Life after the crash

Austin Ervin lies in his bed on a cool fall morning, covered in a red fleece blanket and excited about his new white kitten, Glacier, who curls up on his shoulder. Austin asks his mom for food. He can't move his body. He can't even turn his head.

Standing by his bedside in their large Palmer home, Tina Ervin scoops spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt into Austin's mouth. Some dribbles on his chin and his kitten moves quickly to lick it up. Tina laughs. Austin frowns, his lips pressed tightly together.

By 7:30 that morning, Tina has already completed a series of life-or-death procedures for her 7-year-old son. She has poured water into a tube rooted in Austin's stomach. Austin can't cough, so she has fixed a wide strap around his torso that shakes his limp body for about 10 minutes to break up the mucus in his lungs. She has disconnected him from his ventilator and suctioned out thick fluid trapped inside his body. Then she reconnected him. He could breathe again.

Soon after, Tina starts going over plans for the rest of the day. She will wrap medical tape around Austin's feet and hands, securing him to a stationary bike that moves on its own and sends small pulses to his muscles. She and Austin will go bowling with friends, Austin in his wheelchair while someone rolls the ball for him. They will get pizza, his favorite food.

"My little man, he's always been my number one," Tina said. "Everything we do, we do for him."

And while Tina's friends describe her as hyper, she said she's really exhausted. She breaks down once a week. But most people don't see that side of the 42-year-old woman who had a hard childhood and who can mark the exact day that life changed for her and her son.

Tina remembers March 22, 2013, as a sunny day. Snow had started to melt. To celebrate her 40th birthday, she took snowboarding lessons at Alyeska Resort in Girdwood. She planned to spend the night. Family friends were watching Austin, taking him to see a high school play.

Austin then was a 40-pound, 5-year-old boy, headed to kindergarten in the fall. He just started riding a bike. He went hunting, hiking and fishing with his family. He fired guns at the shooting range and danced when music played in the kitchen.

That night, Austin was fastened in a car seat in the back seat of a Toyota Prius. The temperature had dropped, turning wet roads to ice. On Bogard Road between Palmer and Wasilla, a Ford Taurus slid out of control. It crossed the centerline and slammed into the Prius, Alaska State Troopers reported at the time.

In Girdwood, Tina's cellphone vibrated around 10:30 p.m. By the time she grabbed it, she missed the call from Beatrice Joehnk, a friend they call Auntie B and who was watching Austin. Tina listened to the voicemail.

"It was like crying, screaming, 'Austin's dead, Austin's dead. We got into a car accident,' " Tina said. "And I flipped out."

Austin had stopped breathing for about 10 minutes. He had no pulse, troopers reported.

Medics brought Austin back from dead. But the whiplash severed the ligaments that attached his skull to his spine. Tina referred to it as internal decapitation. As she traveled to Anchorage, she called her foster mom, Natalie Beyeler, a local physician who rode to the hospital in the ambulance with Austin.

Tina remembered her son lying on a gurney as he was wheeled off the elevator at Anchorage's Providence Alaska Medical Center. Wires, cables and tubes came out of his chest and nose. Bruises covered his stomach. He had a little cut above his eye. He looked like a battered angel, she said. She dropped to her knees.

"I was in my deepest, darkest moment," Tina said. "Buckets and buckets of crying. And people in front of me, in back of me, holding me up because I couldn't stand." She lost 15 pounds in one week.

She said doctors told her Austin likely had brain damage. He couldn't move his arms or legs. He was in a coma. If he woke up, he wouldn't be able to breathe on his own. They asked her to think about his quality of life. They gave her paperwork to donate Austin's organs. She filled it out.

But Tina hadn't given up on her son. A team was flying in to harvest his organs when Tina demanded one more test. This time, Austin's head showed brain waves.

Jeff Staley, who is dating Tina now, said he remembers her struggling with what to do next. Should she continue fighting to keep her son alive? Would he even want to live?

"She would say to me, 'I hope I'm making the right decision.' And I had to keep telling her, 'You made the only decision that you could make.' She had to give him the best chance she could," Staley said.

She demanded the hospital staff rip up the organ-donor paperwork. Austin would live.

A school day, a breakthrough

More than two years later, Austin sat behind a desk on the second-floor classroom at Palmer's Swanson Elementary School with a bright Spider-Man blanket draped over his chest and legs. A black strap around his forehead kept him upright in his wheelchair. A portable ventilator kept him breathing.

Students buzzed around Austin, saying hello. One of Austin's classmates described him as awesome, another called him a "great man and a great friend," another said they liked to race him down the hallway. Austin drives his wheelchair with a chin stick.

A different student in the second-grade class gets the job of "Austin's buddy" each day, helping Austin turn in his homework and walking with him to other classrooms. Austin's second-grade teacher, Asdis Derouen, tells the buddies, "You're always going to look out for him, as he's always going to look out for you."

As students sat down at their own seats, a special-education assistant sat next to Austin and pointed to tiny stars on a morning math worksheet that she clipped to a slanted board so he could read it. Austin counted the stars — one, two, three, four. She wrote "4" on the worksheet.

A nurse, paid by the family's health insurance, sat nearby, next to a wagon brimming with blankets, snacks and medical supplies. She must use a catheter to drain Austin's urine about every two hours. She must give him water. She must make sure his temperature and vitals are stable.

