A paragliding crash in Colombia shattered Joey Coleman’s L1 vertebra and put paralysis on the table. The road back included a Colombian hospital, opioid withdrawals in a hotel room, a Grand Junction lottery, and the plant that finally let him sleep through the pain. He now runs KAI Dispensary in Colorado.
The vultures showed up almost every afternoon. Joey Coleman would catch a thermal, climb a column of warm air, and find one of them already riding next to him, wing tip to wing tip, gliding silently over the green hills outside Bucaramanga, Colombia. It was his 21st paragliding flight. He was still a novice. He was also, by his own account, in love with the sport.
“Flying was magic,” Coleman said. “People tend to compare paragliding to other air sports like skydiving, but in reality, much of paragliding isn’t an adrenaline rush; it’s peace and serenity.”
That afternoon, after nearly an hour in the air with a vulture off his wing, Coleman began his descent. He realized he was overshooting the landing zone. At the end of the strip, there were power lines. He made the call to circle back to the start of the strip. He was losing altitude faster than he thought. The turn became a pendulum. The pendulum became a fall.
He hit the ground from 40 feet, legs extended in front of him in a sitting position. Then he bounced. About 20 feet, he says, until he came to rest under a tangle of lines and the colorful fabric of his wing.
“I learned something I never hoped to,” he said. “When you hit the ground hard enough, turns out you bounce.”
His instructor’s voice came in over the radio, asking if the landing was safe. Coleman knew right away it was not. His upper and lower body felt disconnected, like everything had taken a turn somewhere and nothing lined up. Then he tried to move his legs.
“I couldn’t move my legs. I couldn’t move my legs,” he remembered repeating in his head. His wife, Kelsey, who had been paragliding with him on the trip, came running with the rest of the crew.
Excruciating Doesn’t Do It Justice
Coleman was rushed to the Hospital Internacional de Colombia, a then-newly built facility outside Bucaramanga. He could move his toes. Not his legs. The first crisis was simply getting him from the gurney into the MRI machine.
“It was only a two-foot move in which they picked me up and laid me back down, but it felt like someone had just driven a red-hot knife directly into my spine and begun twisting,” Coleman said. “Excruciating doesn’t do it justice.”
The MRI told the story. His L1 vertebra had not broken or compressed. It had burst. The nerves running down to his legs had taken severe trauma. The surgeons told him his spinal cord was unstable. Paralysis from the waist down was on the table.
“Hearing those words is what finally broke me,” he said.
An emergency spinal fusion was scheduled. Coleman remembers being wheeled down corridors, ceiling lights flying past, his wife squeezing his hand. He remembers crying. He remembers being asked, in the operating room, to count to ten. He remembers reaching three.
He still calls himself lucky. If he had needed to be air evacuated, family contacts at top U.S. hospitals later told him, the odds of his ever walking again would have been, in his words, abysmal.
Despite everything I have been through, I AM SO LUCKY.
Joey Coleman
‘You Can Fucking Do This’
Coleman woke up on morphine, already trying to plan future trips with Kelsey before he understood what had happened. He spent the next month in the hospital.
The milestones were small in a way that humbled him. A man who had climbed Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Russia and one of the Seven Summits, now had the goal of sitting up without help. The first time the nurses sat him up, he nearly passed out. He was drenched in sweat and ready to quit in under a minute. He didn’t.
From sitting came leg raises while still on his back. Toe points. Every movement was agonizing. But the medical logic was relentless: the longer the body stays still after a spinal injury, the worse the long-term outcome. He had to move.
He went from bed to wheelchair to walker. The day he stood up came with a script he repeated in his head.
“Ok, you can do this,” Coleman remembered telling himself. “You can fucking do this!”
He gripped the walker. He took one step. Then another.
Somewhere along the way, the word recovery changed meanings for him. Full Recovery had been the goal. Back to who he was before the crash. He came to understand that that version of him was gone, and that what was left to him was building the best version possible going forward.
“At the time,” he said, “I would break down in tears just thinking of who this new version of myself may be.”
