Eibar Coa provided a sight the afternoon of April 14 that few could have dreamed possible after the Gulfstream Park jockey fractured his C-4 vertebra in a racing spill on February 18—he walked into a press conference celebrating his release from Memorial Regional Hospital South. “In all my years of neurosurgery never have I seen a case, an event, this impressive and this miraculous. To have a man who’s completely paralyzed from the neck down—a complete quadriplegic—and then be able to get up and walk is an extremely rare event,” said Dr. Scott Berta, the Memorial neurosurgeon who performed two surgeries to stabilize and repair Coa’s injury. “And do to it so quickly on top of it is pretty much unheard of.” Coa, whose stride was remarkably fluid as he walked to the podium, impressed his doctors with his positive attitude, but he admitted there were times when he had doubts that he would be able to walk out of the Hallandale Beach hospital. “I’m super happy. When I came to this hospital, for sure I had the hope to walk out, but I wasn’t sure I was going to. I knew I was going to work hard to do it,” said Coa, whose wife, Rebeca, waited nearby to take her husband home less than two months after his horrific accident. “Just walking out and seeing all my family and support from the doctors makes me happy. I’m a happy guy today, for sure.”
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