Story

Against the Odds

Tim Callahan was paralyzed from the neck down after his accident. His wife Jamie was always at his side at UF Health.
Tim Callahan regained the ability to walk during rehabilitation at Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital.
The Callahans were afraid their dream of becoming parents would never come true after the accident, but it did.
Today, Tim Callahan uses his story to inspire children through the Tim Callahan Foundation, which offers free faith-based sports camps.

Paralyzed patient surpasses all expectations after TraumaOne repairs his broken spine

Tim Callahan laid awkwardly on the ground, wishing he could yell for help and seriously unsure whether his head was still attached to his body.

A moment before, the quarterback, then 29, was at the top of his game as he led his team in a flag football tournament. He had played in similar matches every weekend for years, and won tens of thousands of dollars doing it. To flag football players all over the country – including former NFL players – Tim was an elite athlete.  But then one hit July 3, 2010, left him with no feeling from the neck down.

It happened so suddenly, even the players on the field didn’t know what was going on. Tim and his opponent were both jumping for the football. They caught it simultaneously, and neither would let go. Tim fell to the ground sitting upright. The other player landed on top of him, inadvertently shoving Tim’s head into his body. His neck broke and he was instantly paralyzed, falling backward like a ragdoll.

Tim’s friend, Ralph Graham, heard a scream, saw Tim on the ground and ran to help.

“Ralph, this is bad,” Tim said in a weak, labored voice. “I heard a crack and I can’t move. I don’t feel anything.”

Ralph called 911. Then about 50 men crowded onto the field, dropped to their knees and prayed.

“Everyone was trying to reassure me,” Tim recalls, “but I could see the fear in people’s eyes. I knew they were scared.”

Only one trauma center equipped to help

When Clay County Fire Rescue arrived, Tim asked paramedics to remove his cleats. He had no idea he was already barefoot. The man who had been throwing touchdowns moments before was strapped to a stretcher and carried off the field. Tim tried to wave to reassure the crowd that had gathered, but his arm wouldn’t move.

In the ambulance, Tim didn’t worry about whether he’d play football again. He didn’t even ask if he’d walk again. All he wanted to know was whether he’d still be able to have children. No one could answer.

Tim was injured in Orange Park and expected to be taken to the nearest medical center. In fact, his dad was already racing to the wrong hospital. But paramedics knew Tim was in a condition so serious, just one place in the region was equipped to handle it – UF Health Jacksonville’s TraumaOne, the only Level I adult and pediatric trauma center in Northeast Florida.

Its staff is highly trained in responding to extreme injuries like Tim’s. Surgeons and other health care professionals in specialties such as neurosurgery, orthopaedic trauma surgery and cardiothoracic surgery are available on campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the center has the high-tech equipment to handle traumatic injuries in the rapid time frame required after a trauma.

Devastating news

Tim was swarmed with doctors and nurses the moment he arrived at the hospital. Everyone wanted to know if he could feel this sensation or that prick. The answer was always no.

When Tim’s wife, Jamie, arrived, she received devastating news: Her vibrant, athletic husband was a functional quadriplegic. Surgeons would do their best to repair his broken neck, but his condition could be permanent, she was told. She found Tim in tears. It was her turn to be his rock, and she wasn’t going to let him down. She would be at his side every day through many ups and downs.

Tim’s struggles would get worse. The one part of his body he could still feel, his head, was pinned into a weighted halo to help begin the process of realigning his neck. Then he was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine for an hour, a scary setting for a man who had lost more than half the muscle power he needed to breathe.

The trauma surgeon on duty that day, Elizabeth Vitarbo, MD, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Florida College of Medicine – Jacksonville, reviewed MRI images of Tim’s spine before stepping into his room. It was a very rare and serious injury, with C3 and C4, the third and fourth cervical vertebrae, shoved out of place. There was a strong chance Tim would never regain feeling below his neck.

A sign of hope

Then, finally, some good news: Tim was able to move one shoulder. That meant there was still some movement in muscles controlled by the spine below the injury. Vitarbo knew the sooner she took Tim into surgery, the better chance he had of regaining some muscle function.

In the operating room, the surgeon – who’s legendary among the hospital staff for her toughness under pressure – cut a small incision in the front of Tim’s neck. She simply pushed tissue and blood vessels out of the way so she could access and remove the disc between his injured vertebrae and realigned the bones to a normal position. She then replaced the disc with a plug of cadaver bone and fastened it into place with a metal plate and screws. The bone would grow over time and adhere to his vertebrae.

Shortly after Tim was wheeled back to his room, his father, Steve Callahan, couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Tim’s toes wiggle.

“I saw that, and I just lost it,” Steve recalls. “I was in tears, thanking God.”

The dad, who religiously wrote email updates for church friends all over the country, gave a very happy report that night. But there was still a long road ahead.

