The long comeback

JULESBURG, Colo. -- The walk is weak, wobbly and wavering, like a toddler steadying himself for the first time with a hand on the family room coffee table.

Confidence is built with each new day and the risks taken to go just a step further and try a little harder.

His once-powerful right hand might never wrap itself around a football or baseball the way it once did, but there is plenty of strength in the grip, proving it belongs to a proud man. Determined.

The toes on his left foot still won't bend. The afternoon still calls him back to bed for a nap. The memory still occasionally plays tricks on him, but he hasn't called any friends lately to inquire about their plans for the prom. It's progress.

The smile is the real story.

It rarely leaves his face, especially with his 7-year-old son in his lap.

John Hessler is reclaiming his life, slowly and surely.

"He's never going to be the same," Keith Hessler said of his 30-year-old son. "There are going to be traits of the old John, but there is also a new John. It's kind of like being reborn."

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John Hessler's life was forever changed on a Sunday afternoon in October 2003 when he suffered a severe head injury, broken ribs and a collapsed lung in a hit-and-run car accident. The individuals who allegedly caused the accident bailed out of the gold Chevrolet Blazer they were driving and ran.

They clipped Hessler's purple Honda from behind on Interstate 76, sending him careering across the median into oncoming traffic, where a pickup truck barreled into him. They haven't been caught, and probably will never face prosecution. It is believed they fled to Mexico.

In those first days, doctors asked John's parents to sign a do-not-resuscitate order in case the worst happened. They refused because they believed in their boy.

The former University of Colorado quarterback spent 33 days in a coma at a Denver hospital. After he woke in a room filled with joyful tears, he spent another seven months rehabilitating in Craig Hospital.

"It's definitely a miracle," John said. "It's a miracle that I think the way I do."

Doctors suggested John might be best served in a nursing home, saving his family from the burden of providing 24-hour-a-day care. They refused again and brought John home to a white corner house in the middle of this small town in northeastern Colorado.

It's the last exit before the state line off the highway on which he nearly lost his life.

Time passes slowly here. The quiet atmosphere seems perfectly suited to healing.

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John's son, Devin, is visiting this summer from California, where he lives during the school year with his mother, Hessler's former girlfriend. Devin said his dad is a lot better than the man he visited just a few months ago on spring break.

Father and son play games together. They fish together at a nearby lake. They play with the family dog, Katie, and laugh. Sometimes John watches his son catch frogs.

He is thankful for every second.

"It makes my day go by a lot easier," he said.

Progress in his recovery has come in tiny increments and big chunks. It is unpredictable, but each step is gratifying for an entire family. Rage, grief and worry have melted into hope.

Two months ago, John couldn't get himself in and out of the family SUV. Now he can in a very careful and deliberate manner.

John resists everything new at first. His family pushes him to try. Once he does, they encourage him to try harder.

Devin, who proudly announces his intention to be a quarterback like his dad, has threatened to take away his father's walker because he knows his dad can walk without it. He just knows it.

"He's doing good walking," Devin said.

John has come a long way over the past year.

Not long after he came home, John called his best friend, Jay Haddick, one day to find out if Jay planned to attend their prom. Jay didn't know what to say. Perhaps the experience of living with his parents again tricked him into thinking he was still in high school.

John called a handful of friends another day to proudly announce he had graduated from college. Most of them had been at CU the day he graduated in 1997.

John and his family now sit together around the kitchen table and laugh about those episodes of time travel.

"It's not a broken ankle," his younger brother Jason said. "It's a brain injury. That's something we have to keep telling ourselves."

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Almost every afternoon around 5, workers at the local swimming pool clear the kids out to give John time to work on walking. He is much more carefree in the water without the threat of hard ground on which he might fall.

Some days, Jason will take him to the gymnasium at Julesburg High School, where John walks laps around the basketball court. He leans on a walker sometimes, but mostly now he picks it up and carries it. He won't walk without it -- not yet anyway.

"He's just got that feeling that he's going to get hurt," his father said. "He's got to get rid of that. I don't know how long it's going to take to get that out of him."

Jason quit his job as a teacher to move to Julesburg and help his parents care for John.

"It's just what needed to be done," Jason said.

The job is nearly complete.

John will leave the family home soon and move back to Denver, where he will live for a time in a group home operated by a company specializing in the treatment and rehabilitation of people recovering from severe brain injuries.

At some point, John will leave the home and live on his own again.

"I can't tell you how bad I want that," he said.

He doesn't remember a thing about the accident. He doesn't even remember owning the car he was driving. Instead, he recalls the red hotrod he drove in college.

He has ruled out driving again. He says he is too scared and would rather master the public transportation system.

One of the most difficult questions he has been asked is how he feels about the people who turned his world inside out, the people who nearly robbed his son of a father. The people who left him there to die.

He considers it for a while and says, "I guess I can't live with any vengeance toward them."

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The Hessler family is convinced they made the right choice by not putting John in a nursing home. They believe he never would have gotten better if his rehabilitation was left to others.

"We've got him about as far as we're going to get him here," John's mother, June Hessler, said. "A woman there asked me what our long-term goal was for John. I said, 'Make him a taxpayer.'"

John agrees. He craves independence. He wants a career. He hopes to marry and have more children. He wants to live life as he was before fate clipped his rear bumper.

He is asked if anything good has come from such a terrible experience.

"I've learned patience," he said. "I never used to have it."

Right at the top of his to-do list is coaching high school football once again. Before the accident, he served as quarterbacks coach at Regis High School in Aurora. He often draws up plays and wonders how they might work if he ever gets a chance to test them.

"I spend a lot of my time looking ahead," he said. "I don't spend much time looking in the past, except for my big accomplishments because I'm proud of them."

John Hessler always has been an underdog. It's a role he relishes.

The same feisty competitor shows up whenever doctors tell him not to get his hopes up too high or that he won't be able to do something.

"That," he said, "has been my motivation."