But a playful dive into a hotel pool altered his charmed existence. When he landed head first at the bottom of the deep end, Lisa initially thought Casey was just horsing around. “We were both athletes,” she says. “When you’re an athlete and you get injured, you just get up, brush yourself off, and continue the game. I kept thinking he’s just going to shake it off and be fine.

“I was treading water and looked down at him. I thought he was going to play shark or grab my leg. But I saw his eyes, and they were as wide as I’ve ever seen them. And then I saw the blood coming out of his head. I knew he wasn’t fine, that he truly couldn’t move.”

Only hours before the accident, Casey had shown Lisa the rescue techniques he had learned in a lifeguard-training class. This fortuitous tutorial quite possibly saved his life, as Lisa pulled him from the bottom and to the edge of the pool.

From there, Casey was airlifted to a hospital in Oahu. That night he proposed to Lisa, knowing that he didn’t want to face this alone. He also promised that he would walk down the aisle; he wouldn’t take his vows in a wheelchair.

“I didn’t know what the future held, but I knew it didn’t matter,” says Lisa. “In my heart, I knew that he would recover and to whatever degree that was, that didn’t matter. There was never a doubt in my mind to accept his proposal.” Seven days later, surgeons took out the two crushed discs in his neck and replaced them with four inches of bone extracted from his hip. With Lisa at his bedside, Casey stayed in the Oahu hospital for another two weeks until he could be transported to the mainland.

After another 26 days at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, Casey was released, but still in a wheelchair and with a halo about his head. He could walk, but not without someone by his side. It took him 15 minutes to walk four or five steps, yet he was walking—something that the doctors in Hawaii had told him he may never be able to do.

What followed were some of Casey’s darkest hours. Lisa had returned to work, so Casey had a lot of alone time in his apartment. “When you play sports and you get a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle, two weeks later you’re healed, you’re back on the field, and you’re playing,” he says. “But it had been a couple months, and I wasn’t 100 percent. The recovery wasn’t going as fast as I had expected.

“At this point, the doctors weren’t expecting anything. I was asking them, ‘When am I going to be able to do this? When am I going to see this?’ And they were saying, ‘We don’t know. You may never see that.’”

Depression set in, and suicidal scenarios haunted him. “I thought this was going to be it, that I wasn’t going to get any better,” he says.

“There were times when I’d get a phone call at work,” Lisa recalls. “He was in his wheelchair on the balcony [ready to wheel himself off the edge]. I’d just leave work and come home as fast as I could to take care of him.”

Yet through all this, Casey and Lisa never gave up. Casey began going to the gym on his own and using his knowledge of muscle training to devise his own workout program when he thought his physical therapists weren’t pushing him hard enough. What’s more, his clients would wheel him to the gym to coach them because just being around Casey made them want to work harder.

There was no breakthrough, no “Hallmark moment” when he leapt from his wheelchair. It was just slow, steady progress, inch by inch, day by day.

Besides Lisa’s love and support, Casey says he had a lot of people pulling for him, including his father, Jerry Kammel, a former catcher for the San Diego Padres, and his mother, Fran. Casey attributes his success to his upbringing: “My parents raised me as an athlete, and an athlete doesn’t quit. If you fall down, you get up, brush the dirt off, and continue playing. There’s something about my personality that never says ‘die.’”

Today Casey works as a personal trainer at a Naples gym and medical spa that he owns with Lisa, now his wife of 12 years. Though all four limbs are affected, his right side is the most impaired. He is unable to open his right hand, and he has a limp in his right leg.

“I run funny,” he says. But run he does, having completed three Half Ironman triathlons since his injury—that means a 1.2-mile swim, followed by a 56-mile bike ride and a 13.1-mile run. His goal is to complete a full Ironman in Hawaii in 2009, the 15-year anniversary of his injury.

This man who was told he might never walk again was the first disabled person to compete in the LA triathlon in 2001. He also finished the Long Beach marathon in 2002 in four hours and 26 minutes, a time that is better than most able-bodied people could pull off. At the 10-mile mark, he fell, but got up and finished with a bloody forehead.

“Too many people are complacent,” Casey laments. “They want everything the easy way. What I’ve learned is that you have to be persistent until you reach your goal. Failure is not an option.”

For anyone who may find himself in a situation that seems dire, Casey advises, “Don’t give up. Do the research and educate yourself on whatever you’re dealing with, whether it’s a spinal cord injury or cancer, because a lot of the time doctors will say something and a patient who isn’t as well-educated will take what the doctors say as ‘OK, that’s what the answer is.’ But if I had accepted what the doctors said, I’d probably still be in a wheelchair.”