INJURED MAN TELLS TEEN-AGERS OF DANGERS

CAPE GIRARDEAU -- For three and a half years, Gary Copeland has been reliving the accident that claimed the use of his legs.

But he's not sorry; in fact, he says, being in a wheelchair while warning kids of the dangers of spinal-cord and head injuries helps him get his point across.

"Very few people will go up to a person in a wheelchair and just say `Hi,'" he tells them. "You have to look beyond the wheelchair and meet the person."

Thursday, Copeland, along with medical professionals from Southeast Missouri Hospital and Cape County Ambulance Service, presented a Head and Spinal Cord Injury Prevention Program to students at Central High School.

Copeland has been one of the speakers on the program for more than three years, talking to kids at least twice a month about how easily such injuries can occur.

Just two months before his 22nd birthday, Copeland, 25, decided to go swimming with a friend. He'd never been swimming in that particular pool before, and, when his friend, who was familiar with the pool, dove in, Copeland dove in right after him.

But the pool was only three feet deep.

"When I hit the bottom I thought, `Wow, I almost knocked myself out,'" Copeland told the students. "Then I thought I should swim to the top and get some air, The whole time I thought I was swimming, I was just floating."

By then his friend had realized what had happened. Because his friend recently had been discharged from the Coast Guard, he knew how to handle victims of spinal-cord injuries. He didn't move Copeland out of the pool, but held him face-up in the water until the paramedics arrived.

The dive into the shallow pool had broken Copeland's neck in three places.

Now an "incomplete quadriplegic," he has no movement below his chest, "But I have feeling," he said.

Years of recovery followed. Copeland, of Farmington, has had to learn everything again, starting from the basics of how to feed himself and how to brush his teeth.

It now takes him 30 minutes to roll over in bed and two hours to dress himself. But before he "recovered," he nearly gave up.

When he first arrived at the hospital where he would spend a year learning how to function in the world, the doctor asked him what he hoped to accomplish while there.

"I told him `I hope to walk out of here,'" Copeland said. "The doctor said: `Give it up. You're never going to walk again in your life."

Looking to his family and friends for support pulled him through, he said.

"I spent a couple of weeks crying myself to sleep," he said. "Finally, I thought I would fight for my family and friends."

He said starting over from a spinal injury is "just like you're in kindergarten."

He said most of his friends deserted him during his year in the hospital. "They say they're going to be there, but they won't."

Donna Boardman of the Cape Girardeau County Community Traffic Safety Program said an average of 6,500 head and spinal-cord injuries happen in Missouri each year. Of those, 1,500 are in people 15 to 24 years of age.

The injuries result in disabilities that have no known cure, she said.

"None of these kids here today think it can't happen to them, but hopefully, they will take this seriously," Boardman said.

Mark Sprigg of Southeast Missouri Hospital and Michael Garrett and Jim Karn of Cape County Ambulance demonstrated to the students how medical crews handle people who have injured their head or spinal cord.

Several more prevention programs are scheduled at area schools in the coming months, Boardman said.

"It's designed to bring to the public, especially those young people most vulnerable to injury, an understanding of the causes and results of injuries to the head and spinal cord and the prevention of those injuries," she said.