Injured BMX Rider, Family Brace for Rough Road Ahead

His parents had received injury calls before, but usually from Murray himself, saying he had broken a leg or some other bone and that it was nothing serious. It was around 3 a.m. in England when Edgworth received a call saying she should come to the hospital, and she called her ex-husband, Stephen's father, Jeffrey Murray.

"Straight away, all I wanted to do was get organized get over here and how could I do it," he said, adding he had no idea what awaited him in Baltimore.

There were three open seats remaining on that morning's British Airways flight to Baltimore. He and Edgworth were at their son's side by mid-afternoon the day after the crash. Melissa, who was unavailable for comment for this story, had arrived early that morning from California.

"I can honestly say for the first week, we had no idea what was going on," Edgworth said, explaining that one of the first pieces of information Murray's family received is that shock-trauma-ward patients are checked every 15 minutes because their status can change at any moment.

"They say to you, 'Live hour-by-hour.' And you're like, 'Okay, sure.' " Edgworth continued. "The first couple of days you think, 'Okay, well, we're going to do this . . . and then something knocks you down.

"One day he's breathing on his own, the next day he's got pneumonia and his temperature is 104. Then the next day everything seems to subside, and then something positive will happen."

It is that daily roller-coaster ride from improvement to regression and back again that has Murray's family and friends riding a line between optimism and realism. Whenever someone has a bad day, other family and friends are there to pick up the slack, making sure that everyone eats even when they're not hungry and sleeps even when they're not tired.

"When you have somebody close to you who's done the type of things Stephen's done, it makes you realize what you're attempting to do isn't all that insurmountable," Roberts said.

'Nothing's Impossible'

This week, as they prepare to move Murray from Baltimore to Craig Hospital in Denver, which specializes in spinal-cord-injury rehabilitation, his family remains steadfast in the belief that if given the best opportunities to recover, Murray will surprise them all.

"We're of the opinion that nothing's impossible, and we're going to do everything to give Stephen the best shot," Jeffrey Murray said. "Somewhere down the line there's going to be some improvement. Whatever that is, we know that it'll be the best that's been possible."

And Stephen Murray is raring to go. One of his first requests was to see footage of his crash. Although he cannot force air over his voice box to talk, Murray can communicate as everyone around him has gotten better at lip reading. His family expects him to eventually regain his ability to speak.

Lately most of his questions have been asking Edgworth when he'll be headed to rehab. An attempt to transport Murray to Denver last week was unsuccessful when, in an ambulance headed to the airport, his heartbeat slowed and then stopped. After stabilizing him at a nearby hospital, the decision was made for him to stay in Baltimore a little while longer.

Neither Edgworth nor Jeffrey Murray expected that BMX would take them around the world as they watched their sons compete, or how much that time on the road would strengthen the strong family bonds that have enabled them to help each other now. And neither would change any of it.

"Even in this state that he's in now, I don't regret him doing it," a quiet Edgworth said. "It's not for me to say if he'll ever do it again, but if he was physically able to, he'd want to."