A Memoir

I Love You
But Damn

It took a broken neck to fix my life.

Chase Treadway

On July 4th, 2009, Chase Treadway dove into the shallow end of a pool in Oxford, Mississippi, and came up a C6-C7 quadriplegic. What followed wasn't a recovery story. It was a reckoning — with pain, with relationships, with identity, with the dark comedy of being a body that stopped cooperating at twenty-four. I Love You But Damn is a memoir that refuses to be uplifting and ends up being exactly that anyway — not because Chase rose above his circumstances, but because he went straight through them, beer in hand, one eyebrow raised, telling you about it at a bar.

From Chapter 1 — Paralyzed Within

The last thing I remember being truly carefree about was a shot of tequila.

It was the night of July 3rd, 2009. Oxford, Mississippi. The kind of humid Southern night where the air feels like a wet blanket you can't shake off. I was at The Library—not the place with books, but the bar where bad decisions usually started.

I dove.

The shallow end.

I didn't know it was the shallow end.

About the Author