Journal Staff Writer
COVENTRY –– As he grips the edge of his wheelchair, Guy Waterman’s mind drifts back to the life-changing day 18 years ago when a motorcycle crash turned his world upside down.
Yes, he says softly, people would sometimes say he drove too fast. But that particular spring day, he was tooling along Route 3 no faster than 40 mph when he came over a hill and saw a driver ready to come out of Pilgrim Avenue.
Guy Waterman, paralyzed from the chest down, believes that he could help injured servicemen.
“She was looking directly at me,” he says. “She pulled out in front of me anyway.”
Because of guardrails and walls on either side, Waterman says he had no choice but to hit the car broadside. The impact sent him hurtling 150 feet; his body slammed against a wooden sign that said “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.”
It would be two months before Waterman would come out of a coma and find himself hooked to a respirator at Rhode Island Hospital with a collapsed lung, his back broken and jaw wired shut. He soon discovered he was paralyzed from the chest down.
“When I realized I couldn’t make love anymore or run around doing all the things I had been doing for 20 years, I started looking for ways to kill myself,” says Waterman, now 44. “I didn’t want to live like this.”
But these days, after a lifetime of ups and downs, Waterman thinks he can be a source of inspiration to others.
“There are a lot of guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. When they come home, some of them will be hurt and have the same kind of injuries. I know what they’re going to go through. They need someone like me to show them they still have something to look forward to.
“Seeing is believing. I think I can show them you can still have fun and a happy life even without your legs.”
Waterman draws his faith from years of going to church — Catholic, Baptist and Lutheran — and trying to “cover all the bases from Jehovah to Ra.” He sums it up in a few words: “If you get through the long suffering, you will be able to have the peace that people have been promised for years.”
He has also gotten a lift from the return into his life of his 24-year-old son, Timothy, a strapping young man, whom he used to see only rarely after he and the boy’s mother separated at the time of the accident.
It’s uncanny how much they are alike, he says. “I’m concerned because he even rides the same motorcycle I was almost killed on.”
Waterman admits that he isn’t perfect, that he needs to get rid of that “hard Swamp Yankee” attitude that sometimes causes him to talk harshly.
Though some recent back pain has slowed him a bit, he has always enjoyed going to nightclubs, where women still flirt with him and seem drawn to him.
One favorite haunt is the Mardi Gras Multi Club in Cranston, where, because of his regular patronage, managers allow him to slip in through a back door.
“He knows the people that own it and he gets first-class treatment,” says Dave Savage, who lives up the road from Waterman’s mother in Exeter and who has known him for six years. “I have to admire his determination. A lot of people in his situation would have given up a long time ago.”
Savage’s girlfriend, Jennifer Knerr, has known Waterman for about nine years, and says they take him out fishing and to clubs.
“He knows how to meet people, and get out there and live life,” Knerr says.
On one Friday night visit to the Mardi Gras in late summer, pounding music filled the crowded room. Waterman worked his way to the dance floor and raised his arms in triumph, then twirled his wheelchair around and back and forth, in his own impromptu dance
“I can’t even dance that good,” marveled Dawn DeStefano, who says the first time she met Waterman she knew she wanted to be with him. “He’s so smart and intelligent. And no matter where we are, he’s the happiest man in the room.”
While Waterman says he enjoys attention from flirtatious women, he’s now focusing on a deepening relationship with DeStefano. Since he met her in the summer, she’s been a regular visitor to his apartment at Woodland Manor, coming “just about every day” to help him with his laundry, to organize and to talk.
“We’ve been up and down, but we manage to forgive each other and get back together,” he said recently. “I just have to accept and appreciate that she really wants to help me out.”
Waterman lists other blessings, too. He still has wheels, a 1988 Monte Carlo “racing machine” which has been specially equipped so he can drive without using his legs, though he is looking forward to the day when he’ll be driving around in a much newer van equipped with hand-controls and a ramp for a motorized wheelchair.
And while injuries suffered in a fall in July have made it more difficult, Waterman not long ago demonstrated how he could still slide himself into the car and, using his right arm for balance, take the wheelchair apart with his left and throw it into the back seat.
