was the beginning of a journey with no promise of a happy ending, no assurance that John would regain any function, much less walk out the door — like those men on the Web site.

But Marci and John were devout Roman Catholics who had clung to their faith especially tight since the accident.

God created heaven and earth in seven days. Maybe, just maybe, he could give them their miracle in a year.

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