Walking Tall : Redfern Fights Back From Neck Injury to Start Over as Recovering Quadriplegic

The strain showed plainly on his face, twisting his mouth and causing deep furrows to form in his brow. If you were looking only at his face, you would assume the man it belonged to was single-handledly moving a house. A two-story house. Furnished.

With this effort, former major league pitcher Pete Redfern moved his right foot forward. Maybe six inches.

“Not bad, huh?” he asked.

Not bad at all, not for a guy who broke his neck late in 1983 and whose wife was told by a doctor that maybe, if he was real lucky and worked real hard, some day her husband might be able to sit up in a wheelchair without being held in by straps.

Redfern’s spinal cord was severely pinched on that day 2 1/2 years ago when he dove off a seawall in Newport Beach into water less than two feet deep. He was paralyzed from the neck down, and doctors said the damage was permanent. Six months later, sitting in a wheelchair in the Northridge Hospital Medical Center, he tried, as he had tried nearly every day since the accident, to make his foot move. And it did.

“When I first got hurt I knew it was bad,” said Redfern, who was the City Player of the Year in 1973, his senior season at Sylmar High. “I knew it was real bad. After a few months they said I might walk again someday, but it would be with a walker or a cane or something like that. But at that time I couldn’t even move my arms. The last thing I was thinking about was my legs. I only thought about being able to hug my wife and my kid.

“Then one day at Northridge I kicked my leg out. Kicked it right off the wheelchair. They told me that was a good sign. I asked if that meant I might regain movement in my arms and legs, and they said maybe, but you don’t know what the quality of movement will be.”

A year ago, Redfern had movement in his arms and hands, but more often than not the movement could not be controlled. He would send a signal to his brain to raise his right hand, but the signal would stall in the damaged spinal cord. Other times the hand would move on its own.

Redfern was learning how to stand, but even when he supported himself with his hands and arms, he needed the physical support of as many as three nurses and therapists to keep from toppling over.

In painfully slow increments, in ridiculously slow increments for a former professional athlete, feeling and movement returned to his limbs. He made steady progress last spring, but when summer rolled around, he suffered a relapse.

“I was feeling really good, coming along really well,” he said. “And then I had problems with my left leg. It became really spastic. The spasticity was getting worse and worse and I wasn’t able to do anything with it. At that point I was getting a little upset about it, and so were the doctors and therapists. I was thinking about telling them, ‘Hey, I need a break. Maybe a month or two off from therapy, time to rest.’ And they had been thinking the same thing.”

So from the first of July through the end of August, Redfern stayed at his home in Sylmar and, with continued help from nurses and therapists, exercised and stretched his limbs. For two months he did not visit the Northridge hospital.

“I was fatigued from the intense therapy and just needed a rest,” he said. “It was just like playing baseball. I had hit those dog days of August and I was tired and needed a break.”

He returned to the hospital in September, and the progress has been steady ever since.

“When I first went back, my therapist, Nora Kubota, was amazed at the improvement and the changes I had made,” he said. “The spasticity had left my leg and I was having no problems at all.”

Today, the 31-year-old has regained much of the movement and control in his arms and upper body. His legs are joining the act. He undergoes intense therapy at the Northridge facility every Monday and Wednesday, and is put through strenuous therapy at his home every Tuesday and Saturday.

Sometimes, the return of feeling to the nerves of his arms and legs can be startling, as one of nurses, Bill Pool, found out recently.

“Bill had this problem of stepping on my toes,” Redfern said. “Most quadriplegics don’t have any feeling at all in their toes, and that’s what he was used to. He stepped on my toes once and I just screamed, ‘Owwww!’ ”

Pool admits he was shocked.

“With most quadriplegics, if you accidentally step on their toes you don’t even bother to say, ‘Excuse me,’ because it doesn’t hurt them. They don’t even know you’ve stepped on their toes. But Pete does,” he said.

Pool said there is another difference between Redfern and other quadriplegic patients.

“I’ve been working with handicapped people for nearly 15 years, and I’ve never seen one of them work even half as hard at therapy as Pete does. He’s remarkable. Most of them give up, just totally give up,” he said.

Redfern said he never considered that option.

“When I played baseball, I always worked hard,” he said. “I was always at the park early, always ran five miles a day. When the accident happened, I told my wife that I was going to work just as hard at this as I did at baseball.”

By most standards, the improvement in the last 12 months has been minuscule. But by all standards used to gauge the progress of quadriplegics, Redfern’s improvement has been remarkable.

