Part I: Hunting for a miracle, grasping at a chance

It was only a chair, but it had become his purgatory.

Each day that John Pou spent in the wheelchair, his spirit seemed to die a little more. It was a perpetual reminder of the calamity that had brought him and Marci, even the kids, to this place.

The chair stood for all that was lost: A promising career as a policeman, a vigorous life spent in karate classes and fishing the lakes of his beloved North Carolina, future plans conjured when things were perfect — plans that seemed irrelevant and impossible now.

Their home, too, the dream house John had worked on with his own hands, felt like a taunting monument to his inadequacies: The pool where he could no longer swim or play chicken with Chase and Kacie, the garden he could no longer tend, the front door he couldn't enter without a makeshift ramp for his wheelchair.

That chair, affixed to him like an unwanted limb.

It had been eight months since John shattered his C-5 vertebra diving over a wave during a family vacation. Eight months spent in either a hospital bed or that detestable chair.