The Mountaineer

Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Feature

Media Credit: Mo Torres Paul Chiou, 23, heads to his business class on March 26.

It was homecoming night and two months before his 16th birthday when an unexpected incident would change his life forever.
A car struck Paul Chiou, a sophomore in high school, while riding his bike to church where he instantaneously flew a few feet and slammed on top of the asphalt. Chiou was rushed to the LAC+USC Medical Center by helicopter where he was in a coma for a week.
He woke up connected to an assortment of tubes and hooked up to a ventilator. He soon found out that he severely broke his cervical spinal cord and has been a quadriplegic for more than seven years. His condition is mirrored to the late actor Christopher Reeve, who played Clark Kent in the 1980s "Superman" movies.
Despite Chiou's inability to move any part of his body from the shoulders down due to his loss of feeling from the forceful impact, he does not want that to affect his ability to learn, he said.
"I am very grateful because I am better off than other quadriplegics," Chiou said. "I heard a lot of quads say their family can't take care of them so they take them to a nursing home."
Chiou is now 23 and can always be seen on campus accompanied by a family member. He navigates throughout school with the help of his chin controlling his wheelchair's motion. However, adapting to this new lifestyle was not an easy ride.
A third of his day is wasted because of medical procedures, Chiou said. He also does these ranges of motion to maintain his muscles, which his grandmother does at least every hour. He is required to swallow 10 pills a day on average. At home he sleeps on a hospital bed because it moves up and down and contains a special air mattress.
He cannot sleep well at night because if he stays in a position for a long time then his skin will turn crimson, then black as a result of his circulation being cut off. It takes Chiou 45 minutes to get dressed
"Before I used to pop a shirt on," he said. "But now one person has to hold my body and another person has to hold my arm. I am completely dependent."
After he recovered from the accident seven years ago, he returned to Rowland High School a year later.
His best friend of 10 years, Jack Lee, who is also 23, recalled seeing him for the first time.
"It was weird to see him," Lee said. "You need to get used to it. It was weird to say hi because he is handicapped. My friends would ask, 'What happened'… I couldn't believe it."

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