Tim spent the next week on heavy medications. Using a ventilator to assist his breathing, he couldn’t talk, but rather communicated by moving his eyes as his family pointed to letters on an alphabet board. It was frustrating, and the situation only got worse when he acquired a staph infection and came down with a fever. His weakened immune system had made him vulnerable to infection. His wife had to ask his many visitors to stop coming, with the promise she would read Tim their encouraging Facebook notes every day instead.

When the fever finally subsided, Tim returned to surgery. This time, orthopaedic surgeon John Kirkpatrick, MD, fused his vertebrae on the back side of his neck, reinforcing Vitarbo’s work from the first surgery. To do it, he took a bone graft from Tim’s hip and connected it to the vertebrae using screws and rods. This bone also would grow, eventually fusing with the bones above and below it.

After six hours in surgery, Kirkpatrick sat down with the family to answer their questions. He explained there was little chance that Tim’s condition would significantly change, but that his spine was realigned so it would serve any recovery Tim’s body was capable of. He also offered the deeply religious family another form of healing: a prayer. Recognizing their faith, he joined hands with them and prayed before and after the surgery. It was an experience the family would remember years later.

Fighting back

Every day, Tim regained a little more strength. His wiggling toes became wiggling feet, then feeling began to return to his legs and continued working its way up. Tim’s night nurse, then-trauma RN Pete Masterson, encouraged Tim during the long, sleepless nights, talking sports and actually understanding the eye signals that left most of Tim’s daytime guests puzzled.

“Nursing is more than just physically taking care of people. It’s also emotional,” Masterson later explained. “It’s about finding out what people need and offering them that support.”

Near the end of Tim’s two-week stay in the intensive care unit, the rehabilitation team was able to sit him upright. He was so weak, he genuinely feared his head would fall off. But even without his physical strength, Tim turned to the mental athlete inside. He was determined to walk again, and he was going to do whatever it took to achieve that goal.

“Toward the end of his time at UF Health, I started to see a change in him, resilience,” his older brother and best friend, Dave Callahan, recalls. “He went from, ‘How did this happen?’ to ‘I’m going to beat this.’”

Tim was transferred to Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital to continue working to regain muscle function. His wife Jaime moved into his room with him, and for a while, he needed help with everything. His dad put his deodorant on for him; his mother, Dianne Callahan, hand-fed him; and his wife brushed his teeth.

It took Tim a week to be stable enough to be propped upright without fainting, a common and dangerous side effect of spinal injuries. The Brooks team strapped him to a tilt table to gradually train his body to handle the change in blood flow.

But Tim was focused on his plan to walk again, and he pushed his body each day as long as his therapists would allow him. Once Tim could stay upright for at least 30 minutes without blacking out, physical therapist Renan Abagat helped him out of his wheelchair and stood him up.

“He put my arms on his shoulders, and then we walked on the fourth floor of Brooks. It was the biggest milestone – to walk again. I was sobbing my eyes out all day after that,” Tim recalls.

Taking it further

Tim’s return to walking was already remarkable, but he took his recovery much further. He set goals: to walk out of Brooks on his own, to return to coaching girls’ basketball at Providence School, even to play flag football once more. That way, he could end his time playing the beloved sport on his own terms, rather than in such a devastating way. He met all of those goals.

“I didn’t even understand why I was so determined to play again. But then we competed in a national tournament and we won the championship. People all over the country heard about my story and wrote to me to tell me how I inspired them,” Tim said.

Tim realized he had found his calling, and so – with the support of his family and friends – he founded the Tim Callahan Foundation. The nonprofit offers free, faith-based sports camps to underprivileged children with guest coaches including well-known high school, college and pro athletes. It’s already served thousands of children on the First Coast, and Tim dreams of expanding the foundation nationwide.

And the biggest dream of his life – to become a father – finally came true after years of trying. His son, Elijah Joseph Callahan, was born in summer 2014, just a few days shy of the four-year anniversary of Tim’s accident.

Life today

Today, Tim lifts weights, coaches basketball and continues to make strides with his foundation. He still has some difficulties, including some paralysis in his body, but he wouldn’t change what happened to him.

“I wouldn’t have been able to impact people the way I have if this hadn’t happened,” he said.

Tim returns to UF Health for yearly follow-up appointments. He likes to recount a conversation he overheard during one of those appointments.

“When we teach you all about the 1 percent chance of recovery, this is that 1 percent,” he heard Kirkpatrick tell his residents when they met him.

Kirkpatrick said Tim’s case was rare, but he couldn’t say it was a surprise.

“It’s remarkable his spinal cord recovered so well. When people come in as severely injured as he did, it’s generally not expected that they’ll see much recovery,” he said. “But miracles happen every day around here.”

Tim Callahan was the 2015 A Night for Heroes patient honoree. The heroes who played a role in his care were honored at the black tie gala, which benefits TraumaOne every year, on Feb. 7, 2015. Learn more at anightforheroes.com.