“The biggest thing I was thinking to myself was just don't fall,” Haskell said of the moment. “I didn't want to fall in front of all those people. I've fallen a couple times, but I didn't want that time to be one of them.”
For most high school seniors, their graduation ceremony is the pinnacle of success. For Noble Haskell, a cross country athlete, walking to get receive his diploma proved how far he has come since he became paralyzed.
“The past two years it's just taken so much hard work just to be able to get to a point where I'm able to walk across the stage,” Haskell told Inside Edition Digital.
Haskell, from Smoky Hill, Colorado, broke his neck in a car crash in Kansas while on a road trip with friends back in 2021.
“Three of my good buddies from cross country were all taking a road trip right before a couple of them left off to college and left off to the army – one last hoorah if you will. We went to Branson, Missouri. On our way back, we were passing through Kansas on I-70 and we were rear-ended. And I was Flight for Life from Russell, Kansas, down to Wichita where they had to perform surgeries to take the broken bones out of my neck, fuse my neck, but basically try to do what they needed to do to make it so I had the best possible chance for recovery,” he said of what happened two years ago.
He spent the next 31 days in a Wichita Hospital, followed by four more months at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado.
“When I first initially started realizing what was happening, a lot of it was just ignorance because I didn't quite know what followed an injury like this,” he said. Day by day, Haskell progressed. “I slowly gained a lot more mobility and strength. Obviously I lost a lot of muscle, but I was able to start doing a flicker with my finger; a flicker of my big toe. That snowballed into more movement, more strength, and more mobility all around.”
His goal was to be able to walk by graduation and he did.
“The biggest thing I was thinking to myself was just don't fall,” Haskell said of the moment. “I didn't want to fall in front of all those people. I've fallen a couple times, but I didn't want that time to be one of them.”
As for continuing with higher education, he’s taking a gap year to continue recovering.
And he recently walked for part of a 5K that helped raise money for his physical therapy treatments.
“It was really powerful for me and everyone there,” he said proudly.
