The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks,
The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and
spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."
Russell Heibner lost the use of his legs six years ago while on summer vacation with his family. Since then, he‚s discovered how to use his spirit to give his life meaning and purpose. Heibner will be speaking at the Apostolic Life Campus Ministry Bible discussion Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Browne Auditorium in the Parkinson Building.
Editor's note: Russell Heibner will be speaking at the Apostolic Life Campus Ministry Bible discussion Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Browne Auditorium in the Parkinson Building. Anyone is welcome.
Russell sat in the kitchen holding the filet knife. Clutching it in his hand, he thought about the past six months. His life could get no worse.
He sat in his wheel chair a paraplegic, unable to walk, unable to relieve himself and unable to be who he wanted to be. Gone were the days when he dreamed of being a doctor. Now in his kitchen at his parent's home, alone, he sat wielding a knife, ready to do the unthinkable.
He slowly raised the knife, pointing the blade toward his chest, aiming for his heart. He reached back, and then, in an instant, he slammed it down onto the counter.
It was a sunny, clear day, skies blue, grass green and the air light. Russell and the family had taken a trip to Missouri. They would enjoy the outdoors that day, as it was a fitting day to do so. Congregated around a swimming pool, Russell and his brothers tackled each other and pushed one other into the pool as only brothers do. Enjoying an extended weekend in commemoration of the Fourth of July, the Heibner family frolicked and barbecued poolside.
Russell's father had tied a rope earlier that day to separate the shallow end from the deep section of the pool in an effort to help his nephew in case he ventured into an area where his legs could no longer reach the bottom.
Russell got a running start, took to the air and dove in. As he stretched his body over the pool, he came crashing into the water. His head directly perpendicular to the rope, his neck snapped back, but the rope did not. He heard a crack. Russell did not lose consciousness.
His brothers instantly got him out of the pool.
"Russ can you move! Can you move?" Ted Heibner, his father, asked.
Lying on the concrete patio, Russell was motionless. His mother sat next to him, kneeling, praying, hoping her son would move and stand up complaining about a bruise.
"I'm trying," he said.
"I had a pretty good idea that I had busted my neck," Russell said. ?"I heard the crunch. I knew something was wrong with my neck and I hoped it was temporary."
Back against the concrete surrounded by family, Russell was taken aback by the sky ? a clear, crisp blue. It radiated, clouds drifted above, as if they had been painted upon some large blue backdrop.
"It was so peaceful looking into the sky. I will never forget it. My mom finally snapped. I guess she thought I was dying."
"Russ, Russ, Russ, Russ," she said.
Russell could hear them, but the serenity of the moment and the initial shock had left the 20-year-old into a Zen-like stupor.
"What?" he said.
"Are you dying? "she said.
" I don't know, but it sure feels peaceful" he replied.
He woke up in the hospital in St. Louis, gagging on the respirator. He began to panic from the number of tubes they had attached to his body.
"I remember being on the respirator," Russell said. "At first it was something
that hurt real bad. You have screws screwed into your head. They have you pulling weights with your neck trying to stretch your neck out. You wake up and there's a machine breathing for you and you're choking on all these tubes. They're sucking all the stuff out of your head."
There was the tube in his lungs, pulling the mucus and build-up from deep within his tissue. There was a tube in his stomach for feeding, in addition to the tubes for his bowels.
Russell didn't sleep for three days. Even with various sleeping medications, his body refused to allow him to rest.
"Depression really began to set in, and the doctors told me I was going to be like this for the rest of my life," he said. "You can't move, you can't eat by yourself, you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. You're 20 years old, and a week and a half ago you were playing ball with the guys.
"That's when it really started to hit me ? I don't like this. And it just closed in on me. It feels like you're like a dead man living. You learn that some things in life are easier to die than to keep on living."
After two and half months of hospital stay and recovery, Russell returned home. It would be hard adjusting from a place where he had the constant care and watch of professionals, doctors, nurses and therapists to home life alone.
"Then I got really depressed, and it really hit me in the face on the way home," he said. "Even though they're telling you you're not necessarily going to get better, I think in the back of your head, you're thinking you're in the place where everybody gets better ? the hospital.
"They're doing therapy for a reason, right ?"
He had heard the stories. People with similar accidents focusing on the movement of their toes, and then one night they can feel a sensation in their feet and then the next day they can wiggle their toes. But this was real life, and the stories stopped where reality began.
"I laid all night, trying to move stuff, all night," he said. "And it just didn't happen. And in the back of my head I was thinking, "I am in the hospital. I am going to get better. I can do this. I am tough. But when I got home, around the old neighborhood, around the old roads I used to run, and there are my buddies going on with their lives.And here I am just sitting."
"The closest I ever came"
"There's that threshold," he said. "I don't know, because when I came to do it, I just got so sick, I couldn't do it."
