HOURS after his car crashed over the precipice, the doctors stared at him in disbelief, looked at the X-rays and glanced back at 23-year-old Keith Tucker who was unable to move anything but his eyes and lips.

His neck was broken in three places, and the doctors predicted that he would die within hours. A few beds away, his friend, who was travelling with him when the accident occurred, had his back broken and his neck slipped out of place as well.

Today, ‘Miracle Man’ is a para-quad, having progressed medically from being a quad, who lost the ability to move his four limbs, to a para-quad, where he now has some movement in his limbs.

Tucker reflects on that fateful day, July 26, 1996, when he careened off Glenmuir Road in May Pen over a precipice to avoid a head-on collision with a truck that was coming around a corner. He was trying to avoid loose gravel on his side of the road and the truck was not hugging the bend.

“I swung from the truck, back into the gravel and the car skidded and took us over the precipice,” he recalled in an interview with JIS News.

“Actually as you see it in a movie, it rolled right over and then landed on the four wheels. All that time I was still conscious,” he explained. “I knew something was wrong but I just didn’t know what.”

Tucker is featured in an infomercial produced for the ‘Drive for Life’ campaign as part of the Road Safety Unit’s public education programme on defensive driving. In 15 seconds, Tucker appeals to motorists to take care on the roads because they may not be as fortunate as he is to be alive.

“God was gracious to me,” said Tucker, who is a Christian noting that people came to their rescue immediately, put him along with his injured friend in a pick-up so that they could lie flat all the way to the hospital to avoid further injury.

At the time, Tucker was an employee of ScotiaBank, Riverton City Branch, and had been accepted by the College of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST), now University of Technology (UTech) to pursue his dream in another two months in Avionics and Instrumental Design. But the story of his life changed instantly.

His expected lifespan crept from three hours to three days and then to three weeks. “When three weeks passed they (medical staff) started to gather around my bed because they had not seen anything like this before,” he said.

“I lost feeling and movement from my neck down,” he added. “But the church prayed. At the time I was a baby Christian. not having a deep relationship with God, but just knowing about Him, that’s a big difference.”

Tucker underwent skull traction. “They bored my skull, put weights on it to set back the neck and I stayed in that position for about three months,” he explained.

He remembered the support from his family, fellow church members and co-workers who helped him through the healing process. After some time, he noticed that electric shocks began going through his body, but was reluctant to tell the doctors as he thought something was going wrong.

One day someone came to pray for him and they touched his stomach and he felt it. “I feel my belly, I feel my belly,” he gasped excitedly for the first time in months and after that he looked forward to regaining the basic sense of touch in other areas of his body.

The bank rallied around him and opened an account which played an integral role in covering his medical expenses and other bills for more than five years.

He received his medical treatment at the Kingston Public Hospital after which he was moved to the Mona Rehab Centre where he spent more than a year in the first instance, undergoing aggressive therapy. It would be some time after that before he returned to Mona Rehab, having spent years in Nursing Homes and St Monica’s Home for the Aged in St Catherine.

“Can you imagine not seeing your hand for a long time and your hand is on your body?” Tucker asked, trying to convey the seriousness of his medical condition. When he eventually moved one finger, he as if he had been given the gift of walking.

“Just to move one finger was like I could walk. Every morning it was a new miracle and the doctors would come in and ask ‘What’s new this morning Keith’?” That was when they started calling him Miracle Man.

Aggressive therapy and the support he had from friends, such as Elgin Holness whom Tucker refers to as ‘Daddy Holness’, the manager for his branch, and George Kerr, who he calls his ‘best man’, helped him immensely. He cherishes the hope of being married one day and for Kerr to be his best man.

“This just can’t be the final chapter of my life,” he said to himself one day. “This can’t be me just sitting. It can’t be that someone comes to look after me and puts me in front of a TV.”

Back at Mona Rehab, his mobility improved considerably. He was able to stand with assistance between parallel bars and soon he was able to use the computer.

He credits his physiotherapist Susan Harris and others for fighting with him and telling him all the time that he could do it.

While there were down times, Tucker said, “all my attention was focused on how I could rise above this.”

He started working again at Scotiabank in 2003, thankfully a few months before the funds in the charity account dried up. He is now a Customer Service Representative at the Call Centre.

And, Tucker does not dwell on the crash. “Maybe one and two times, but I look ahead where I know that there is hope for tomorrow,” he said. These days he skilfully manoeuvres a motorised wheelchair around the office and home.

“It’s one hand actually that I use, to deal with the computer, calculator and the phone within two minutes,” he says of his job.