This school year is the first in which Austin is attending elementary school full-time. After his initial hospitalization, Tina and Austin traveled between Anchorage, Seattle and Baltimore, where he learned to talk and eat again and where she learned to care for her son.

Since they returned to Alaska, Tina quit her high-paying oil job on the North Slope to care for Austin. She cashed in her retirement to help pay for Austin's care. She and Austin's dad got divorced. She moved from Chickaloon to a three-story home in Palmer, bought on a foreclosure and closer to a hospital.

At the new house, Tina has set up a backyard farm with goats, chickens and rabbits in hopes they will help Austin heal. She painted Austin's bedroom ceiling blue, pasted fish to it and shined a moving light on it so it looks like the ocean. She hung pictures with images on both sides so she can flip them over if Austin wants to look at something new.

"It's always Austin, Austin, Austin," she said.

At school, Tina stood in the back of the classroom, wearing black pants and a black T-shirt that read "Rollin' with the Homies," the R shaped as a wheelchair. She often comes to school, but on this day she wanted to teach staff how to help Austin into an upright frame that allows him to stand up, albeit with complete support. His spine is a spiderweb of titanium, fused from the top of his neck to halfway down his back.

Tina, the nurse and the special-education assistant took Austin into another room, strapping his torso into a cast that looked like a turtle shell and then strapping his body onto a piece of metal equipment to strengthen his muscles.

It took about 45 minutes to get Austin set up and he sobbed in discomfort most of the time. Tina tried to calm him down. She had to make sure he could breathe.

"I want to go home, Mama. I want to go home now," he said, grinding his teeth in protest.

"I know, sweetheart," Tina said. "But this is good for you."

Later, he had a new gadget to try. School district staff had connected his wheelchair to the building's wireless Internet. For the first time, he could control a computer. Austin maneuvered his jaw and used his wheelchair's chin stick like a mouse, hovering over aliens that floated across the screen. They exploded.

"Again," Austin squealed in a quiet, raspy voice. "I want to do it again."

A history of fighting

As a child, Tina had her own set of troubles. She grew up between women's shelters and the woods of Chickaloon, where she lived in a cabin with no running water and electricity. She mushed dogs and rode horses bareback. She also said she faced abuse. She eventually moved to her aunt's house, she said.

There, her cousin had started to baby-sit for Beyeler, whom Tina now calls her foster mom. Beyeler said Tina wouldn't look anyone in the eye. Tina wanted to work. So Beyeler hired her to help clean the house and soon took her in, raising her alongside her three children.

"I think Tina, no matter what, would've landed on her feet," Beyeler said. "I think if anything, I just helped her recognize how much potential she had."

Tina described herself as a fighter. Her childhood, she said, "prepared me for this world."

"I don't know how I turned out the way that I did, and then bang, the worst that could ever happen to a parent happened," she said.

In spring 2015, Tina drove a small bus from Utah to Alaska because she wanted something that Austin could ride in with his wheelchair, medical supplies and friends.

She had the bus outfitted with a flat-screen TV and cameras. The outside reads "Austin's Spidey Bus" in red letters. She remembers Austin's huge smile when she had the bus unveiled at an Anchorage auto shop, where she invited his friends, teachers and the media.

On a cold winter day in December, Austin sat inside the bus, parked in Palmer with the heat blasting. Friends traded places in front of his wheelchair, showing off their Santa Claus hats and plastic candy canes.

"Oh my gosh, this bus is packed," said Austin, who has grown to about 80 pounds and just over 4 feet since the crash. He told his friends knock-knock jokes.

Tina stood outside of the bus in a line of parade floats and hastily directed a group of family and friends who carried oversized ornaments and crafted sheets of clear plastic into a life-size snow globe. Inside the snow globe, Tina had already hooked up an electric fireplace and built a cardboard sleigh for Austin. The globe was hitched to the Spidey Bus.

"This is crazy," Tina said and laughed as she tried to get an 8-foot-tall teddy bear strapped to the back of the bus. She later wheeled Austin off the bus. He wore a red Santa Claus hat and a white, stringy wig. More than one girl had named herself Mrs. Claus. Two of Austin's goats were dressed in sweaters.

"People ask me all the time, 'How do you do it?' " Tina said. "I do it because I'm a mom. I have to. There's no other choice."

And Tina said she doesn't know how long she'll have with Austin, so she's happy to stay home with him now. She said she often thinks about Christopher Reeve, an actor who became a quadriplegic when thrown from a horse and who used a portable ventilator, just like Austin. Reeve lived for only nine years after his accident. "That's always in the back of my mind," she said.

Still, Tina said she learns something new from Austin every day. He teaches her resilience. She admires his humor. She loves his smile. She remembers a day she took him to her foster mom's house and he asked to get pushed closer to the trampoline. At first, she panicked — he couldn't possibly jump. But it turned out he just wanted to see the kids up close.

More than anything, Tina said she wants Austin to have some independence. She wants him to eventually date and go dancing and attend his high school prom. She said she doesn't know if any of that will ever happen, "but you never know."

"I just keep strong about it," she said. "I believe in telling him, 'Even if you can't climb a mountain — if we have to take a helicopter or if I have to pack you on my back — we will climb a mountain.'"