Issue date: 5/13/08 Section: ARTS & LIFE

Trevor Shockley, a NT master's student, does not hold regret nor grudges despite an accident which left him with a traumatic brain injury.

Shockley was training to race in the MS 150, a 182-mile, two-day cycling tour from Houston to Austin, organized by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, when an accident happened.

On Feb. 1, 1995 Shockley, a senior at Texas A&M University, was hit by a bus while riding his bike on the west side of the College Station campus.

"I went underneath the 18-ton bus and it ran over both my legs, crushed my right rib cage, broke my jaw and smashed my helmet," Shockley said.

He went into a 10-week coma and doctors gave his father no hope that he would ever regain consciousness or even live.

"The first few days were critical with him having so much pressure on his brain," said Joe Shockley, his father. "If the doctors couldn't relieve the pressure, he would go brain dead."

Joe Shockley stayed by his side everyday he was in the coma. He joined the Dramatic Brain Injury Advisory Council to learn about and advocate for individuals who had the same injury as his son.

"Everything I read while he was in a coma pointed to things not being good for him once he woke up," he said. "But with each step of recovery, he did better than expected."

He said the recovery process was emotional for the first six weeks. It was one life-threatening scare after another that kept Trevor Shockley in and out of intensive care.

"I would get down but I had to get back up and fight for Trevor's sake," Joe Shockley said. "I had to try even harder, but it was anything special on my part--he's my son."

Trevor Shockley spent more than five months at The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research in Houston, and nine months at the Transitional Learning Community in Galveston. Later he began working with a physical therapist at Access Physical Therapy in Conroe who helped him go from a wheelchair, to forearm canes, to a single point cane, to finally walking independently.

At first, he said he was in such bad shape that he didn't even give the MS 150 any thought, but in 1999 he began training with his therapist Anne Campbell. In 2000, he and Campbell finished the race.

Campbell said when Trevor Shockley first came to therapy he couldn't even talk. Then after four years of slowly progressing, he asked her to begin training for the MS 150.

"I knew I could not tell him no. No is not a part of his vocabulary," Campbell said. "I've never met anyone with such dogged motivation."

Continued...

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