The Accidental Doctor

After a gymnastics fall shattered his Olympic dreams, he found his true calling.

A Life-Changing Moment

Robert Lee's dream of Olympic gold imploded on a gymnastics mat in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It happened in a split second on July 4, 1983, two days before his 18th birthday. The Los Angeles Games were still a year off, but Lee was working to master a risky move. He had done it hundreds of times -- 360-degree somersault, midair twist, two-hand landing and roll. But on this evening, as his fellow gymnasts watched in horror, he failed to gain enough height and crashed to the ground on his chin.

"It felt as if someone had dumped a ton of sand on me and just my head was sticking out," Lee remembers. "I didn't know where my body was." The impact crushed his spinal cord at the seventh vertebra, causing paralysis of both his legs and arms. In an instant, he went from being an elite athlete to a quadriplegic.

A decade earlier, Robert Seung-bok Lee had emigrated from South Korea with his mother, father, brother and sister. "My parents wanted us to have a bigger and better life in America," he says, "but it was tough." Leaving a spacious house behind in Seoul, the family squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment in Flushing, New York. Lee's pharmacist father, unable to get licensed in the United States, found work mopping floors at Jamaica Hospital, an hour's ride away by carpool. His mother, who had always stayed home to care for her children, took a job at the nearby Swingline stapler factory.

Lee knew no English; he thought if he spoke slowly and loudly in his native language, the other kids at school would understand him. When he unpacked the lunch his mother had made him -- rice, tiny dried fish and spicy fried vegetables -- his classmates screamed, "What is he eating?"

Frantic to fit in, Lee hurried home each day and copied words he didn't understand from the dictionary. He bought a skateboard and clothing with American labels, but he still felt like an outsider. "I had this emptiness inside me," he remembers, "and I didn't know how to fill it."

One summer day in 1976 while watching the Montreal Olympic Games on his family's small TV set, Lee found the answer. When Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored seven perfect 10s, Lee thought, That's me. "I wanted to wear all those gold medals and show the kids who belittled me that I was a proud South Korean."

He began sneaking through the back door at the Flushing YMCA to attend open gymnastics workouts. "I had a passion for it from the beginning," he says. When he'd saved enough to enroll in classes, he began training on the pommel horse, rings and parallel bars. After, he would practice floor exercises on the grass in the botanical garden across from his apartment.

At age 15, Lee earned a spot at an Olympic training center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His parents begged him not to go. He was their eldest son, they said, and it was his duty to focus on academics and go to college. "You're just going through some teenage phase," his father snapped. But Lee couldn't be stopped.

In the early '80s, he won two gold medals at the junior-level U.S. Nationals. On the day of his catastrophic injury, Lee, who had maintained his South Korean citizenship, qualified for his native country's national team and was on track to be named to its 1984 Olympic squad.

Perseverance at Graduate School

After his accident, Lee was rushed to Lehigh Valley Hospital, where doctors surrounded him, inserting tubes everywhere. He remained conscious, though scared and woozy. "Don't do that," he shouted when an attendant began cutting off his favorite gym shorts. "I was still thinking about the big Olympic dream," he says. "I didn't believe it was over."

When his family arrived several hours later, his mother and sister broke down in tears. His father, with a look that Lee has never forgotten, said, "See, this is what happened because you disobeyed your parents."

Lee spent the next three months immobilized with a metal halo screwed into his skull to prevent further injury to his neck. What hurt most was that his doctors didn't talk to him about his prognosis. "They'd poke and prod, talk among themselves in their jargon, then leave," Lee remembers. "I felt like a medical experiment." His anger and frustration sparked his own interest in medicine. "I decided that one day I was going to become a caring doctor who offered hope." Shortly before Lee was discharged, a doctor finally gave him the grim news -- the accident had rendered him a quadriplegic. "My Olympic dream ended that day," Lee says. "The thing I had given my life to was over."

He spent most of the next year at Manhattan's famed Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. He hated it. "I felt degraded doing piddling little exercises with three-pound weights attached to my wrists when I'd once been training for the Olympics," he says. But, through rigorous physical therapy, he regained minimal movement in his arms. He learned to write using a gadget fitted over his hand to stabilize a pen. His therapist worked with him on the streets of Manhattan, helping him master getting on and off buses and navigating crowds. By the end of his stay, he had learned to manage on his own.

That summer, he watched the 1984 Olympics at his parents' house. "Here I was, the first son who was supposed to make a name for my family, in a wheelchair, like a broken trophy," he says. "My dad never verbalized his disappointment, but I felt it. I wanted to reverse it with my accomplishments."

That fall, Lee enrolled at New York University. He adjusted well despite inevitable challenges -- like falling out of his chair getting on a bus. "It freaked out the passengers," he says, laughing, "but I was a rambunctious college guy, and it didn't faze me at all."

What did faze him was the dean's refusal, during Lee's senior year, to recommend him for medical school. "He kept asking, 'How are you going to do this in a wheelchair?' " Lee recalls. For once, he gave up.

He decided instead to go to graduate school at Columbia University, and earned a master's in public health. While there, fellow students urged him not to abandon medicine. So, in 1993, Lee applied and was accepted at Dartmouth Medical School, where he became its first student in a wheelchair.

During New Hampshire's winters, Lee's chair got stuck in the snow; when it was stormy, he missed lectures. Impressed with his perseverance, classmates nicknamed him "S.B." -- short not for his given name, Seung-bok, but for Super Boy. The moniker has stuck.

His parents, who returned to South Korea in the mid-'90s, didn't attend his 2001 graduation. "That was one of my biggest disappointments," Lee says. "I had worked so hard toward that day."

Lee knew he wanted to work in physical rehabilitation, but wondered how patients would react to him. At Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he served as chief resident in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, senior physicians noted that Lee provided a sense of hope to spinal cord injury patients that no able-bodied doctor could.

More than 20 years after his accident, Lee completed his residency in 2005 and began receiving job offers from around the country. He chose to work at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute in a newly opened state-of-the-art spinal cord injury center with John McDonald, a pioneering neurologist who worked with Christopher Reeve before he died. "In the past," explains Dr. McDonald, "people with spinal cord injury received acute care followed by rehabilitation -- then nothing." McDonald advocates patterned exercise and electric stimulation, which can awaken dormant nerves.

An Inspiring Doctor

Today Lee, who became a U.S. citizen in 1984, lives alone in a two-bedroom Baltimore apartment. He drives himself to Kennedy Krieger each morning in a van equipped with hand controls and an automatic ramp. Lee develops therapeutic plans for roughly a dozen patients a week. "He knows exactly what the patients are feeling," says Dr. Cristina Sadowsky, the center's clinical director. "They open up to him with questions they would never ask otherwise, about things like sexual function and bladder problems."

Lee no longer dreams of walking again. "If there were an opportunity, I'd be one of the first to want it," he says. "But I'm useful doing the work I'm doing, and I'm finding my life rewarding." He hopes one day to return to South Korea and work with spinal cord injury patients there.

Last January, Lee's parents traveled from South Korea to attend a conference where their son was speaking. At the hotel that night, Lee's father said the words his son had long been waiting to hear: "I'm so proud of you."

At a rally at Kennedy Krieger last May, a five-year-old boy perched in a small motorized wheelchair pointed at Lee. When his mother told him the man was a doctor, the little boy couldn't contain his delight. "Hey, look!" he shouted. "That doctor can't walk either!" Dr. Lee wheeled over and gave the boy a great big hug.