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Page 1 of 4 When an Accident Broke Kirk Hennig’s Neck, He Was Sent to One of the Best Rehabilitation Centers in the Nation Led by One of Its Top Doctors. Now He’s Sharing His Insights With Other Injured Patients.  Kirk Hennig, ’89, and Professor Diana Cardenas, ’01, at the UW Medical Center Rehabilitation Medicine Clinic. Photo © 2006, Karen Orders Photography.
Although he had graduated with honors from Washington State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he preferred working with his hands, and had already helped build bridges and docks in the Seattle area, including the I-90 bridge between Bellevue and Mercer Island. He took pride in his work and had energy to spare. A few months earlier, he had bought a fixer-upper house and was excited about his plans to remodel and resell it in a couple of years.
On this day in 1983, Hennig was helping to rehabilitate Pier 91, replacing rotting pilings under the wharf. While he and the rest of the crew were preparing to place a new piling, a 3-pound bolt dropped 50 feet from an idle crane and struck him on the top of his head with approximately 1,000 pounds of brute force. His neck was instantly broken.
The bolt crushed Hennig’s sixth cervical vertebra, about even with his Adam’s apple, immediately paralyzing his legs and partially paralyzing his hands. Medics arrived at the scene in about two minutes, and within 20 minutes he was at Harborview Medical Center.
In some ways, Hennig was lucky. His physical conditioning helped him survive the blow, and he had no other complicating injuries. He was able to breathe on his own and never had to use a ventilator, which is common with injuries that occur high on the spinal column.
At Harborview, Hennig was strapped into a striker frame to prevent movement and to hold his spine in traction. Flipped over every few hours, he could only look straight down at the floor or straight up at the ceiling. The resident doctor who came for a frank talk with him a few days after his injury leaned over to look Hennig in the eye when she told him he would never walk again.
“I didn’t believe her,” Hennig remembers. “I thought I’d work hard, lift weights, they’d work on me, and I’d be up and about.”
Five days after the accident, Hennig underwent the first of several surgeries on his neck, grafting bone from his hip and pelvis to repair the structure. The damaged nerves, however, were another matter.
After two and a half weeks, Hennig transferred to the rehabilitation medicine unit at UW Medical Center, where he spent seven months learning to adapt to his new life. But he hadn’t fully accepted it.
“I was puzzled when I was first injured because I worked in construction, and when we ‘rehabilitated’ a project it was better than when it was built,” he says. Although he was grateful that the medical team had saved his life, he didn’t understand why they couldn’t mend his broken body. “I thought, ‘Don’t these guys get it? This is rehabilitation. They’re supposed to fix me.’ But I was the one who didn’t get it. That’s not what the intent is of that department or what they’re capable of—nor anyone in the world just yet.”
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