Guy Waterman wonders today what his life would be like if not for another tragic accident that occurred when he was 3. It was then that his father, an ex-Green Beret, was killed in a tractor-trailer accident in New Jersey. If his father had not died, Waterman says, he probably would have made sure his son finished school, thereby setting the teen on an entirely different path.
As a student at Metcalf Middle School, in Exeter, Waterman won all sorts of track and field awards, “beating every school in the state.”
But his time at North Kingstown High didn’t go so well. Kicked out because of too many fights, he drifted through a number of jobs, including work as a painter and a sandblaster for Electric Boat. He had a few girlfriends, including the one who bore his son.
The motorcycle accident changed everything. After he came out of his coma and discovered he was paralyzed, he was terrified at first of having to go through life depending on others. He panicked because he didn’t think his respirator was giving him enough air. “But I couldn’t tell anyone because my jaw was wired shut.”
He began having dreams of taking his own life, which led to one of his most bizarre experiences. While placed on a suicide watch at Rhode Island Hospital, he caught the attention of a nurse who developed such a liking for him that she wheeled him out of the hospital without telling anyone and took him to her apartment. He stayed four months.
It ended when Waterman phoned his mother to tell her what happened and then persuaded the nurse to take him to her home in Exeter. (When the hospital learned what happened, the nurse was fired.)
Another unusual episode came 15 years ago after Waterman moved into Woodland Manor, a housing complex for senior citizens and people with disabilities, and had a run-in with a certified nurse who had been hired as his caregiver. Waterman says she, too, was emotionally attached to him and became angry that he was more interested in his car. One day in the complex’s parking lot, she knocked over Waterman in his wheelchair with her car and was later charged by Coventry police with domestic assault and leaving the scene of an accident. The case was later filed.
It wasn’t the last time that Waterman would have problems with caregivers. Over the years, he deemed others who were sent to his apartment unacceptable for one reason or another.
But then three years ago, the visits stopped after the social worker who was in charge of his case retired. State human-services workers later explained that Waterman had opted for a new program in which he would find the caregivers and then send the state the paperwork to allow payment. The trouble was that Waterman never found someone he considered suitable who also had the right credentials.
During this time without home care, Waterman ran into another crisis in November 2008, when the elevator in the Woodland Manor complex broke down and was not repaired for four months. The breakdown inconvenienced many of the building’s 150 residents, but Waterman says it was worse for him — making him a virtual prisoner in his apartment since he could not go up or down the stairs without someone carrying him.
In the meantime, his mother, who has her own health problems, and his sister, came to his rescue — not only helping with household chores, but completely redecorating his apartment.
More recently he’s had help from DeStefano, who works as a fraud investigator for Blue Cross. She says she’ll help him find a job.
Recently she helped him — and his wheelchair — into her new car and took him out for dinner at Café Noir in Providence, where her 20-year-old daughter works.
“I love him dearly,” she says. “Sometimes you lose sight of the dream, and for a time I think that’s what happened with Guy. But I feel he’s getting it back. God knows what he’s doing. He brings people into your life to inspire. I think I’m helping to inspire Guy and he inspires me.”
But as the new year approached, Waterman was expressing frustration — he’s weak from the painful deterioration of some discs in his spine and he can’t seem to get his van equipped.
The used minivan that his sister gave him more than a year ago has been parked at a local repair shop, he says, because the insurance company has not yet authorized the installation of the hand controls and wheelchair ramp.
“I don’t understand why it should be taking this long,” he says, explaining that he’s too weak right now to get his wheelchair into the Monte Carlo. He says he wants to get out and visit injured veterans.
But he is grateful for the small things.
On Christmas Day, Waterman’s son, Timothy, called to wish him a Merry Christmas. “It’s surprising what one phone call can do.”
Source: http://www.projo.com/news/content/guy_waterman_01-11-10_7QF021P_v57.32a8edd.html
Tagged as: disabled · handicap · handicap accessible · handicap accessible van · mobility · mobility aids · mobility for the disabled · mobility vehicles · wheelchair accessible · wheelchair accessible van · wheelchair van
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