Louisiana Life: Split Second, July 1, 2019
In his ongoing recovery from a nearly fatal accident that left him paralyzed, Mark Raymond Jr. seeks to mobilize the paralysis community by providing advocacy, funding and fitness centers with his nonprofit foundation
From myneworleans.com:
At 27 years old, he had been celebrating the holiday with friends on a boat all afternoon in Lake Pontchartrain and periodically cooling off in the water— familiar territory to the New Orleans native and broadcast engineer who has a passion for athletics. But the tide in the lake had changed over the course of the day, and when he dove off the boat later, the water had gone down to three feet. He damaged the C-5 vertebrae by the base of his neck and nearly drowned as his lungs filled with brackish water.
When he woke up more than two weeks later, following a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit, he was 30 pounds lighter and learned that he’d lost his ability to walk. Newly quadriplegic, he was so weak, in fact, he could barely hold his head up, and on top of that he had a tracheotomy.
“I woke up and the first thing the doctors told me that I would never walk again. I was very new to all of this; it was a shocking moment in time before I could really begin to grieve,” he recalls.
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