DENVER—Lee Akin sits on a sofa inside the hospitality area at the National Western Stock Show, his eyes trained on a television airing the night’s Professional Bull Riders Chute-Out.
Every few minutes, one of his old friends from the bull-riding circuit approaches, taps him on the shoulder and reaches out to shake his hand.
“Good to see you, Lee,” one of the guys says.
“How’ve you been?” another asks.
That the 34-year-old Oklahoman is alive today after a bull crushed his skull in early 2007 is a wonder to everyone.
That he is here in Denver and able to chat up the guys right back, his friends and family say, is a testament to the power of prayer.
“He’s a walking miracle,” said Akin’s friend and fellow bull rider Corey Navarre.
Akin doesn’t remember much about his accident, other than getting on the bull, saying, “Let’s go man,” and then hitting the dirt.
“And I was out,” Akin recalled.
For Navarre, who traveled to rodeos for years with Akin, the memory is much more vivid.
It was March 8, 2007, at the Southeastern Livestock Exposition and Rodeo in Montgomery, Ala. Navarre watched as Akin got bucked off and landed toward the bull’s head. The bull went to hook him, and appeared to graze the side of Akin’s skull.
From where Navarre was watching, it didn’t seem that serious. But Akin was unconscious.
Navarre climbed into the ambulance with his friend, who didn’t wake up but was writhing around and making noises.
Navarre started praying.
At the hospital, doctors whisked Akin away. Moments later, one of them came out and told Navarre to get Akin’s family on the phone. Lee’s wife, Mary, had given birth to their daughter, Jada, about six months earlier.
“The doc said, ‘He may not make it,'” Navarre recalled. “That’s when it really hit me.”
Akin was put in a drug-induced coma and underwent his first neurosurgery. Doctors said if he survived, it was unlikely he would live a normal life again.
About three weeks later, Akin was brought out of the coma. Slowly, he began responding to his family and to doctors’ commands. Within another month, he was breathing on his own, holding his head up and moving both sides of his body.
After another surgery and a return to Oklahoma, Akin began rehab, and his speech and mobility continued to improve.
In June—almost three months to the day of his traumatic brain injury—he sang the ABC’s with Jada.
Through all of it, rodeo fans and fellow cowboys and their families kept tabs on Akin’s recovery via the Internet and Professional Bull Riders’ news releases. Hundreds sent get-well wishes to a Web site detailing his progress.
Today, Akin is walking and talking and happy to be traveling from time to time with Navarre and other friends.
He remembers faces and words but cannot yet write and has some trouble forming the words he wants to say. When he gives his age, for example, he holds up his fingers and says “three, four,” rather than 34.
He will never ride bulls again. But he was getting up there in age and probably was going to have to retire soon anyway, he said.
Mostly, Akin is thankful to God—and for the thousands of people who prayed for his recovery—for getting him through this.
“To go back and be normal is going to take me a long time,” Akin said. “But I’m going to keep trying, and eventually I will get there.”
Just then, another cowboy approaches, happy to see him.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
“Good,” Akin says. “Real good.”
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