Hayden Days Grand Marshal Embodies Hope

Hazel Grace Martin considered dying a year ago as she waited with a broken neck for rescuers. The car was crunched around her. Paralysis seemed insurmountable, death an enticing escape.

Then she heard her 40-year-old nephew scream, “You will live.” She knew she had to, regardless of the price.

At 59, Hazel Grace entered the toughest battle of her life. At 60, she’s emerging from it the victor - and that’s why she’s the grand marshal in the Hayden Days parade on Saturday.

“I don’t know why in the world they chose me,” she says, as flustered as she is pleased. “I could name 10 or 12 other people more deserving.”

She means it, that part about the other people. But she knows why she’s grand marshal. The metal crutches propped next to her on the couch are the key.

Hazel Grace learned to walk again this year. No one told her she wouldn’t, but she knew her chances were slim after she felt her neck snap in the car crash in West Virginia a year ago.

“She was so excited to go on that trip,” says Hazel Grace’s daughter, Karen Loertcher.

Hazel Grace and Frank Martin drove to West Virginia in June 1996 to reunite with Hazel’s family. It was their first vacation in umpteen years. They’d had eight kids to raise and businesses to run.

The crash happened in West Virginia as Hazel Grace and her sister waited in their car behind a car trying to turn left. A Chevy Blazer rear-ended them at 55 mph, bounced and hit them again.

Hazel Grace had just released her seat belt so she could adjust her seat. The impact thrust her into the roof.

“I felt my feelings draining out of me from my chest down,” she says. “I remember wiggling my toes and thinking I’ll never wiggle them again.”

She stayed conscious and told rescuers not to move her because her neck was broken.

Her family arranged for Hazel Grace to see the surgeon who’d worked on actor Christopher Reeve’s spine. The surgeon found a thread of her spinal column still connected and rebuilt from there, using bone from her hip, metal plates and screws.

She could wiggle the middle toes of her left foot but felt nothing. Frank came back to the hospital from dinner one day to find an emergency crew trying to save his wife’s life. Hazel Grace had nearly strangled on phlegm she couldn’t feel and had no muscles to eject.

“It’s the worst thing in the world to hear ‘Code Blue’ and your room number,” she says.

Months of recovery at the University of Virginia segued into months of rehabilitation and therapy at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane.

She hadn’t let her children visit her in Virginia, knowing she needed all her energy to heal.

“That was agonizing for us,” Karen says. “She said later she didn’t want any of us to live with the memory of what she looked like.”

But Hazel Grace welcomed them and their support in Spokane. She was ready for her comeback and to disprove doctors’ descriptions of her as quadriplegic.

“I knew if I could keep myself alive, I could do anything,” she says. She apologizes to Frank for the tears that spring to her eyes, afraid they’ll worry him because she’s struggled for a year not to cry.

Hazel Grace did everything her therapists suggested. She’s terrified of water, but allowed them to lower her into a pool. That’s where she first stood and walked.

She left the hospital last September in a wheelchair but could take steps with a walker. Now, she can raise herself from sitting to standing, walk with a cane, roll over and bend.

She has no doubt that she’ll walk someday without a cane.

“My mother never faltered,” says Karen, who’s 37. “She’s strong, determined and full of life. I always tell myself that when I grow up I want to be just like her.”

Hazel Grace blushes and talks about the people who supported and prayed for her. They brought out the best in her.

“I found I had an inner strength I didn’t know I had,” she says. “And I didn’t give up. If you don’t have hope, you have nothing.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo