YOUR SPACE: Near-death experience serves as inspiration

In a flash of smashed metal, Ethan Myers went from a 9-year-old who loved soccer to a near organ donor.

He spent his 10th birthday in the rehab unit at Memorial Hospital. You'd think he'd never want to go back.

Not so. Ethan, now 17, returns weekly to help others, It earned him the President's Volunteer Service Award.

The crash in 2002 was on U.S. 24 in Divide when Ethan's sister Bethany, then 17, was driving him and brother Luke, 12, home from school. Their car was hit head-on by an oncoming car crossing the center line.

"This dude on drugs hit us; he fell asleep at the wheel," Ethan says. "I was in a coma for a month. I was in rehab for two months with my brother."

Luke later had a leg amputated. Ethan is still recovering from the head injury he wasn't expected to survive.

"At the hospital, I thought, ‘How nice of them to send in a chaplain to pray with me,'" his mom, Emma, recalls.

"He was pronounced brain dead," says his dad, Howard.

When he started stirring, it wasn't the spirited son he knew. "It was a shell of Ethan.

There was no emotion; he didn't talk very much. He had to relearn how to do everything like he was a little baby again."

"The doctor said I'd be in a wheelchair forever and be a vegetable," Ethan says. "He said I'd never be able to do more than a few spelling words. I said, ‘I'm going back to show him.'"

He did, but it took awhile.

"My whole right side was paralyzed," he says. "I felt really down when I went back to school. All the kids were walking, playing on the playground, and I just sat there in my wheelchair and I felt really down."

Now, he's more the class clown, but it takes a serious note when he speaks to schools about the dangers of driving impaired.

Two years ago, Ethan did a job-shadow at Memorial and started volunteering. He remembers the good times with his brother in the unit, where most patients were older.

"We'd have squirt gun battles with the syringes," he says. "I wasn't in a hurry to get out. The food's pretty good."

He's an inspiration to patients.

"This has really helped him," his mom says. "It has boosted his self-confidence."

The driver who caused the crash was charged with felony vehicular assault.

"We had the final say (in sentencing). We thought he needed help instead of putting him in jail," Ethan's dad says. "That was part of our healing. It's a slow process."

It took Ethan longer.

"I thought he should go to jail, and Mom and Dad said no, but over time you understand that," he says. "I used to be a soccer player. I was really fast. I was scoring goals."

Now, his goal is to give back.