Reeve, 42, lay last week in a Virginia hospital, paralyzed and breathing only with the aid of a respirator after injuring himself in an equestrian competition over Memorial Day weekend. Witnesses said Reeve’s horse balked at the third jump on the cross-country course Reeve was tiding Saturday, stopping short and pitching him headlong over the 3 1/2-foot fence. The unconscious actor was resuscitated and rushed to a local hospital, then moved to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. On Wednesday, doctors confirmed the worst. “He has sustained complex fractures to the first and second cervical vertebrae,” Dr. John Jane of UVA said. “Mr. Reeve currently has no movement or spontaneous respiration.”
Jane wouldn’t forecast his patient’s prospects (though Friday he said Reeve had some sensation in his chest), but experts say Reeve broke his neck in the worst possible place. “The higher the cervical fracture, the poorer the prognosis,” says Dr. Paul McCormick, assistant professor of neurosurgery at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. Since there’s a loss of sensory and motor function below the point of a spinal-cord injury and Reeve’s accident shattered the two vertebrae closest to his skull, it’s “extremely unlikely that he’ll regain any function in his arms or legs,” says McCormick. Assuming Reeve doesn’t succumb to complications like pneumonia or blood clots, he may recover the ability to breathe on his own.
In any event, the injury could easily end a career that took off in a single bound in 1978 when the handsome, athletic Cornell grad was plucked from obscurity to star opposite Marlon Brando in “Superman.” He went on to make three successful sequels, and appeared in more than a dozen other films, including “Deathtrap” (1982), “The Bostonians” (1984) and “The Remains of the Day” (1993). In 1980, he starred on Broadway as a disabled veteran in “Fifth of July.”
Of course, tragedy and irony go hand in hand. Reeve, an experienced horseman, had just lent his image to a poster promoting riding safety. And, eerily, the actor portrays a paralyzed cop in the current HBO movie “Above Suspicion.” Before his accident, Reeve told TV tabloid “Hard Copy” about a research visit to a spinal-cord trauma unit. “You see how easily it can happen,” he said. “You think, God, it could happen to anybody.” Even Superman.
