High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Tough Break, Tough Guy : A Surfing Accident Left Him Paralyzed, but Jeff Robinson Is Now Walking Again

One day he was a healthy teen-ager surfing at the beach. The next he was in the hospital, hooked up to tubes and facing the possibility of permanent paralysis or even death.

Jeff Robinson, a senior at Orange High School, has seen his life take a new direction since last February, when he hit a sandbar while surfing and broke his neck.

Because of the fast thinking and emergency care provided by his brother Brad, a junior at Orange, Jeff was able to remain very much alive and eventually, through hours and hours of therapy, again able to walk on his own. Jeff returned to school that fall, wearing braces on his shins and neck.

It was on the afternoon of Feb. 8 that the Robinson brothers decided to go surfing off 17th Street in Newport Beach. The waves were almost perfect, and the two were having fun. Suddenly, a wave crashed onto Jeff and pulled him under. Jeff was beneath the ocean’s surface for nearly 1 1/2 minutes, then pushed into a sandbar. He crushed his fifth vertebrae and was knocked unconscious.

Brad did not realize anything was wrong until he saw Jeff floating face down.

“I’m glad that I was wearing my wet suit,” Jeff said. The brothers agreed that had Jeff not been wearing it, he would have sank.

At first, Brad thought that Jeff was just joking around, but he knew something was wrong when his brother didn’t respond.

“The first thing I did was get him out of the water. I treated him for shock and also helped immobilize his neck,” said Brad, who received first-aid training in a scuba diving class as a sophomore. Around his brother’s neck, Brad packed wet sand he topped with dry sand so as to help the sand serve as a cast.

Brad called 911 from a house near the beach. By the time he returned to Jeff, lifeguards had arrived on the scene. The paramedics came a few minutes later and took Jeff to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach.

“For a while, I thought Jeff’s accident was my fault,” Brad said. “Jeff wanted to go to another beach, but I convinced him to follow me. I felt really guilty.”

The doctors told Jeff’s parents that the boy might not survive the first three nights and that if he did live, he would be paralyzed from the neck down.

But Jeff proved the doctors wrong.

“It was a miracle,” he said, “but I did it through determination and a lot of hard work.”

Jeff was paralyzed for three of the five months he spent in the hospital, and he also lost 40 pounds during his stay.

“I used to go to therapy every day, but now that I’m better, I only go once a month,” he said. Doctors now expect a full recovery.

The only surgery came later, in August, when a bone was taken from Jeff’s hip and fused to the vertebrae in his neck to help him keep it from curving.

Jeff says his life has changed dramatically since the accident, a re-enactment of which was been featured on the “Rescue 911” television show. Everything is different for him now, he says, and he can will never be able to do many of the things he used to enjoy.

What he misses most is participating in team sports, particularly baseball.

“I played baseball at Orange, and I was planning to play in college too, but that dream is basically gone,” he said. He also has given up his idea of working in the construction field. At first, Jeff thought everything was over for him.

“I wanted to kill myself,” he said. “I felt like I had lost everything that I had worked for.”

He believed that with the loss of his athletic ability, he had nothing to live for. But thanks to the inspiration provided by his friends and family, he now thinks differently.

“I feel lucky to be alive and thankful for my brother,” Jeff said.

The brothers agreed that the accident has brought them closer. Jeff says Brad saved his life and gave him a second chance.

“Brad is basically my keeper; he watches out for me,” Jeff says.

The entire ordeal has every member of the family looking out for one another. The brothers said their mother, Barbara Schneider, has become very protective, sometimes treating them like toddlers. They say she is often afraid to let them go out and doesn’t want them surfing.

“When I found out what happened,” she said, “I felt like part of me died. It was the worst nightmare ever. It was devastating.”

Their stepfather, Leo Schneider, said Jeff is “very, very lucky.”

“When kids say they’re going surfing, most parents just tell them to be careful,” he said. “Their biggest fear is that they’ll drown or get hit by the board. What they don’t understand is the greater danger of cervical injury, caused when they get tossed around by a wave and hit a sandbar that wasn’t there yesterday.”

Jeff has put the accident behind him, concentrating instead on his future. Now he plans to attend Orange Coast College and major in child psychology.

Brad, partly because of the accident, but more as a result of his first-aid training, says he is is looking forward to becoming a fireman or paramedic.

“If I wasn’t there, he would have died,” Brad said. “Nobody else was around when the accident happened. It was basically just me and him, and I’m glad that I was there to save him.”