- My mom had passed away in Cuba when I was five.
My dad was one of they very fortunate
citizens to win a Visa lottery, to leave Cuba.
And we came to the United States
to pursue the American Dream.
That dream of being a pilot,
of having flown out of that airplane
on October 6, 1997, out of Cuba to Miami.
That dream had stayed in my mind ever since.
Every school that I went to I excelled.
And I tried to be number one, and the best of the best.
I leaned towards aerospace and aviation.
But in the back of my mind I knew I wanted
to fly the meanest and baddest, fastest planes in the world.
I initially wanted to go to the Air Force.
And have a significant impact
through service to this country.
For having allowed us to come here to have opportunities
which we would never would of had to,
not even to this day in Cuba.
I decided to go to both Georgia State University
and Georgia Tech.
I was in the top five percent.
For Valentine's Day 2012 only five
of us were selected for pilot slots.
Oh, man.
The accident.
I don't remember much,
going home on a motorcycle just like I did everyday.
700 feet from being in my neighborhood.
A lady in a minivan ran the light and I was T-boned
at 50 mph as I was going through an intersection.
That, that put everything on pause.
My brain, my lungs, my heart, everything just shut off.
I died at the scene for 15 minutes.
I fractured my T-4, T-5 vertebrae,
resulting in a spinal cord injury.
An injury of the central nervous system of the body.
A peripheral nerve injury of the right arm.
So, here I am.
I wake up three months later.
It didn't kill my dreams.
It didn't kill me.
Your body could be paralyzed, and my body was.
As paralyzed as it could be.
But my mind wasn't paralyzed.
I did not see myself as someone with a disability.
I did not feel disabled.
I woke up as a fighter pilot.
And I said okay, let's assess this situation.
Let's observe, orient, decide, and act.
I did investigations.
I got all the 911 phone calls on a CD.
I listened to them all.
I got the police report.
I contacted one by one every witness that saw the accident.
I went to every doctor and I read every medical report.
I went to every Mayo Clinic.
I traveled all the US.
Went to conferences, tried to understand the human body.
What the central nervous system is.
How come humans have not walked again after
complete spinal cord injuries.
In this lifetime and history of the human race.
I spoke with the doctor and he
told me a very familiar number.
You have one percent chance of ever walking again.
One percent again and one percent of leaving Cuba,
one percent of being a pilot, one percent of walking again.
I quickly found out that I only had two doors.
One door is be depressed, don't continue my career,
don't finish my degree.
Or I could go with door number two, which was
put on my pants and try to figure out a way forward.
This Master's of Bio-Medical Innovation Development
at Georgia Tech is one of a kind.
Now I am the executive director of
Henry Neural Recovery Center, here in Atlanta.
That is focused on changing the standard of care
for spinal cord injury patients.
We are going after the long term solution.
We don't want to improve the daily lives of these people,
we want to get them out of wheelchairs.
I tell everybody, this right here is my laboratory.
My body right here.
And everything that I implement and the
protocols that I create, I implement them on myself first.
I'm now gaining sensation.
I'm walking on a Loco mat,
a robotic assisted locomotor machine.
Four hours a day, five days a week.
That's 20 hours a week of walking.
And that translates to 30 miles a week.
And that's 100% weight bearing,
no assistance from the device,
even though I have a harness on just for safety.
What I have seen is unbelievable.
I want to focus the next 10 years to get hundreds,
if not thousands of people out of wheelchairs.
I've almost died six times.
One time I was clinically dead.
So, facing obstacle is something I'm not afraid of.
I want to transform peoples qualities of lives.
(piano music)