Brandin Spare, 17, leans back in his wheelchair while talking about his life as a paraplegic on Friday afternoon at his home in Centralia. On Nov. 20, 2014, Spare, a senior at Centralia High School, was involved in a rollover accident on Reynolds Road. His 1983 Dodge pick up rolled over twice into a ditch alongside the 600 block of Reynolds Road. He was ejected from the car and broke multiple vertebrae in his back.
Brandin Spare, 17, sits in his wheelchair while talking about his life as a paraplegic on Friday afternoon at his home in Centralia. On Nov. 20, 2014, Spare, a senior at Centralia High School, was involved in a rollover accident on Reynolds Road. His 1983 Dodge pick up rolled over twice into a ditch alongside the 600 block of Reynolds Road. He was ejected from the car and broke multiple vertebrae in his back.
Brandin Spare, 17, sits in his wheelchair while talking about his life as a paraplegic on Friday afternoon at his home in Centralia. On Nov. 20, 2014, Spare, a senior at Centralia High School, was involved in a rollover accident on Reynolds Road. His 1983 Dodge pick up rolled over twice into a ditch alongside the 600 block of Reynolds Road. He was ejected from the car and broke multiple vertebrae in his back.
Brandin Spare holds onto the rim of his wheelchair while sitting in his living room on Friday afternoon in Centralia.
Brandin Spare, 17, lifts himself from the seat of his wheelchair while sitting in the living room of his Centralia home on Friday afternoon.
Brandin Spare, 17, shares a laugh with his father, Smokey, and his mother, Jeanie, while sitting on the wheelchair ramp his Smokey built outside their Centralia home on Friday afternoon.
Brandin Spare, 17, shows a picture of the X-ray of the broken vertebrae in his back after a rollover accident ejected him from his pickup truck last November.
Becoming paraplegic doesn’t seem to have slowed Brandin Spare down.
If anything, it has given him new goals to work toward, including the Paralympics.
While a broken back has dashed the 17-year-old Centralia High School student’s dreams of winning medals in snowboard competitions, he hast plans to take up sit skiing and compete in the 2018 Winter Paralympics.
“That’s been my dream, snowboarding, just to make it somewhere in snowboarding, and, if I can’t do that, I might as well do it sit skiing, right?” Spare said during an interview with The Chronicle Friday.
He said employees with the recreational department at Seattle Children’s Hospital told him it’s not unreasonable for him to train to compete in the Paralympics in three years, and they gave him contact information for coaches.
Before his accident in November of last year, the high school senior said his life “revolved around the weight room.”
“My junior year I was All-American and All-State in weightlifting for all my power lifts,” he said.
He’s counting down the days until he can do more bicep curls at the gym. Six weeks to go.
He credits his physical fitness as one of the reasons for his quick recovery. He said his doctors and caretakers were impressed with his recovery rate and positive attitude after a Nov. 20, 2014 single-vehicle rollover accident left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Spare was driving to Centralia High School when he tried to pass a car and things went terribly wrong.
The impact from hitting the ditch off of Reynolds Avenue in Centralia threw Spare, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, from his pickup.
He couldn’t feel his legs.
A police officer arrived at the scene and kept him calm.
Spare said he kept repeating that he was a football player, a weightlifter, a snowboarder.
But, as an athlete, he knew he had to try to control his shock.
The ambulance came. As first responders transferred him to a backboard, pain shot through his femurs.
“I don’t have words to describe the amount of pain that it was,” Spare said.
He felt every bump in the road during the ride to Providence Centralia Hospital.
From there, it was a 20-minute helicopter ride with his mom to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
His dad, who was in Vancouver at the time of the accident, met them at the hospital.
Surgeons went to work right away and put eight screws and two rods in his spine. Basically, his spine had lifted up, shifted and came back down, putting the two separated vertebrae side-by-side, he explained.
Once he came to, he said he accepted the situation and that he would have to adapt.
“To be positive was really easy, if you think about it,” he said. “To be negative, depressed or anything throughout your hospital stay is just going to make your hospital stay seem like 10 times longer.”
During his four-day stay at Harborview, he kept his doctors entertained with saracastic comments.
“They’d say, ‘Hey, what’s your pain on a scale of one to 10?’ I was like, ‘Eight or nine.’” Spare said. “And then I’d press my button with the pain meds and say seven.”
From Harborview, he was transferred to Seattle Children’s and began therapy the next day.
Before returning home, he had to learn how to transfer himself, get up and down curbs and even do wheelies. But he already had some practice with that from goofing around in his grandma’s wheelchair.
While he lost 30 pounds during his hospital stay — all muscle — he said he didn’t lose much upper body strength, making transferring from his bed and getting around easier.
He returned home on Dec. 19, 2014.
On Friday, when Chronicle reporters visited Spare at his family’s home in Centralia, his dad, who is a contractor, was working on the step portion of the wheelchair ramp to the home. The ramp part for his son had to be completed before he could return home.
Spare, who went back to school Wednesday, said he will graduate on time.
He said when he went back, other students who he didn’t know asked him stupid questions like, “Are you Brandin?”
“Let’s be real. I’m the only paraplegic in our entire school,” he said.
He said he just blows them off because it’s better than what he wants to say to them.
Other teens have told him, “Get better soon.”
“This is me,” he said. “I’m better.”
Costs for the ramp, a bathroom remodel and medical bills have made money a “little tight,” he said. Insurance is paying some medical expenses as well as his $4,000 to $5,000 wheelchair that will replace his loaner chair.
The Spares have received some donations, and his two sisters’ have planned a baked goods, craft and rummage sale for Jan. 17 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Centralia Eagles.
“Anything helps at this point,” he said. “It’s an expensive injury.”
It was an injury that Spare said resulted in a perfect scenario that included hitting the ditch at the right angle, the height of his truck and his decision to pass a car. He’s considered all the “what ifs,” but doesn’t dwell on them.
“My mentality, I guess, is just to kind of brush it off,” he said. “It happened. Ifs don’t change it.”
And it hasn’t change him. He’s still just as loud and still able to push his buddies around, he said.
“It hasn’t changed me and my personality,” he said. “… I broke my back, not my head.”
