Road Back from Accident Gives Pediatrician a New Medical Tool: Hope

By Sam Thrift Friday, February 03, 2012

Not everyone recovers. Some wounds will never heal. Knowing this, how can a doctor promise a patient that everything will be all right, when the promise is best made with their fingers crossed behind their backs?

Giving patients hope when faced with impossible odds is a concept Dr. Dan Via believes most people in his profession avoid. But since the tables turned last September, when the Williamsburg pediatrician found himself sprawled on a North Carolina beach, unable to move any part of his body after a rough wave sucked him under and spit him out, he better understood how hope can be just as important as any medicine.

The 52-year-old doctor was on a family vacation with his wife and son in the Outer Banks on Labor Day weekend when the accident happened. He was swimming in the surf of a wave on his boogie board when he was dragged under the shallow water, hyperextending his neck and injuring his spine. Although conscious and able to speak, the doctor was stuck in the water, unable to move any part of his body. Via still doesn’t know the names of the strangers who pulled him out of the water, saving his life.

The emergency crews got the doctor to a hospital in Duck, North Carolina, where he was then taken by helicopter to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.  Via had surgery that night and spent three days in the intensive care unit.

“At that point I was completely paralyzed,” Via said. “I couldn’t move my hands, arms, legs, anything. I wasn’t sure at that point if it was permanent and no one at that point could tell me if I could get better.”

Via had disrupted ligaments and ruptured a disc in his spine. The severity of his injury and bruising of his spinal cord left physicians unsure if Via would return to the life he had before the accident.

“I think doctors sometimes have this idea that giving people false hope can cause more harm than help,” Via said. “But when several nurses spoke to me, made me feel like things weren’t hopeless and that I would pull out of this, it did help me believe I could be normal again.”

Within the first 10 days at the rehabilitation unit at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center the doctor was able to move his fingers and toes a few millimeters. After three weeks, Via was able to feed himself with the help of a special splint contraption.

“It sounds depressing, but when you go from not being able to feed yourself to eating on your own, it’s a big improvement,” he said.

Three and a half months and two other rehabilitation centers later Via went from not being able to move to walking with a walker. Nearly two weeks ago, five months after the accident and with the assistance of a cane, Via walked back into work at Sentara Pediatric Physicians in Williamsburg.

“There are a handful of things I am are aware of in the gap between where I am now and where I was before I was injured,” Via said. “Not that I think that people significantly change who they are because of an injury, but I think I have become more sympathetic to patients because I’ve been on the other side of experience.”

Via said he is thankful for the people who have helped him throughout his recovery and that the initial support given by doctors, nurses and his family did help him on his road back to normal.