CHICAGO — From the beach where he swims on Lake Michigan, Rob Heitz can point out the green facade of the rehabilitation hospital where he began his recovery journey after being paralyzed from the neck down 19 years ago.
“I see my hospital, the window of my hospital room, where I looked out every day, my bed looking out on Lake Michigan,” Heitz said. “Rather than it being something that would cause me anything, fear or anxiety, it’s like — holy cow, I did it.”
Heitz, 41, is preparing to swim from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park in San Francisco on Friday. The Chicagoan has been training for a year by swimming in Lake Michigan, where the accident that left him quadriplegic — paralyzed in all four limbs — occurred. The distance of the swim can be 1.5 to 2 miles, depending on currents in San Francisco Bay.
“That doesn’t surprise me a bit, that he’s doing it,” his mother Norma Heitz said. “He’s a goal-oriented person, and he takes out the negative and just tries.”
It was dusk on Aug. 26, 2003, when a 22-year-old Heitz went on a boat ride in Racine, Wisconsin, with his boss and a business partner. The group went to a cove, and Heitz decided to go for a swim.
“I’ve always loved the water,” Heitz said. “I’m extremely comfortable with water and even being out in the lake at night, I felt like I wanted to go for a swim — it isn’t something that I would really probably consider too much, because I just always love being in the water.”
So he jumped, and his head immediately made contact with the bottom of the sandbar, which was about 2 to 3 feet deep. He held his breath underwater, unable to come up for air, until he couldn’t anymore.
And then everything went black.
“The next thing I remember was being in the back of the boat and my boss Mike yelling at me to try and move my feet or move my hands,” he said. “I remember being really cold and not being able to move and really confused and not knowing what was going on.”
He had been resuscitated with CPR, but he had also fractured the sixth cervical vertebra of his spine, effectively becoming paralyzed from the neck down.
“It’s a phone call that no parent wants to hear,” his mother said. Doctors told Heitz there was a 95% chance he’d never walk again.
To Philip Heitz, the recovery process was nothing short of a succession of miracles: It was a miracle they were told by a doctor to transfer their son immediately to Northwestern Medical Center.
It was a miracle that their son was sent to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) — now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab — which was the number one rated rehab hospital in the country, his father said.
“(It was) a miracle that he has the strength of character to be able to take all the therapies that he had to, to have the will and hope that he would be able to walk out of the doors — and he did,” he added.
Heitz was also able to be part of a research study at RIC that used the Lokomat, a device that helps patients with quadriplegia to relearn to walk. When he was inpatient at RIC for two months, he had to undergo physical therapy every day for three hours. Once he was released, he did therapy three days a week for a few hours for three months. He also had to undergo occupational therapy to learn to take care of himself once again: to eat, dress, shower and do other tasks.
In two to three years, Heitz had almost fully recovered — though he said he still can’t feel most of the left side of his body, he can’t run, and he limps and has certain limitations with his hands. He also still exercises to strengthen the right side of his body, which is weaker. Recovery is a spectrum, he’d say, but his is still a pretty “rare” recovery overall.
And then Heitz went to school at University of Illinois at Chicago for biomedical engineering, drawing motivation from his own story. Then he got a job at Hocoma, the rehabilitation robotic exoskeleton company that manufactured the Lokomat, where he now works as a top salesman.
In 2018, Heitz founded the Paralysis Foundation after meeting with many paralyzed patients and realizing they were unable to reach their recovery potential when their insurance coverage ended. The foundation’s mission: To support nonprofit clinics that work with paralyzed people and ensure they offer the best treatment possible.
“He’s spent lots and lots and lots and lots of time and energy and his own money and gotten his friends and relatives all involved and just as put in his whole heart and soul into this foundation,” Heitz’s father said.
The swim from Alcatraz is meant to be an awareness-raising campaign to raise money for the foundation. The event will be livestreamed on Facebook.
“Certainly the event is beyond anything that I would have imagined that he would even have thought of trying to do,” Philip Heitz said. “Most people who are terrific swimmers wouldn’t even attempt to do that type of thing, and for him, with his limitations — he’s tried to minimize them, but they certainly are there — and the amount of swimming that he’s done to train for this is amazing.”
Heitz said Kathy Winkler, who manages Alcatraz swim logistics, has told him the currents vary so much day to day that it’s hard to say how long it might take him to swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco. In fact, she just switched the landing point for the swim after a change in currents made the original plan impossible.
The swimmer is being trained by coach and world record open water swimmer Sarah Thomas. Three to six times a week for the past year and a half, Heitz has put on a wet suit, blown up a bright orange buoy and, with an almost imperceptible limp, walked toward the frigid water of Lake Michigan — and toward the rising sun — to swim for almost two hours.
As for why he chose Alcatraz as a starting point for the swim, Heitz has his reasons. And they relate directly to his journey to recover from paralysis.
“Not being able to do anything feels like being trapped in a prison,” he said. “And so that imagery of escaping from it, which is something that I feel like I was fortunate to accomplish, it seemed like a really, really fitting and really exciting challenge to do.”
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