Diving into the waters of Miami Beach was something I had done many times before. I was familiar with the ocean and its power, but I wasn’t prepared for how my dive on the morning of February 6, 2010, would radically change my life.
I was in Miami to attend the Super Bowl with my cousin, and we decided to hit the beach the day before the game. While diving into the choppy waves, I misjudged my landing spot and struck a hidden sandbar, breaking my neck and bruising the C5 and C6 vertebrae in my spine. It was immediately clear that this was a devastatingly serious injury. I was in the water — paralyzed — and unable to resurface on my own.
Thankfully, my cousin, Bernie, pulled me to safety. He saved my life that day, but I knew things would never be the same.
This is a club no one wants to belong to, and I soon discovered I had a long journey ahead of me, a road filled with potholes brought about by depression, frustration, financial stress and painful physical rehabilitation.
There were dark days — even moments when I considered not continuing with life. My depression led me to have a lot of self-doubt. I believed I would never find someone to love me or that I would get married, and I knew I would never have children. I went from feeling like I had it made to feeling completely hopeless because I was in a wheelchair. However, I focused hard, working on my body and my mind.
Then I found Karen — a high school classmate I had always had a crush on — on Facebook. I was finally in a place where I had the courage to contact her. We rekindled our friendship, which eventually blossomed into romance. In 2017, we married.
I entered married life with the assumption that children were out of the question. Even though I had worked hard to strengthen my body and make strides not even my doctors had thought to be possible, I couldn’t see how Karen and I could have our own biological children.
But finding Dr. Jesse Mills at the Men’s Clinic at UCLA changed our story. He told us that there was no reason someone with a spinal cord injury couldn’t father a child, as long as doctors were able to successfully retrieve sperm to perform in vitro fertilization (IVF). Through a process called percutaneous epididymal sperm aspiration, he was able to retrieve viable sperm directly from my testes.
Though retrieval of the sperm was possible, the IVF process was challenging. It took Karen and me six attempts over two years, and our faith was tested before we finally heard those magic words: “You’re pregnant!”
In the Spring of 2023, we welcomed Payton to our family. She is truly a miracle baby. After suffering an injury that had taken so much from me, I never imagined I would be a father. I don’t take it for granted — not one day.
Now I am blessed with a beautiful, loving family. I also am blessed with a greater purpose. Not long after my injury, my mother — who refused to even accept the word “paralyzed” as it applied to me — and I established a non-profit, Walking With Anthony, to support and help others who have suffered devastating spinal cord injuries. It is our mission to educate and raise awareness about the challenges imposed by spinal cord injury and the need to increase the quality of life for all who suffer from it, expand spinal cord injury rehab centers to ensure all who can benefit from dedicated facilities and communities have access to them and provide financial assistance to individuals with spinal cord injuries to help meet the often suffocating, even impossible demands of paying for essential treatment that is not covered by standard insurance. To date, we have been able to help more than 100 people with spinal cord injuries to restart their lives.
For them — as I discovered for myself — the greatest therapy can be hope.
Anthony Purcell is an executive in the financial services industry in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
For information about surgical treatments at the Men’s Clinic at UCLA, go here.
For information about Walking With Anthony, go here.
