Roy Tuscany Starts the High Fives Foundation After Life-Altering Injury

On April 26, 2006 at 9:05 a.m., everything shifted for Roy Tuscany. He was at Mammoth Mountain for his 2nd Coaches Retreat. On his first run of the day, he hit a jump he'd hit a 100 times before except -- this time -- he overshot it. The people who did the accident investigation told him he traveled over 130 feet and flew more than 30 feet in the air. It was not a good crash.

Roy suffered a burst fracture of his T-12 vertebrae and severed the artery in his right thumb. HeI was life-flighted to Reno and told he was an incomplete paraplegic. Someone said that being an incomplete is a lot like purgatory -- you're stuck somewhere in the middle between a wheelchair and moving easily on two feet.

Roy knew from the beginning he wanted to walk and ski again. He had health insurance, but just a few weeks before the accident, Roy turned down a chance for disability insurance. There were a lot of things that health insurance didn't attend to -- alternative medicine treatments, gym memberships, acupuncture, rent, food, adaptive sports equipment and the insurance deductible. 

Roy decided in the hosptial he would start a fund to protect other risk-taking winter athletes who wound up on the wrong side of crashes. The name for the fund -- the High Fives Foundation -- came from his early hospital experience. Doctors and therapists would come into his room and hide behind their clipboards. It was as if they didn't want to interact with him. So, he made them give him a high five. Hand to hand, skin to skin, forced them to connect. It also made them friends from the get-go.

If there were one way to sum up how Roy lives his my life and what the foundation is doing, it would be this. He's breaking the boundaries of purgatory.