Chapter 4: My Family Perception
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There is a version of this story where the family gathers around the hospital bed, holds hands, and instantly becomes a fortress of unshakeable support. Like a Hallmark movie.
That is not this story.
But before the bomb, there was a map.
I was born at Torrejon Air Force Base, just outside Madrid, Spain. That was the beginning. By the time I was done moving, I had lived in eighteen places. Eighteen. Not cities — places. Bases, suburbs, towns, islands. I went to five high schools. My dad, Rich — the Colonel — retired on June 4, 2004. We moved to Hawaii two months later. August 2004. The final assignment. The last change-of-address card.
Eighteen places. Five high schools. One family that somehow stayed one family through all of it.
That is the context. That is why what happened next was survivable.
When a bomb goes off in the living room, you do not just sweep up the glass. You bleed. You scream. You blame.
My injury was a bomb.
We are a Southern family. We have roots. Deep ones. My mom, Becca, comes from the stock of Deda and Honey. People who did not just endure hard times; they outlasted them. My dad, Rich, carries the legacy of Mere and Big Daddy. The kind of strength that is quiet, mechanical, and absolute.
But nothing prepares a family for C6-C7.
In the early days at The Med and then Shepherd Center, we were not a unit. We were shrapnel.
Let me tell you who my dad actually is, because the word "Colonel" does not do it justice.
Rich Treadway flew F-117 Nighthawks. Stealth fighters. The kind of aircraft you only read about in classified briefings and Tom Clancy novels, the ones that look like geometry homework, the ones that are invisible to radar. He flew those. He also flew F-16 Fighting Falcons. He bent the laws of physics for a living. He operated in the dark, at altitude, with precision that most people cannot comprehend, and he did it without flinching.
That is the man who built my wheelchair ramp.
Not contracted it out. Not hired someone. Built it. With his hands. With lumber and a level and sweat. Because his son needed to get in and out of the house, and there was a problem that required a solution, and the Colonel does not wait for someone else to solve problems.
A guy who flew stealth fighters and then built wheelchair ramps with his bare hands. That is the whole man. Right there.
When I think about who my father is, that is the image I land on. Not the uniform. Not the rank. The man in the driveway with a tape measure and a saw, building accessibility into a house so his son could come home.
The Colonel did not cry in front of me. Not once. Not in the hospital, not during the surgeries, not during the months of rehab. I only found out later, from my mom, that he would go sit in his truck in the parking garage after visiting hours and fall apart where nobody could see him.
That is the Colonel in a nutshell. You do not get to be that guy — the stealth fighter pilot, the Full Colonel, the man whose entire career was about maintaining composure under conditions that would break most people — and also cry in a hospital hallway. The world does not work that way. So he put it in the truck.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about that. Some days I am grateful. Some days I wish he had just let me see it, because then I would have known it was okay for me to fall apart too. But I think we both needed him to hold the structural integrity together while the rest of us figured out what the new building was going to look like.
He is a man who fixes things. I mean that literally. He can rebuild an engine. He can look at a broken system and immediately start calculating how to make it functional again. So when the broken thing was his son, and there was no engineering solution, I think it broke something in him in a way that nothing had before.
The F-117 does not have an ejection seat you can use after the mission is over. You do not get to punch out of fatherhood when the plane goes down.
What he could not give back was my body. What he could give back was everything around it. The truck with the hand controls. The ramp. The accessible setup at the house. The logistical infrastructure of a new life. He could not fix the spinal cord, so he fixed everything else, and that was how he said I love you during a season when neither of us had the language for it.
The first time I drove with hand controls, my dad was in the passenger seat.
I want to be clear about what that means. This is a man who flew aircraft that cost a hundred million dollars. He has been a passenger in very few things. He is not the guy riding shotgun while someone else is in the cockpit. That is not how he is wired.
But he sat in that passenger seat and he did not say a word. Not when I was learning the pressure of the push-pull mechanism. Not when I overcorrected once coming out of a turn in a parking lot. He just sat there. Hands in his lap. Looking straight ahead. Letting me fly.
I remember thinking: this is the most respect he has ever shown me.
Not the ramp. Not the truck. Not any of the logistics. That silence in the passenger seat. That deliberate choice to let me be in control of something when everything else had been taken from me.
He gave me the cockpit back.
We drove around that parking lot for twenty minutes. Did not say much. When I finally pulled to a stop he looked over and said, "You got it." That was it. Two words. But it was everything. It was him handing me back something I did not think I would ever have again.
