On a random Saturday morning in 2000, Jim Beckley was sitting down with his wife Ellen discussing how exhausted he had been at his engineer job.
He had been working close to 80 hours a week and this was his first Saturday in months that he had off. Jim told his wife, “Honey, I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”
Little did Jim and Ellen know that in the next six hours Jim would more than slow down, his life as he knew it would come to a screeching halt.
Four years ago, when Ellen and Jim lived in Michigan, they were driving down the road in their truck when they were suddenly hit head-on by another vehicle with two teenage boys in the car. The accident paralyzed Jim from the neck down, killed one of the teenage boys and left the other practically brain dead. Ellen, inexplicably, walked away without any serious injuries.
“I was a stay-at-home mom with six kids and he was an engineer, and all the sudden,” she snaps her fingers, “it was all taken away from us.”
Since Jim’s spinal cord was not severed, he did get some movement back in his arms, but very little.
A year after the accident, the Beckleys moved from Michigan to Tiffin, and Jim started taking some autocad classes at Terra Community College.
“When you’re a quadriplegic like I am, you have nothing but time on your hands,” said Jim. “You start feeling down a lot and you have a lot of time to think about your life, so I decided to go to school so that I could at least keep my mind sharp.”
Jim then had his degree altered a bit to meet his handicap from autocad to a robotics/autocad tech studies degree.
He has undergone two major surgeries at Cleveland Metro Hospital in the past two years, both of which have given him a lot more movement than he’s had since the accident.
The first surgery was a tendon transfer where Jim said his doctor took his deltoid muscle and stretched it around to triceps since he no longer had tricep muscles. He can now stretch his arms out to his sides, while before he could only make small movements.
The second surgery was a lot more innovative. Jim was selected as one of only 300 people in the world to have a free hand system implanted in his chest. The free hand system, which Jim said Christopher Reeve had implanted to get off a Ventilator, allows Jim to have movement in his left fingers. The surgery consisted of weaving eight electrical wires down the muscles of his left arm to his hand so that when Jim touches a button on his wheelchair, he is able to open and close his hand.
“I can hold a cup now and brush my own teeth, which I wasn’t able to do before,” he said. “It just locks whatever someone places in my hand in place by a push of a button, but someone still has to put it in my hand first.”
With the advanced mobility gained through the surgeries and a new robotics program at Terra Community College, Jim has been able to excel in his abilities as a student. He also is able to write his reports and do his homework with voice activated software that he got at Staples.
Tom Kissell, dean of engineering and industrial technologies at Terra, said the new program allows Jim to work on things as if he had no handicap at all, and in turn it has given him hope.
“What teachers do is provide hope for students, and in Jim’s case it’s especially true,” he said. “Here we have this guy who had an excellent job and career taken away from him in a matter of seconds. He didn’t think he had hope when he started here and we were able to give him back some hope when we were able to hook up the Asea Brown Bovari software to the robots.”
Not only does Jim have hope, but he’s learned that his previous experience in the field has helped others — especially his lab partner David Bledsoe.
“We work so well together,” Jim said of David. “We have relied on each other over the past year because he has been my hands and I’ve helped him better understand how things will apply once he gets out of school. I’ve also learned from him as well.”
Kissell said Terra is currently looking at ways to set up a small classroom next year to let Jim teach since he will be graduating in the spring.
“We want to tap his knowledge and help him do some teaching if it works out for him physically,” he said.
But Jim has been teaching, with his wife Ellen — just not robotics.
Since the accident, Jim and Ellen have been speaking to children at area high schools about the dangers of not being a responsible driver. The two are also members of the Northwest Ohio National Spinal Cord Injury Association.
“It’s a lifeline,” said Ellen. “Once something like this happens in your life, you learn a new language and you need to be around others who also speak the same language as you: wheelchairs, pressure sores and catheters.”
Regardless of life’s setbacks, Jim sees this whole experience as his second chance in life.
“I feel like God gave me a second chance,” he said. “Before I was a workaholic and I never got a chance to see my older three children grow up. Now I’m home every day with my three youngest and it’s almost as if God gave me a second chance to be a dad.”
By MEGAN BATTISTA
Staff writer
