Home Entertainment Game Technology Six months after a bullet left me paralyzed, my fiancée secretly ordered the staff to stop my afternoon therapy because she believed helping me was pointless, but the exhausted aide earning twenty-five dollars an hour refused to treat me like a lost cause. I had spent my life surrounded by men terrified of my name, yet it took one brutally honest woman washing my back to make me realize the person wearing my engagement ring had already abandoned me.352

My signature could change a man's future.

I had always considered that a measure of success.

Then a bullet entered my back on a wet Thursday night behind Warehouse Twelve and shattered my T12 vertebra.

There was no warning.

No cinematic moment when I saw the gun.

I remembered rain striking the harbor pavement, the stink of diesel and salt, somebody shouting my name, then an impact so violent I thought a truck had hit me.

I fell face-first.

Tried to get up.

Nothing happened.

My arms worked.

My hands worked.

My lungs dragged in air.

But below my waist, my body had become a country that no longer answered to me.

Three surgeries followed.

Then infection.

Then rehabilitation.

Then the sentence the doctors tried to soften with careful language.

Paraplegia.

Incomplete spinal cord injury.

Uncertain prognosis.

Potential for neurological improvement, but no guarantees.

They used words like adaptation and independence.