Published: June 09, 2009 12:36 pm      

The Road to Recovery

By: Sean Bailey

About a month or so after the 1997 school year began sophomore Matthew Crawford was ejected from the vehicle he was a passenger in somewhere between the north and south Corbin exits.

The SUV, driven by a classmate, flipped three times. The driver and another passenger walked away from the wreck, but Crawford landed on the left side of his head. His head swelled up to the “size of a pumpkin”. He was rushed to Baptist Regional Medical Center where he was quickly flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

Crawford was given a 10 percent chance of ever walking or talking again.

The crash erased all the memories Crawford had of being a high school student.

In the months after the wreck he had to learn how to talk, walk, read and write, and even eat all over again.

But now, a little more than ten years later, Crawford is working on his black belt in Shaolin-Do.

Crawford can’t imagine what life would be like without the martial arts discipline — not to mention the scores of friends he has made spending nearly everyday at Baptist Fitness in Corbin working to better himself.

“Three years ago,” Crawford says, “Shaolin-Do changed my life ... without it I would have no growth. (I’m) always soaking up knowledge.”

A long smile confidently spreads across Crawford’s face when he talks about the discipline that he says helped save his life.

“I think the rest of my life I will go to Shaolin-Do,” Crawford said. “Until I’m put in my wheelchair, or before my nursing home time.”

The accident that changed Crawford’s life was like being born all over again, he says. The brain damage to the left side of his brain paralyzed the right side of his body. His memory of high school was completely lost as a result of the accident, and the once talkative teen was at first unable to speak at all.

Crawford points to a picture of him at the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Tennessee not long after the accident. Two nurses on both sides of 16 year-old Crawford helping him put a puzzle together.

“It was a little bit like (being) an infant,” Crawford says, “I couldn’t talk at all.”

There was a time when it was frustrating for Crawford to look at pictures like the one of him at the Patricia Neal center. He still can’t remember any of the people in the picture.

“I think wow, only wow,” Crawford says as he holds the photo. “I remember none of it, the first month or two of physical therapy, I don’t remember the workers or anything. It was a couple of years of rebuilding piece by piece.”

The events leading up to the crash are a blank slate too.

“Do I remember? No, but people tell me,” Crawford said.

From what he’s been told, Crawford was at a party after a home football game somewhere around Laurel Lake. There was drinking, and when the party slowed to a halt Crawford hitched a ride from a friend. Between exit 29 and exit 25 the car Crawford was in hit another vehicle on Interstate 75 and Crawford was ejected from the car.

“The driver (was) a little bruised and went home that same night,” Crawford said. “But me, I was thrown out the window.”

At first Crawford said he was “harsh” on the driver, because he knew the driver just walked away. But, as the years passed and as the discipline of Shaolin-Do and the love of his fellow church-goers at Central Baptist in Corbin entered his life, Crawford let those feelings go.

“I shouldn’t have gone to the party. I feel it was my own fault now. Now I have a grown up approach,” Crawford said. “I tell people alcohol and drugs can cause disaster or destroy your life. This (caused me) to have a handicap and a little speech problem. Because I was hanging around the wrong crowd in the wrong place.”

At 27, Crawford still has a bit of a speech problem — Crawford sometimes has to pause to find the right word — but that doesn’t stop him from being a warm talkative guy. Even when he searches for a word, Crawford has an energetic smile on his face — he’s the type of guy you see in a crowded room and know you can approach.

It wasn’t always that way. After being released from the hospital after a four month stay, Crawford said he immediately became withdrawn. The once talkative teenager shut out the world.

“I hid, until I went to a Cumberland college GED courses, and I found Baptist Fitness Center,” Crawford said. “At first I was very shy and (then) I found lots of people to help me and support me and they changed my life.”

One of those people was Shaolin-Do master Master Eric Berg, Crawford said he had been going to the Fitness Center for a year when he noticed Shaolin-Do.

“I noticed how young people eight years old to adults were in it,” Crawford said. “I love martial arts and action movies and I started talking to the teacher.”

At first Crawford wondered if his limp leg and weak right arm would make him look like “a fool.” He even considered quitting, but Master Burke explained that he could go at his own pace.

“Master Burke told me there’s no competition. The competition is with your own self,” Crawford said. “He uplifted me and three years of Sholin-Do and I missed two practices only for sickness.”

Shaolin-Do has its origins somewhere in the 6th century in China. A traditional martial art, Shaolin-Do is a discipline that strengths the body, mind, and can be in extreme situations be used as a self-defense measure. The discipline borrows the Japanese “belt system” to denote where a particular student is in their training.

On one level, Crawford’s Shaolin-Do has been a way to strengthen his damaged right side — but it has also been a tool that uplifted him out of the “shielded” world, as he describes it, that the accident put him in.

“Shaolin-Do helps my walking. It used to be that I had an awful limp and my right side was so weak I wasn’t able to hold a weight,” Crawford says. “I built up my right side and people might recognized that I have a little handicap. But I trick lots of people, I’m more focused now, and (in) the best shape in my whole life.”

On almost any given day Crawford will be at Baptist Fitness either volunteering his time, working out, or having a cup of coffee and talking to one of the many friends he’s met there. He’s seen stories like his at the Baptist Fitness — people who turned their lives around after nearly losing life itself. Crawford says he appreciates that people look to him as an example of how to change one’s life for the better.

And that’s a message he wants to pass on.

“Daily workouts and Shaolin-Do have changed my whole life,” Crawford said.

“I’ve gotten the chance to better my own self, and I talk to anybody, and everybody. I’m shy no more. I used to be ashamed of myself, but no more. I guess I try to pass it on to the next guest.”