My mom was the Fierce Protector. She went into hyper-drive. She was fighting insurance companies, fighting nurses, fighting God. She needed to fix it. And when she could not fix the spinal cord, she tried to fix the environment. The pillows. The temperature. The air. It was love, but it was suffocating.
The days at Shepherd Center had a rhythm to them. Therapy in the morning — occupational, physical, the endless grinding work of teaching a body new rules. Then the afternoons, which were supposed to be rest, but which my mom had converted into a second shift of advocacy. She would be on the phone with insurance. She would be flagging nurses with questions she had compiled from whatever medical literature she had been up reading at four in the morning. She had a notebook. It was always out.
I remember one specific afternoon. A nurse came in to do a routine check and my mom was already at the door with a list. The nurse was good. She was patient. But my mom had forty-five minutes of questions for a fifteen-minute check, because my mom had been up since 4 AM reading and she had follow-up items.
I both loved her and wanted to crawl out of what was left of my working body in that moment.
Here is the thing about a mother in crisis: she needs to do something. The worst thing you can do is tell her there is nothing to do. My mom found things to do. She made herself indispensable to my recovery in ways that were genuinely helpful and in ways that were her managing her own terror through action.
She kept records of everything. What the doctors said. What medications were given and when. Which nurses were good and which ones cut corners. She built a binder. An actual three-ring binder with tabs. If you had told me in July 2009 that my mother was going to become a quasi-paralegal expert in spinal cord injury care by September, I would have told you that tracks completely.
But eventually, that terror had to become something else. And it did. My mom became the battering ram. She did not just fight for me in the hospital. She fought for me in the world. She fought with insurance companies over equipment. She fought with contractors over accessibility. She fought with people who gave us the pity stare in public, not with words, but with a look that said try it and see what happens.
She stopped mourning the son she had and started going to war for the son she had now. That was her shift.
My sister, Lee. She was the collateral damage. The sibling who suddenly becomes invisible because the Patient sucks all the oxygen out of the room. She was hurting, but she was not allowed to show it because Chase is the one in the chair.
That is the cruelest part of a traumatic injury that nobody talks about. The siblings. The people who are not the patient and not the parents. They watch their family go into crisis mode around a person they love, and they have to figure out where to put their own feelings because there is no designated space for them.
Lee held it together in public. She showed up. She was there. But I know it cost her something. And I know that for a period of time, she lost her brother not once but twice. She lost the brother she had before the accident. And then she had to get to know the person I was becoming, which was a stranger for a while, even to me.
There was a moment, maybe eight or nine months in, where Lee said something to me that I am not going to repeat verbatim because I will butcher it, but the gist was: stop being so serious, you're still annoying and this is still your problem, not a performance.
She was absolutely roasting me. About something stupid. I do not even remember what it was. Some opinion I had that was probably wrong. And she just came at me the way she always had. Zero mercy. Maximum accuracy.
And I laughed. For the first time in a long time, I laughed because something was actually funny, not because I was performing okay for somebody who needed me to be okay.
That was the moment I got my sister back. Not a caretaker. Not a visitor. My sister.
The gift she gave me, when we found our way back, was that she never let me become the chair. She still roasted me. She still expected me to be annoying and difficult and to have stupid opinions about things. She did not handle me. She just treated me like her brother, which is all I ever needed and did not know how to ask for.
We fought. God, we fought.
There were nights in Atlanta where the tension was so thick you could choke on it. The blame game. Why did you let him go to Oxford? Why did we not stop him? Why is this happening?
It nearly broke us. I saw the cracks. I saw the moments where it would have been easier for everyone to just drift apart. To let the resentment win.
But then, the Forge kicked in.
The thing about high heat is that it either melts you or it hardens you.
I remember a specific moment. I do not remember the date, but I remember the shift. We stopped looking at me as the problem to be solved, and started looking at The Chair as the enemy to be outmaneuvered.
That shift was not one conversation. It was not a family meeting where we decided to get our act together. It was a slow, grinding process that happened in parking garages and hospital waiting rooms and across kitchen tables and in the cab of a truck on the way home from therapy.
It happened in increments. And then one day it was just true.
The Shepherd Center has a family program. They bring everyone in. They explain what C6-C7 means for the patient and for the people around the patient. They talk about the caregiving load, the emotional load, the identity shift for everyone involved. It is thorough. Clinical. Useful.
It does not tell you how to stop resenting each other. It does not explain what to do when your family is too proud to ask for help and too wrecked to pretend everything is fine. It does not cover the parking garage crying or the four AM medical literature or the sister who is quietly disappearing into the background.
You figure that part out on your own.
Or you do not.
