GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A motorcycle crash in Lake County nearly killed the driver back in September, but in just 30 days, Andy Hoffman went from being listed as a quadriplegic to walking out of Mary Free Bed on Friday.
“I was going around the corner and hit a pothole,” Andy explained to FOX 17 Friday. “It bucked me off the bike and it flipped my bike both ways, and I ended up pinned underneath my bike.”
Andy says he doesn’t remember the 75-foot slide, but when he came to, he was pinned beneath his bike.
His helmet likely saved his life, but Andy’s neck was broken. He says he could smell the dripping gas, but he couldn’t move.
“I couldn’t do it. There was nothing I could do. I was stuck there in that same position for over two hours, just hoping that my bike didn’t catch on fire, hoping that I was able to honestly live through what happened,” he added.
Andy says, finally, someone found him and called EMS, before he was flown to the hospital.
“He was in very serious condition. He was a quadriplegic at the time,” Andy’s wife Lisa told FOX 17.
The surgeon gave Andy and Lisa an ultimatum: the risk of death with a spinal cord surgery or permanent paralyzation.
“He went in and did the surgery. They took out all the bones out of my neck from C3 to C7. They ended up putting rods in there and screws to hold it together and they grind your bone up and place that back into your neck, and without that surgery, I wouldn’t be here today,” Andy said. “Recovery from any surgery is, is rough, but recovering from a motorcycle accident and a spinal surgery was going to be a long journey.”
That’s where Mary Free Bed in Grand Rapids stepped in to make sure Andy could and would walk again.
He was limited to a bed and a powered wheelchair for about a week before he started to make some serious progress.
“I lifted my hand up to my face for the first time on a Sunday night, which I didn’t realize that I could do or that I was really doing it. It was the most out of body thing, but just to touch your face was, it brought me to tears,” Andy said.
The staff at Mary Free Bed challenged Andy not to allow himself to lay down and accept a different fate, and he decided to rise to that challenge.
“I felt like I could do something instead of being told that you’re paralyzed, you know, and the nursing staff here, the therapist and everybody, I can’t say enough about the occupational therapist. Riley was just unbelievable.”
In just three weeks, Mary Free Bed had Andy walking past stunned doctors in the hallway.
“They pushed me to do it, you know. I was shocked that first day that they told me, ‘Let’s try and walk,’ and I didn’t think I was going to get up to walk that day. I didn’t think I had it in me, but once I felt it, we can do this. And since then, I’ve dragged them around the block for two and a half miles,” Andy added. “They marked me as a dead man. They painted the wheels and tires on my bike to a body shop. That means that’s a death car or death bike.”
Andy credits his wife, family and friends, his neurosurgeon Dr. Cilluffo and, of course, Mary Free Bed.
He says riding a motorcycle used to be his own kind of therapy, but, while he would never encourage anyone else to give it up, he decided to hang up his helmet for good.
