Book Excerpt

In a manner of seconds, two lives can be changed forever.

Suzy Parker and her husband, Ralph Hager, were a week away from retiring to Crested Butte, Colorado. The one-time English teacher, adventure travel tour guide and marketing director was looking forward to the change—she and Ralph would hike, bike, and ski to their hearts’ content. She wasn’t prepared to have their future yanked out from under them in an instant.

It was a beautiful April day in 1994 when Ralph left for his regular 60-mile bicycle-training ride near their home in Oakland. At the time, Ralph was 55 (a decade older than Suzy), a ruggedly active, recently retired physicist from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He reveled in the tortuous climb up to Grizzly Peak and exhilarated in the ride down. As he turned onto Claremont Avenue, the front tire blew, and suddenly body and bicycle tumbled after one another. When he awoke, he was a quadriplegic.