44 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
sit up. He had no control over his breathing, which soon
grew labored. Only his eyes heeded his commands. Am I
going to suffocate? he asked himself. Am I going to die slowly?
Just before paramedics arrived, Bradley was finally
able to shrug his shoulders, a minuscule motion that he
remembers feeling monumental amid the panic. As EMTs
loaded him onto a spine board, one worried aloud that
Bradley wouldn’t fit into the ambulance, but ultimately
they finagled the doors shut.
Carrie collected her husband’s bike and rushed to the
hospital, fretting about his fate—and about what might
befall her family. Shawn is largely estranged from his first
wife and their six children, but he has adopted Carrie’s
three kids. And since they married in 2017 he has been a
stable force in four lives previously beset by chaos. Carrie
says she was mistreated by her last partner, and she worked
odd jobs to keep her children enrolled in sports. Given
those trials, her friends tended to distrust suitors—until
Bradley’s steady, commanding presence won both them and
her children over. (Bradley is no stranger to delicate situa-
tions; after the NBA, he spent a decade as a vice principal
and athletic director at a Utah school for at-risk teens.)
When Max, now 14, hid in a tree after his father showed
up unexpectedly at a soccer tournament, Shawn was able
to reach up and coax him down. Dubbie, 18, once crawled
out of his bedroom window, despondent, and sat on the
roof. Bradley clambered out to sit and talk with him. Haylie,
20, had long been resentful of men after watching what
her mother had endured, so Carrie was stunned to hear her
talking to Shawn on the couch for two hours one evening.
Now, though, the man those kids had learned to lean
on was being wheeled away into surgery after an MRI
revealed that a pair of vertebrae in his neck had shifted,
pinching his spinal cord. Waiting outside the operating
room, Carrie didn’t know what version of the man she had
fallen in love with would emerge—or how much of her
family’s precious new stability would survive the crash.B
RADLEY SPENT THE next three weeks in the ICU
at St. George Regional Hospital, in a sedative-induced
fog, with a breathing tube down his throat. At one point he
moved an arm and pointed his fingers in Carrie’s direction.
No one in t hat room cou ld decipher what he was t r y ing to
say, but in his mind, over and over, he muttered, I love you.
A surgeon had by then inspected Bradley’s spinal cord
and fused damaged vertebrae in the base of his neck,
diagnosing him as a C6 quadriplegic. Meaning: a loss of
sensation and function from the top of his rib cage down,
and the expectation that his triceps, and the muscles in
his hands and forearms, would have little to no function,
though the extent differs from case to case. Typically,
people with this diagnosis will maintain control of their
shoulders and biceps.
With Bradley’s type of spinal cord injury comes a higher
risk for cardiovascular disease, pneumonia, fatal blood clots,
gastrointestinal issues, chronic pain and pressure ulcers,from the many hours he’ll spend moored to beds and chairs.
Based on this alone, his life expectancy would be roughly
three-quarters that of an otherwise healthy man his age. For
Bradley, though, many of these concerns are exacerbated by
his extreme height, which studies have shown to shorten
lifespan and increase risk for cardiovascular issues. “His
size adds a bigger complexity,” says Philip Lamoreaux,
Bradley’s occupational therapist at St. George. And it is going
to “affect his ability to participate in life as he gets older.”After three weeks in the ICU, Bradley moved to an inpa-
tient neurological rehab wing, where a team of physical and
occupational therapists, nurses and dietitians confronted a
unique challenge. That group’s leader, Dr. Bryndon Hatch,
dug through research and consulted with peers around the
country, but he found no road map for managing quad-
riplegia at such a scale. “Usually, we do our first day of
evaluation and then treatment after that,” Hatch says. “For
him, it was several days for evaluation, and going back to
the drawing board on everything.”
Hatch and his team had to recalibrate their processes—
and their equipment. Their patient couldn’t fit in his hospital
shower, so he had to be transferred to a separate room to be
bathed. Given his sheer girth—he’s now up to 350 pounds;
each leg, alone, weighs more than Carrie—the staff had to
learn how to transfer him among beds, chairs and exam
tables. They reconfigured an ultrasound to account for theCO
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Every menial task is now a chore—and Carrie
has helped find creative solutions. She’s not
above using fast food as an incentive.
S H A W N B R A D L E Y