Leesburg man, quadriplegic at 20, helped change minds about what’s possible

On the worst night of his life, Bill Miller of Leesburg was 20 years old, a math major at the University of Florida and celebrating the final weekend before the start of his senior year.

He’d invited a few friends to his apartment, bid farewell to summer with way too much to drink, and gone to his bedroom upstairs to sleep it off. At some point, he had gotten up, tripped over an Ab-Roller in the dark and landed awkwardly. His roommates found him on the floor, assumed he had passed out, and hauled him back to bed.

As it turned out, Miller had broken his neck. And for a few hours of youthful indiscretion, he became a quadriplegic, dependent on a ventilator to help him breathe.

He spent the next 25 years able to move little more than his mouth and eyes.

You might consider Miller, who died in March, disastrously unlucky. But as his family prepares to celebrate his life, his international impact and the release of his unfinished book, they see something else entirely.

“At first my job was keeping his mind active and giving him things to look forward to,” says his stepmom, Donna Miller, a retired Lake County judge. “But after the first five years, I didn’t have to do that anymore. He made his own life exciting.”

Long before Alexa and Siri, Miller would teach himself to operate a voice-activated computer system and program it to turn on the lights, adjust the volume on the TV, set the thermostat or play a song list.

Though he had never considered himself a writer, he became a movie reviewer for the local newspaper. In the earliest days of remote collegiate learning, he returned to UF online for a bachelor’s degree in business, and a few years later, he earned a master’s degree in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University, where he eventually became a teaching assistant.

And most profoundly for the greater community of fellow quadriplegics — faced with precious few options for participatory sports — he and a friend would develop a system allowing them to bowl, directing the ball with the angle of their electric wheelchairs and sip-and-puff mouthpieces to adjust the chair’s speed and time the moment of the ball’s release.

For those whose power to control their environment is so extremely limited, the sweet cacophony of toppling pins in a bowling alley is nothing short of miraculous.

“This should be illegal, it’s so much fun,” Michelle Hlavek Carston said when she first tried it in 2003. Carston, who died in 2020, was left a quadriplegic after a diving accident at age 23. She and a half-dozen or more others would become regulars over the years at the Spanish Springs Bowling Alley in The Villages, the massive retirement community.

They called themselves “The Quad Squad,” and they were seriously competitive. Miller’s top score was 255, a quadriplegic record.

Finding faith

Miller was still a baby when his dad, Jim Miller, divorced and moved from Chicago to Florida. He was a quieter kid than his big brother, Andy, and studious, but he loved baseball, soccer and football, playing in recreational leagues.

“For a long time, we pretty much just lived with my dad,” says Andy Miller, now 48, who helped care for his brother in recent years. “You know, we were close. It was three guys and lots of sports.”

The morning after the accident, the family rushed to what is now UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville for the onset of months of hospitalization, surgery and rehabilitation. When a doctor explained the extent of the injury, Jim Miller passed out.

The brothers, though, were stoic. “I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry,” Andy Miller says. “But Bill — he was incredible.”

There was profound grief, to be sure. Doctors prescribed a series of antidepressants in the beginning. But on a night when he was battling double pneumonia, when doctors were unsure whether he would survive, Bill Miller would say that he made a choice to live.

“I clearly remember thinking that I just wanted all of the struggles, all of the issues, all of it to be over,” he would write years later. “I wanted … to be made whole again.”

In that moment, he wrote, he saw what he believed was an angel come to him. If he so chose, the angel said, he could simply stop breathing, and the pain would end. But if he wanted to live, he had to push through.

Miller had not been especially religious before his accident, though he considered himself a Christian. But afterward, his faith defined him. It gave him patience, perspective, purpose.

“He was the sweetest, kindest soul,” says Donna Miller’s sister, Wanda Fishalow. “He was an inspiration to me — and pretty much everyone who met him — not to let the world defeat you.”

He started a blog, lookmomnohands.net, that drew a worldwide following, sharing practical advice for quadriplegics, personal updates from the Quad Squad and large doses of encouragement and compassion. He also sent out a newsletter to hundreds of admirers, able-bodied and otherwise.

“I am writing a book called ‘Life Can Still Be Good — Despite Difficult Challenges,’ which is a memoir and more,” he announced in February. “I started writing it in the early part of the pandemic, thinking that I really want to get my thoughts out there before COVID-19, or something else, ends my life on earth and sends me to heaven. August 23, 2022, will be the 25th anniversary of the day I became paralyzed, and it is the day I plan to release my book — one way or another. I try to take nothing for granted and realize tomorrow is not guaranteed for any of us.”

Donna Miller thinks it was prescient.

‘I’m not worried’

On a Monday night in mid-March, Bill Miller told his dad he was having trouble focusing enough to read. Jim Miller slept in his son’s room so that someone was always within earshot if the ventilator malfunctioned or the catheter clogged. Jim Miller didn’t think too much of what seemed like a momentarily lapse in concentration.

But the following night, his son couldn’t read at all. He couldn’t make out the words. And by the next morning, he struggled to speak.

Jim Miller took him to the emergency room, where technicians ran various tests and scans.

“There’s a huge mass in his brain,” Jim Miller remembers a doctor saying. “We can do a biopsy, but I’m sure it’s cancer. He has days or weeks — maybe a month — to live.”

Bill Miller had conquered and achieved so much. He had given inspirational talks at homeless shelters and civic groups and schools. He had educated caregivers and health workers on the needs of quadriplegic patients. And he had helped countless quadriplegics themselves realize they were more powerful than they, or the rest of the world, might think. Though his IKAN Bowler was never mass-produced, roughly 1,000 of them sold to users both in the U.S. and abroad.

But brain cancer? Of all the afflictions, infections, complications and vulnerabilities that threaten to shorten the lifespan of quadriplegics, this was not one of them.

Bill Miller was awake and alert for the news. “I’m not worried,” he said calmly.

Doctors ordered high doses of steroids to relieve the pressure inside his head and sent him home to die.

For four days, Miller rallied, entertaining a parade of visitors who came to say goodbye.

“We heard more laughter coming from that room…” Jim Miller says.

Sometime in the early morning of March 22, Bill Miller died in his sleep. He was 45.

A few feet from his bed, posted on the wall by his computer, was a sign he’d had hung years ago: “It is what it is,” it read. “But it will be what you make of it.”

ksantich@orlandosentinel.com