Searching for a miracle - First of a three-part series

It was only a chair, but it had become his purgatory.

Each day that John Pou spent in the wheelchair, his spirit seemed to die a little more. It was a perpetual reminder of the calamity that had brought him and Marci, even the children, to this place.

Their home, too, felt like a taunting monument to John's inadequacies: The pool where he could no longer swim with Chase and Kacie, the front door he couldn't enter without a makeshift ramp for his wheelchair.

It had been eight months since John shattered his C-5 vertebra diving over a wave during a family vacation. Eight months spent in either a hospital bed or the chair.

Eight months, also, for Marci to hunt for the miracle that just might bring him and their family back from despair.

And now, staring at her laptop, she prayed she had found it.

On the video, a quadriplegic was doing leg pushes on a Total Gym, riding a stationary bike -- walking, even, with support crutches in each hand. His wheelchair was parked behind him.

She read about the program that promised added muscle mass, fewer health problems, greater independence and restored function -- all through intensive exercise.

This place wasn't about learning to live in the chair, but trying to get out of it. For good. Even its name inspired hope: Project Walk.

"He could be one of those guys," Marci thought. "He's going to walk."

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On Aug. 22, 2005, Chase was sprinting across the sand to Marci at Topsail Beach, their annual family vacation spot on the North Carolina coast.

"Mommy! Mommy!" her 7-year-old said, "I think Daddy's dying."

Marci looked down the beach and saw John on his back on the sand. She ran.

"Help me," her husband mouthed, unable to speak.

John never lost consciousness. Not in that awful moment when he dived over a wave and felt his head hit the sand as though it were a stack of bricks. Not in the moments after, when his body went limp and he feared he would drown.

John had broken his neck, crushing the fifth cervical bone of the spinal column. Doctors believed part of the shattered bone cut into his spinal cord, leaving a lesion along the bundle of nerves that carries impulses to and from the brain and controls the body's motor and sensory function.

The next day, the doctor delivered the diagnosis the couple expected. Once the initial swelling subsided, John might regain some function, but worst-case scenario: He would be paralyzed from the chest down, meaning quadriplegia, or loss of mobility in his legs and at least partial loss of his arms.

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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, 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 skilike 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.

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.

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.

When they returned, they sat the children 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.