Accident paralyzed his body but not the love for his work

By JEANNIE KEVER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Sweat soaked his Aggie baseball cap as Eugene Alford lurched upright over the parallel bars. Suddenly, he was once again the tallest person in the room.

"Man," he said, as his daughter flashed a thumbs-up. "This feels so good. This is the first time I've been standing upright since December 30."

The thrill didn't last long. After about 10 minutes, his blood pressure began to drop, and he was lowered into his wheelchair.

No matter. That moment in spring provided a sign that Alford, a surgeon accustomed to working 14-hour days and lecturing around the world, was on his way back from an accident that fractured his spine and left him paralyzed below the waist.

Back to what, however, remains uncertain.

The bravado of the weeks after the accident has faded. Maybe he will walk again. Maybe he won't. The real dream, it turns out, is independence and a return to the operating room.

But that, too, may prove elusive.

It's certainly possible to perform surgery from a wheelchair — surgeons use their hands, their knowledge and their judgment, not their legs. But can he balance work and Rehabilitation? Will people want a surgeon in a wheelchair? How will returning to work affect his Disability insurance and his future ability to support his family?

Several times, he set a date to resume seeing patients, only to push it back. He even began to consider, reluctantly, the possibility of doing something else.

"If I have to retrain or do administration or teach, I'll do it," he said. "But in my heart of hearts, I'm a very skilled surgeon. That's my gift."

For the past six months, Alford's recovery has been all-consuming, both the Physical Therapy to regain his independence and the more amorphous territory of learning how to be a husband and a father, as well as a doctor, from a wheelchair.

In early May, he entered the NeuroRecovery Network, a clinical program designed to rewire the Autonomic Nervous System.

On Tuesday, he plans to begin seeing patients in his office. Surgery, if it happens, will come later.

Alford had just turned 48 when he was injured by a falling tree in late December.

He had performed more than 800 surgeries at The Methodist Hospital in 2007, his services as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in such demand that patients waited months for elective operations.

Among his best-known cases was the 2005 facial reconstruction of Carolyn Thomas, a young woman from Waco whose boyfriend shot her in the face in 2003.

After a month in the hospital, first at Methodist and then at TIRR Memorial Hermann, Alford was sent home for his broken bones to heal before beginning the next phase of his therapy. There, the maelstrom of family life proved a bittersweet distraction as he experienced some of what he had missed over the years.

His daughter, Bess, who graduated from St. John's School in May, dismissed the disruption caused by her father's devastating injury and his increased presence around the house.

"The dogs like it," she said.

Before the accident, the family used a lawn service in Houston, unwilling to risk an injury to Alford's hands. Working at their 86-acre farm in Bellville, however, seemed different. The farm was just for fun.

So, Alford climbed atop his tractor, a 20th anniversary present from his wife, Mary, shortly after noon Dec. 30.

He began to nudge a dead oak tree. The top split and fell backward, trapping him against the tractor. His cell phone holster was knocked out of reach.

But for some reason — "It was a real God thing," he said later — he had slipped the phone into his shirt pocket. He called Mary at home in Houston.

She called a neighbor in Bellville. "Gene's hurt," she said. "Call 911, and go find him."

Another neighbor heard the call on a police scanner and began canvassing the farm on foot as he called Life Flight.

Half an hour later, neighbors called to say Alford had been found.

Alford doesn't remember any of that. The helicopter landed at Memorial Hermann Hospital, and he was soon transferred to Methodist, where he had worked for 16 years. He had surgery the following day.

He was sedated and on a Ventilator for a week. In addition to a compression fracture of two Vertebrae, he had six broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a broken scapula. He spent 12 days in the intensive care unit.

The tractor was fine.

Life in the Alford household, however, was not.