GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Bryce Burnette remembers the moment his crashed happened. He remembers being upside and unable to breathe, not knowing at the time, he had broken his neck in the rollover car accident. Burnette lost nearly all of his feeling and movement from the neck down.
“I just remember them telling me I was paralyzed,” Burnette said about the doctors in the hospital.
After four days in the hospital, Burnette was transferred from Kalamazoo, by ambulance, to Mary Free Bed in Grand Rapids. And after weeks of working with their staff he was able to walk out, with the help of his walker, on his own feet from Mary Free Bed.
Burnette’s story is the first in the recently debuted Mary Free Bed podcast, “Rehabilitationships” — defined by the hospital, as “the intersection of rehabilitation and human relationships.” It’s what MFB accomplishes everyday in the hospital walls, now through the first-of-its-kind podcast, shared with the community.
“We set out to discover and share what it really takes to recover from life-altering injuries and conditions,” Chris Mills said, MFB’s media and external relations specialist and podcast host. “That’s where this podcast got its start and there’s so many stories we are excited to share with this podcast.”
The monthly podcast will focus on those stories that speak to the human spirit of perseverance and recovery; like a mother of eight who had never run a mile finished a marathon to bring awareness to the global water crisis. Or a car crash that changed the trajectory of one man’s life from successful engineer to hospital CEO and how that’s helped shape West Michigan and the Midwest.
The podcast will weave in first hand accounts of the stories through the eyes of the patients and the clinicians who helped them recover, leaving listeners with a feeling of hope and recovery.
Hope and recovery like Burnette’s, whose walker he once used is now collecting dust in his parent’s basement. And whose story that has helped launch a new perspective of where rehabilitation and human relationships meet — “Rehabilitationships.”
Hear the first episode with Burnette, here.
