Ready, Willing and Able

Jeremy Newman loved the free-fall rush of a skydive, the vivid combination of risk, wind and sunshine. The desert below was so different from his native New York. He had come almost every weekend since February, sometimes doing 15 jumps a day.

The personal trainer had one of those bodies that never fails its owner.

This time, however, his parachute did. A desert dust devil came up behind him and destroyed his parachute. With that, Jeremy Newman dropped to the earth, falling 1,200 feet.

He wasn’t supposed to live. He did.

He wasn’t supposed to walk. Today, he is walking an exhaustive two hours a day with a walker. The rest of the day he’s in a wheelchair, but the Brentwood trainer is determined that won’t last for long.

All those years of training his body are paying off, but he has had to endure spiritual and personal growth to help him on a long, sometimes intensely painful journey to recovery. In so many ways, he is already a winner.

His life has become one of friendship, family, incredible survival and sheer luck. And although he is still recovering, Newman is eager to begin paying back a community that has generously helped him through his ordeal.

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On May 24, Newman prepared to do a synchronized jump with one partner. He remembers taking the jump above Lake Elsinore. He remembers the routine, pulling his chute and watching his partner float ahead safely.

He doesn’t remember his fall except for “this enormous sense of panic.”

The first help came as Newman was falling. A man standing outside his house saw the parachute fail and yelled inside to his wife, who phoned 911 before Newman hit the ground.

He was quickly helicoptered to Riverside Memorial Hospital, where doctors discovered a torn aorta (three of four chambers in the heart had been torn), collapsed lungs, compound fracture of the left femur, a spinal cord injury and severe head trauma.

Newman never asked how long he was in a coma. “It wasn’t something that I really cared to find out.”

Newman is a natural athlete, a personal trainer for 13 years, a triathlete, a marathon runner, a childhood gymnast, a college rower. But following his injury, he “could not even sit up straight at 90 degrees. . . . I would scream.”

In typical fashion, Newman tells the story in rapid succession, about the 2 1/2 months he spent at Daniel Freeman Hospital, about the anger, frustration and rage he was holding in. “Daniel Freeman was absolutely integral to my entire rehabilitation. I owe them my sanity.”

And then there is Newman’s boss of the last two years, Lance Fessler, owner of Independent Fitness Consultants in Sherman Oaks, who kept him employed during his hospitalization and never questioned that a wheelchair would impede a personal trainer.

Fessler was working that Memorial Day weekend when he got the call. He and his wife, Barbara, quickly drove to Riverside, where they saw a swollen and comatose Newman. “I absolutely did not expect him to survive,” Fessler said.

Fessler, a physical therapist, can read medical charts. He called the doctors on his staff and everyone agreed: “There is really not any reason why he should be alive. The amount of damage that occurred from the fall was unbelievable.”

Newman’s mother, both sisters and brother-in-law flew from Maine, Chicago and North Carolina and stayed for two months. “They came out with just their handbags,” said Fessler.

Fessler and his staff opened up their homes to the four, hosting them for up to two weeks at a time and buying dinners almost every night.

The other trainers at IFC took on Newman’s clients and Fessler continued to pay him, saying: “Even though he wasn’t physically able, at least financially he wasn’t going to be bankrupt.”

And, IFC was about to open another facility in West Los Angeles. “During the development, I knew he was going to be in a wheelchair, we made it wheelchair-accessible. He’s that much of an asset,” Fessler said.

On Aug. 1, Newman was released from the hospital. On Aug. 4, he returned to work.

But this is not a Hollywood ending, there is still much work to be done. Newman does physical therapy three times a week and, even for him, it’s exhausting. His spinal cord injury is a T-10--not a sever, but one that will require an enormous amount of work to recover.

He suffered short-term memory loss, though his brain is finally beginning to compensate for it. In the meantime, “I write everything down. Everything that I don’t write down, typically I forget.”

The damage to his body affected him emotionally. “A lot of my wit and personality is coming back. I just felt like there was a cloud under my head.”

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Newman moved to Los Angeles three years ago because he couldn’t stand New York City weather or attitude. But now he finds himself unable to even stroll his neighborhood. “Every sidewalk in Los Angeles is pitched,” he said.

Soon after the accident, his sister Caitlin Martin and her boyfriend, Jeff Dorigan, moved from Chicago into Newman’s Brentwood home. A few weeks ago, they moved a mile away, confident that he’s able to live alone again.

“He’s going through a lot of trial and tribulation right now,” Fessler said.

Still, every day Newman comes to work and puts on what Fessler calls “his game face.”

Newman has changed in other fundamental ways not apparent at the gym. His clients will tell you about the various pre-accident girlfriends who showed up at the hospital unaware of the others. Newman says he has grown up and wants to wait for real love and commitment.

Born into Judaism, he has always been tepid about religion. These Sundays, he alternates among three churches, including a Pentecostal service--not to pray, but to celebrate life in a pure, free-for-all way.

His exuberance is apparent in a recent session with a client, Madeleine Colcord of Studio City, whom he spotted as she worked out at a machine. “Assistance?” he teased. “I’m giving you resistance, not assistance.”

Colcord joked that she has to be more cautious in complaints, no longer telling him, “I’m not going to be able to walk tomorrow.”

Newman laughed at this attempt at sensitivity. Colcord is part of his family of clients who hold various fund-raisers to chip away at his enormous medical debt.

A client before the accident, she said Newman is harder on her now. “At the same time, he’s more sympathetic,” she said.

Newman says the accident has given him an empathy for others’ pain, as well as a sense of clarity about what he wants in his life.

Newman, who turned 30 last week, dropped out of a premedical program at Columbia University in his senior year because he had become disenchanted with Western medicine. Today, he realizes, Western medicine saved his life. He wants to help people who face similar challenges to his own.

“The reason I love doing what I do is that I love playing a part in helping someone achieve their goals. They become very happy,” he said. “That’s a wonderful feeling to me, especially after they’ve achieved what they want.”

He has a chance to do this at IFC, which offers rehabilitation and medical strengthening. Fessler said the gym’s medical clients include not just those with sports injuries, but transplant patients who need pre-operation strengthening.

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And now, here is the Hollywood ending:

Newman is making the rounds, revisiting his accident.

He went back to Daniel Freeman to sit alone in his hospital room.

And he returned to the accident site.

Parachuting isn’t part of his future. “I don’t think I want to risk me being able to walk again, ever again.” He just wanted to show his skydiving friends he was OK.

“There was a part of me that wanted to know if I’m afraid of flying.” He said he had been avoiding making airline reservations to see his family back East.

But at the accident site, his friends got him in the plane.

“I watched everybody get off the plane. It was the coolest thing.”

As they jumped, everyone jumped backward and gave him a thumbs up--except for one jumper, who is also a client.

She did a reverse exit and waved to him.