We figured it out. Slowly. The way you build a ramp — one board at a time, measuring twice, making sure it will hold weight before you put any on it.
My favorite thing about my family is that none of us are good at being victims.
It is genuinely not in the DNA. You trace it back to Deda and Honey on my mom's side, to Mere and Big Daddy on my dad's — people who grew up in the kind of South where you did not complain about hard things because everyone had hard things, and complaining was just noise. You got up. You figured it out. You kept going.
That is not always healthy. I will be the first to say that. There are times when people need to stop and fall apart and let themselves feel the weight of what has happened to them. The Colonel in the parking garage understood something about that. My mom with her binder understood something about that. You find your outlet.
But the baseline was: we are not going to let this destroy us. That was non-negotiable. Not a decision anyone announced. It was just understood.
We found our roles. Mom: The General. Dad: The Engineer. Lee: The Ground Support. Me: The Pilot.
The first Christmas after the accident was a disaster. I won't dress that up. We were all trying so hard to be normal that the effort was palpable. Everyone was performing happiness at each other. Nobody knew where to put the presents—the accessible table, the regular table, the cleared-off counter. The room was arranged and rearranged before I got there, which meant everyone had noticed the chair before I walked in. Which meant the first thing in the room when I rolled through the door was the absence of a conversation about the chair.
We powered through it. We ate. We opened things. We said "thank you." We performed Christmas.
By the third year, we'd stopped performing. Not because the hard stuff went away but because we'd gotten our parts down. We knew our cues. Dad made the same terrible eggnog joke. Lee roasted me about something I hadn't done yet but she was certain I would. Mom's cooking was extraordinary in the specific way it's always been extraordinary—made entirely too much of everything, as though the act of providing food in excess is its own form of armor.
And somewhere in the third or fourth year, I looked around a table full of imperfect, rebuilt, genuinely remarkable people, and I thought: We made it.
Not to some destination. Not to fixed. Just to here. To the table. To still choosing to show up and still loving each other after the accident blew through and took a piece of everyone.
That's the Baker and Treadway legacy. Not perfection. Not grace under pressure. Not even the elegant overcoming of adversity.
Just: we stay. We show up. We eat together at a table that had to be moved for the chair, and we don't talk about the table. We talk about each other. We give each other grief. We laugh at jokes we've heard three times before. We do the thing families do when they've decided the alternative is unacceptable.
We stay.
There is a first Christmas in here that I think about sometimes.
We were back in Louisiana by then. Shepherd Center was behind us. The house had the ramp. I had the truck. We were in the building phase, not the crisis phase. And we sat down for Christmas dinner like we had done a hundred times before, at the same table, with the same food, with the same ridiculous opinions about football and politics and whatever Lee was currently refusing to eat.
And for about thirty minutes, it was just dinner.
Nobody was a patient. Nobody was a caretaker. Nobody was the Colonel holding structural integrity or the Fierce Protector managing her terror. We were just a family at a table, arguing about something stupid, passing the cornbread.
It did not last. The reality was still there. I still needed help getting in and out. The logistics were still the logistics. But for those thirty minutes, the weight lifted enough that I could see what we were rebuilding.
It was going to look different than before. But it was going to hold.
It was not pretty. It was not seamless. We still annoy the hell out of each other. But we survived the fire.
People look at us now, unified, tight, unshakeable, and they say, you guys are so strong.
They do not see the cracks. They do not see the welding scars where we had to put ourselves back together.
We are not strong because we did not break. We are strong because we broke, and then we decided to rebuild the structure better than it was before.
There is a version of this story where the bomb tears the family apart for good. Where the resentment calcifies and nobody ever finds their way back to each other. I have seen that version happen to other families dealing with disability and illness. The injury becomes a permanent fracture point. The before and after are two separate families that never get reconciled.
That is not what happened to us. But it could have.
I think about that sometimes. I think about the specific choices each of us made in those early years. The choice to stay. The choice to adapt. The choice to keep showing up even when showing up meant sitting in a parking garage and crying alone, or fighting a nurse over pillow placement, or roasting your brother in a wheelchair because the alternative was treating him like someone who had already died.
Those choices are the story. Not the injury. Not the rehab. The choices.
That is the Baker and Treadway legacy. Deda, Honey, Mere, Big Daddy. They did not raise quitters. They raised builders.
A guy who flew stealth fighters and then built wheelchair ramps with his bare hands. A woman who turned terror into advocacy and a three-ring binder into armor. A sister who refused to let her brother disappear into his diagnosis. A kid who dove into a pool and somehow had to become a man on the other side of it.
We had a lot of building to do.
We built.