The sky’s the limit for CSU’s first paraplegic veterinary student.

Until the day he crashed into the Arizona desert going 90 miles an hour, the sky was the limit for Bernard Dime. He was an accomplished skydiver who was weeks away from enlisting in the US Army, and dead-set on making the elite Golden Knights Parachute Team. But the driven 25-year-old’s ambitious plans changed dramatically on one last practice jump before a canopy piloting competition, when something went wrong and he hit the ground, shattering his back. “I don’t remember the impact. I don’t remember the pain all that much, just brief moments laying on the ground and thinking I was going to die,” said Dime, now 29.He was airlifted to a hospital and learned he had burst-fractured the T12 and L1 vertebrae in his lower back, and suffered a spinal cord injury. He was permanently paralyzed. “You crash and then you wake up born again with a different body,” Dime said. But at the time, he didn’t feel born again. He felt like the life he had planned was over. During the following months of rehab, his energy went into learning how to shower, how to dress himself, how to live with his new body. “There were times I wished I was dead, I thought ‘my life is never going to be good again.’ That’s rock-bottom. That’s a scary place.” The young man who had counted on his physical fitness to carry him into a career as an elite skydiver, had to come to terms with the abrupt end of that dream. Lying in the hospital, he pondered his childhood dreams of being a musician (in his late teens, he was a guitarist in a touring band called The Real You whose music was featured on MTV) or a veterinarian (he volunteered at animal shelters as a child). But he faced months of acute recovery. “The hardest part is not learning to live with a new body and being in a wheelchair, you get over that. The hardest part for me was being in the hospital and realizing I was so close to a dream that I worked so hard for – for it to be totally taken away and there was nothing I could do about continue