A year ago, Redfern was struggling to take a single step in the physical therapist’s pool, standing in water five feet deep and supporting barely 15% of his weight. Today, with the aid of a metal-frame walker, Redfern completes two, three, even four laps of the pool in water just four feet deep while he supports 50% of his weight.

Last spring, Redfern was introduced to the parallel bars. He was barely able to stand between them, even with the help of three people. Today, with no physical support at all, Redfern braces himself on the bars with his arms and hands and walks several feet at a time. Unquestionably, it is slow and tedious and awkward walking. But above all else, it is walking.

While the physical support that Redfern requires has diminished since the accident, the emotional support he has received from his wife, Tina, 5-year-old son, Chad, and many friends has never wavered. Redfern is extremely grateful for the medical wonders and therapy that have helped him travel this road, but he knows better than most people that love can be the most important ingredient of all.

“When something like this happens, you find out how many good people there are out there,” he said. “When I was in the hospital for the first six months I thought all the time about how people would treat me and react to me when I got out. I found out right away that there are so many good people in this world. They far outweigh the one or two who don’t give a damn.

“My friends have been unbelievable. They’re the greatest friends in the world. And Tina--well, I don’t know where I’d be right now without her. I’ve got the best wife anyone could ever find, anywhere. If it was anybody but her who was asked to endure something like this, they’d be long gone, I guarantee you.”

Redfern has received support of another kind from the Major League Baseball Players’ Assn.--cash. The players association has paid nearly all of his medical bills and will pay for all of his therapy. The group recently boosted the limit on individual medical benefits from $250,000 to $2 million because of the injuries to Redfern, former Boston Red Sox star Tony Conigliaro and last year’s tragic death of the young son of Angels pitcher John Candelaria.

With money saved from his playing days, Redfern and his wife recently purchased a hot dog and hamburger restaurant, Flookey’s, on Devonshire Boulevard in Granada Hills. Both will work in the restaurant, with Tina handling the cooking and other physical chores and Pete working on computerized payrolls and accounting. The restaurant is due to open this weekend, with a grand opening later this month that will be attended by several Dodgers, including Tom Niedenfuer, a friend of Redfern’s.

On the day Redfern was injured, his mailbox contained a letter from the Dodgers, giving him his release. He had spent two standout seasons pitching for USC and seven years with the Minnesota Twins, compiling a 42-48 major league record, but was trying to come back from a serious arm injury in 1982. He pitched for the Dodgers’ farm team in Albuquerque in 1983, but the Dodgers had no further plans for him.

In a split second, it became insignificant. He dove off the wall, shattered his neck between the fourth and fifth vertebrae, then lay face down in the shallow water, unable to move, drowning. His friends watched, thinking he was fooling around. For two full minutes they watched until, finally, Scott Swett rushed in and turned his friend over.

“It’s something I’ll certainly never forget, but something I know I can’t go back to,” Redfern said. “I can’t sit here and say ‘I wish I could relive that day.’ A lot of people in my position say that, but you don’t know. Something else might have happened to me that day. If my friend wasn’t there to pull me out of the water, I would have died right there in the water.

“God had a reason for all of this to happen. I think the reason was for me to be able to set an example and show other people that you can get through something like this with hard work. I thank God every day just for the fact that I’m still here.”

And still making progress. Redfern sets goals for himself, short-term goals that can, with enough work, be attained. He does not set unrealistic goals.

“I knew a long time ago that I’d never be the same,” he said. “I knew right away that I’d never be able to go jogging again or go run around with my son. So my goal now is just to someday be ambulatory around the house. I’d like to be able to . . . instead of having a nurse wheel me around the house . . . to be able to get into my walker and walk from the bedroom to the living room. My doctor and my therapists don’t think that’s out of the question at all.”

And this is what keeps that goal, that dream, alive:

“What I really want to do, what I would love to do--even though I know it would take the strength out of me for the whole day, that I’d be shot for the entire day--is to wake up on Christmas morning, grab the walker and walk with no help into the living room to watch Chad open his presents.

“That would be a nice Christmas present for everybody.”

As Redfern finishes the sentence, his eyes water and a tear rolls slowly down a cheek. He brushes it away and smiles.

That would be a nice Christmas present.

‘I knew a long time ago that I’d never be the same. I knew right away that I’d never be able to go jogging again or go run around with my son.’

Pete Redfern