Breathe - one breath at a time. Just breathe.
A million thoughts flitted in and out of John Payne's conscious mind, but the one he was able to hold onto was "breathe."
He wasn't unconscious, but he was close. He was on his back at the bottom of a hill trying to suck in air without choking on blood.
Growing up, Payne climbed too many trees for his mom's comfort. He was a kid always looking for wood to build a bigger ramp for his bike.
He was an Eagle Scout, he loved barefoot water-skiing and he was almost through his first year of college. He rode dirt bikes near Pickwick and was one of the best young mountain bikers in the nation.
He was a quiet kid with an infectious smile who lived life at one speed - full throttle.
On a blistering summer morning seven years ago, Payne was in Chattanooga for a mountain bike race. It was a small, local race that he was using as a tune-up for the national finals in Vermont the following month.
He can tell you the date like it was tattooed on the back of his hand. June 28, 1998. It was the last time his feet would ever touch a bike pedal.
There isn't a detail of that morning too insignificant for Payne's memory.
He can remember how steep it was down the hill. He remembers hitting his brakes and losing control. He remembers flying over the handlebars. And he can't forget the overturned tree at the bottom of the hill.
"I can remember laying on the trail and the next moment getting carried off," Payne said. "I was scared. I knew something was weird, because I reached down to touch my stomach and I couldn't feel anything."
When Payne collided with the tree, it paralyzed him from the waist down and shattered his jaw.
A paramedic happened to be stationed just 20 yards from the wreck and was at his side within seconds of the fall.
His mother and father, Brenda and Bob Payne, were a half-mile down the course at the start/finish line waiting for their son to ride by when Boomer Leopold stopped his bike at their feet.
"John's down," Leopold said, his breath escaping him. At the time, Leopold thought Payne had only broken his nose.
"It wasn't that far away, so we decided to walk in to him," Brenda recalled. "Another biker rode ahead of us to the accident. When he came back he said John couldn't feel his legs."
Payne was airlifted to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he learned of his paralysis.
As he lay in that hospital bed, racing was the furthest thing from his mind.
In one minute he was a vibrant 18-year-old traveling the country, his bike strapped to the top of his car; the next he was spending his days staring at ceiling tiles from a hospital bed, relearning things as simple as balance.
David Butler grew up across the street from Payne and has known him longer than he can remember.
"He's always been wrapped up in some sport. If he wasn't riding motorcycles he was skiing at Pickwick," Butler said. "He didn't do anything casually. If John was involved, he was going in head-first."
When news of Payne's wreck reached Memphis, it was Butler's house where John's friends gathered. They didn't know where else to go.
"We didn't know what to do," Butler remembered. "We just prayed, all of us."
They also began to help. They called. They sent cards. They picked up old newspapers.
"I had so many people watering my yard, I wasn't sure if we'd be able to pay the water bill," Brenda said. "We had people fighting over who was going to cut our grass. They came around us at that time and gave us so much help."
Before the accident Payne lived every day with purpose, but he didn't understand what purpose he would have now. Far more questions than answers filled his head, and instead of energy and enthusiasm, Payne's family saw him clouded with depression and doubt.
"The first two weeks were really tough," he said. "I kept asking, 'Why is this happening to me?'"
Even today, when Payne talks about those first days in the hospital, his eyes dart down and begin searching the floor. And, though no one else is around, the lively 25-year-old suddenly quiets as if he's telling a secret.
He doesn't like talking about those days in the hospital now. It's part of an agreement he made with himself.
The agreement was acceptance. Stop looking back. Stop asking why, he told himself.
The decision came about the same time Payne was transferred from Erlanger to The Shepherd's Center in Atlanta to begin rehabilitation.
Payne said he left his doubts on that hospital bed in Erlanger. He arrived for rehabilitation looking for his next challenge.
"I don't remember exactly when (my attitude) shifted, but at some point when I was in the hospital I decided that me being mad about it wasn't going to make things any better," he recalled. "I was competing against myself to try and get better as fast as I could. Also, everyone that got there at about the same time as me, I wanted to rehab faster than them."
From then on Payne was on a mission. To rehab faster than his nurses thought he could. Faster than doctors could predict. Faster than any other patient at Shepherd's.
Friends and family began to see a familiar face.
"We sifted through the millions of cards he had gotten," Butler said, remembering a trip with his brother to visit Payne in Atlanta. "He was making jokes about everything that had happened since he got to the hospital and he was showing us the cards he thought were the funniest."
Butler was worried Payne would still be a changed person, bitter from the accident, but instead found his old friend as he had remembered him.
The lines around his eyes and mouth were still those of a face that has expressed many more smiles than frowns and furrowed brows.
Payne was released from the Shepherd's Center in August.
For a while after Payne returned to Memphis, things were still awkward for some of his friends.
They tiptoed around the subject of his wheelchair and the accident. They didn't know if things would ever return to the way they were before.
Butler remembers when he got his answer.
"We were sitting around my mom's kitchen when he called and asked if he could borrow his dad's car, because it had hand-controls he could use," Butler remembered. "His mom said he couldn't because his dad was taking it to work. My mom and I were listening to him talk on the phone and he said, 'There's about as much chance of dad going to work as there is of me walking across the kitchen.' We were rolling on the floor laughing. He was making fun of himself. It was kind of his way of saying he was comfortable (being in a wheelchair.)"
Payne graduated from The University of Memphis in 2001 and now works as an internal auditor.
Twice a week, he hosts a bible study at his house, something he said he never would have done before the wreck forced him to trust his faith more than himself.
In his spare time he competes in wheelchair basketball tournaments, trains for races and spends time with his friends.
In March, Payne climbed into a specially designed wheelchair, strapped his Kevlar gloves tight and raced in the seventh annual Germantown Half Marathon. It was his most recent step in the journey back to a life he left seven years ago.
Thoughts about that day in June of 1998 don't frequent Payne's memory much these days.
He knows he can't win the race looking back.