He was alone at the house, fed up, sick of having to be catered to, sick of feeling sorry, sick of watching people he knew pass by as he sat on front porch of the house, waving as they drove past.
As he sat in this chair holding the knife, he pressed it against his chest. Thoughts of suicide had preoccupied his mind lately, but this was the closest he had ever come to performing the act.
"It was more than just trying to get attention," Russell said. "It scared me so much, I had gotten that close. I didn't tell my family until years afterward."
A culmination of events, this was a turning point. After stages of depression, a feeling of being "a dead man living" and having a life without a purpose, Russell searched for the American dream.
"If the purpose of life is to get a career, get some work, make good money, get married, have some kids, the good American life, nice car, nice house, that's what I always wanted," he said. "If that's the whole purpose of life, then that appeared like that was all gone for me."
He was always very active, running with friends, hiking, hunting, running the dogs with his brothers. This was a setback physically and spiritually. Russell was falling deeper and deeper into an abyss of emotions that had no light, no hope and no outs.
"It felt like the purpose of my life was over," he said. "Everybody was telling me I could go back to school. You could still use your mind. And for some people that is the appropriate thing to do. And all my life I had prayed that it was
God's will for me to help people by becoming a doctor."
But, according to God, it wasn't in the cards for Russell to help people; he had that chapter shut in his face by fate and a rope that floated in the pool that Fourth of July weekend.
"It scared me because I had to make the decision not to go to school, and everybody thought I was nuts," he said. " I had acquaintances disappointed at me, but it came across as being angry with me and they would say, "You're just going to waste your brain," and "You're going to waste your life away."
"I was reading my Bible"
"I have yet to hear God's audible voice," he said. "But I have heard God's voice speak in my head. A lot of people will say there is an inner being in all of us."
Two years after the accident, sitting on his porch outside of his house reading his Bible, it hit him. As his brother mowed the lawn, Russell began crying and sobbing uncontrollably.
Apparently, a car had slowed down in front of the Hebiner house and the driver in it crouched forward in the seat and stared in bewilderment at the man who sat in a wheelchair reading his Bible.
His brother rounded the corner to see what was wrong with Russ.
"Hey Russ, what?s the matter?" he asked.
"God's calling me to preach," Russell replied tears streaming down his face.
"That's when I realized what this accident happened for," he said. "Since that time things have gone up. God is good. Life isn't so bad."
Now, Russell is in charge of prayer meetings at his local church. An apostletic Pentecostal who is a devout follower of the fifth book, the book of Ax, which is the workings and lives of the apostles who followed Jesus, Russell turned to the church as his crutch.
"Speaking in tongues"
When Russell was 9 he was baptized. By the time he was 13 years old he was speaking in tongues.
" It felt so good all I could do was cry," he said. "I just balled my eyes out. Part of being a Pentecostal is we believe in the gifts of healing and that people can lay hands on people and be healed."
"I am sitting in a wheel chair not healed. But believe me, I've seen it. I have seen tremendous miracles, and it's not this fake junk on TV."
Russell understands his mission on earth now. A medical student at John A. Logan before his accident, he had always wanted to help people, whether it was in the operating room or the church meetings.
"As a little kid I knew I would feel something," he said.
All his life, he was raised in a household that valued church, and being a
Pentecostal he knew church would be fun. He would watch as the other parishes spoke in tongues astounded by their commitment and the power of God.
"I believe that God had a burden on my life of wanting to be a doctor to help people. I think it is all going to come to pourishsion now, through a life of faith."
"Instead of me dedicating my life to curriculum and the teaching of what a man can do, I think what God wants me to do is to live by faith."
Russell has experienced some small miracles since his turn back to faith. At
work when a fellow co-worker skinned his finger to the bone all the way to his knuckle, Russell prayed.
Within two days, Russell said, the scar had healed and his finger back to normal.
"It was gone man," he said. "And it freaked him out, and I don't know if he really doubted Pentecostal faith and God, but after that when he would talk about it he would get goose bumps."
In July 1999, Russell stopped taking his medicine. Intent on letting God do the healing, Russell allowed his body to fall to the whims of the world. The medicine helped with his bowels and bladder, a daily routine since he had become a paraplegic.
"The first couple of weeks it didn't go very well," he said. "And I began to scratch my head. And it was amazing, within a couple of weeks I didn't need the medicine, because that stuff made me sick."
"It's all part of the experience"
Lying on his back on July 3, he could feel the wind blow, the cool summer air passing over his body. He stared fixated on the sky, staring at "God's creation" mystified. Hurried relatives buzzed and hovered over him trying to find out what had happened, was Russell going to live.
"It goes hand in hand," he said. " The biggest thing for me in the last few years is the learning experience. To be honest with you, this is the learning experience."
"I go and talk to these guys and you can see it in their eyes. There's something missing. And that is when I began to see this experience as something real. When this happened to me, I was thinking that things couldn't get much worse. If life can be this bad and living for God can be this good, then this is awesome."
