Clayton's 'Superman' Ed Petner swims for a cure, dreams of walking again

By Pat Welter

"One, two buckle my shoe," Ed Petner said to himself as he sat down in a handicap accessible chair lift at his neighborhood pool in Clayton, NC. "Three, four, start cruising over."

Petner pressed the remote control and lowered himself into the pool. It's not the same as diving, but for the sixty-four year old it works.

"It is what it is you know," Petner said. "I'm lucky I can get in there and swim, realistically I should have been a quadriplegic or I should be a vegetable drooling because my brain is all mush."

August 23rd marks twenty years since the accident. Petner was enjoying retirement after a successful business career that included working as CEO for Lynch & Mayer in New York City where he helped manage about $7 billion for large pension and endowment funds.

"I'm 6'3 and my hair used to be combed pretty much the way Clark Kent's was and so people used to call me Superman," Petner laughed.

Even Superman would have struggled to survive what Petner endured. He was on vacation doing a thirty-five mile bike ride from Rhode Island to Connecticut. If he had finished, it would have been a personal best.

"I was in the bike lane and up ahead I saw some red cones blocking the bike lane," Petner remembered. "At the time I had the green light, I checked over my shoulder pulled out into the road and unfortunately the girl was in a hurry and she sort of rushed the light to beat her oncoming vehicles and she cut way inside the double yellows and hit me head on. I don't remember the moment of impact, but I do remember flying through the air and I remember being terrified of my kids losing their dad, I have four kids."

Petner fractured his skull, his neck, his ribs and back.

"One of the vertabrae roughly behind the heart exploded like a grenade into two hundred pieces," Petner said. "Some of those pieces crushed the [spinal] chord.

Petner said he believes the only way he survived is through divine intervention.

"I felt this warm hug like you can't even imagine and a voice said these exact words 'relax, everything is going to be okay.'"

Petner was "okay", but he was completely paralyzed from about two inches above the belly button down. It wasn't easy to accept and neither was the rehab, but Petner leaned on tools like a gratitude journal to cope with his new reality.

"Even in those first weeks, most of the time I was in a place of how lucky I was," Petner said. "I knew it was a miracle I was alive, that I'd had a wonderful life up until then and that I had gotten to experience God which not many people do."

After his four children finished high school in Connecticut, Petner and his wife Peggy moved south to Clayton four years ago where he's carried on a tradition of swimming at least one mile on the anniversary of his accident. Last year he swam four miles and raised over one thousand dollars for Parkinson's research and a non-profit called United We Age.

"It dawned on me last year that I could make something much bigger happen," Petner said. "So my thought was this year I'd swim a half-marathon and that might be enough to get some press coverage to raise a lot more money."

On August 23rd Petner swam the 13.1 miles and has raised about $15,000 of his $25,000 goal. The money goes directly to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation which is focused on spinal chord injury research. The donation link can be found here: https://give.reeve.org/team/519821.   Reeve played the role of Superman in the 1970's and 80's films.  He was paralyzed from the shoulders down after a horseback riding accident in 1995.  Reeve died in 2004, but took the time to speak with Petner after his accident.

"I pick up [the phone] and a voice says 'hi is this Ed Petner?' and I say 'yes' and he said 'hi this is Christopher Reeve.' I said 'no way! My whole life people have been saying I look like you, but I tell them no, no, he looks like me!'" Petner laughed. "I promised him that once I could walk I'd show up on his front yard and help him get there too. That obviously didn't get to happen, but talk about turning a lemon into lemonade what a man. The courage he had of turning a tragedy into a triumph, we'll all walk much much sooner because of Christopher Reeve."

There's currently no cure for paralysis, but good luck telling that to a man who says he beat death.

"I got to experience God and when you no longer fear death, when you literally look forward to death which I do, though I'm happy for every moment here," Petner reflected. "It really changes your life."