The Ninja Turtle Suit
Coleman was transferred from the hospital to a hotel, where Kelsey took on the role of full-time nurse. She helped him get out of bed. She helped him get to the bathroom. She celebrated milestones that, to anyone outside the room, would not have looked like milestones. She cried with him when he needed it.
“It is not an exaggeration when I say I owe my life to Kelsey,” Coleman said.
There was a miscommunication on his way out of the hospital, and he was discharged without any pain medication. He had been on a heavy morphine drip for weeks. He now found himself coming off it cold turkey, with a fresh spinal fusion still in his back and the agony of the injury still raw.
He shook in bed with cold sweats. His emotional regulation came apart. He broke down without warning. He was terrified of never walking normally again. He was also terrified of becoming an anchor on his wife.
“It would have been enough to wrestle with regardless,” he said. “But dealing with it all in the grips of withdrawals were some of the darkest times in my entire recovery.”
He spent months in a hard plastic shell that locked his spine in place. He nicknamed it his “ninja turtle suit.” Inside it, step by step, he covered more ground. From bed to bathroom. From bathroom to across the hotel room. From the room to the lobby.
What he could not seem to do was sleep.
‘I Could SLEEP’
The pain medication doctors prescribed numbed the pain but left him worse off in other ways. Digestion problems. No appetite. Foggy days. He needed rest more than anything, and he could not find it. He would shift positions trying to escape the pain, the night would shred itself into broken hours, and he would wake up exhausted.
Coleman had used cannabis recreationally before the crash but had never thought of it in any kind of therapeutic frame. He didn’t know much about minor cannabinoids. He had not tried edibles. Flower was what he knew, and that’s where he started experimenting.
The difference, he says, was sleep.
I could SLEEP. And I didn’t have the side effects of the opioids.
Joey Coleman
He does not describe it as a cure. He still had plenty of pain. Nothing about his body got fixed overnight. What changed, he says, was being able to rest. Once that was possible, the rest of the recovery had room to happen.
From flower, he started reading deeper into the plant, into minor cannabinoids and how different compounds work together. Back home in Colorado, that interest accelerated.
The Old Joey and the New One
Before the crash, Coleman’s life had been built almost entirely on motion. He had coached tennis professionally in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and California. He had run a charter sailing business in Nicaragua, after he and Kelsey lived for a year on a 50-foot sailboat they had renovated themselves. He had climbed Mount Elbrus while fundraising for an orphanage in Mongolia, where he later spent a summer taking the kids camping and living in a ger.
The accident did not just damage his spine. It pulled the floor out from under his sense of who he was.
“My life had been defined by constant movement, by chasing the horizon,” he said. “And now, suddenly, it felt like that might all be a dream of the past. That the life I loved may be gone, but what scared me more is that the person I believed I was may be gone as well.”
He still mountain bikes. He still snowboards. By any external measure, he has come back further than the surgeons in Bucaramanga thought possible. The part he describes as ongoing is internal.
“It took me a long time to stop constantly comparing the old me to what I was capable of now,” Coleman said. “That comes with a lot of time and acceptance, and it’s something I’m still always working on.”
The 4 Percent Chance
When Coleman and Kelsey came back to the United States, they came home to Western Colorado, where Joey grew up in a family of nine kids. He wanted to be near family. He wanted to keep recovering. He also wanted to get into the cannabis space.
His hometown of Grand Junction did not yet allow recreational dispensaries, so he started in the legal hemp and CBD market. He learned about the plant from the ground up: cultivation, extraction, product development, cannabinoid profiles. The boom in that market eventually went bust in his region, but it left him standing where he needed to be when Grand Junction finally moved on adult-use cannabis.
In 2023, the city held a lottery for 10 recreational cannabis licenses. Coleman had spent more than a year showing up at city council meetings to help shape the process, with no guarantee that licenses would be granted at all, much less that one of them would land in his name.
The lottery itself was theater, Coleman says. Thirty-one ping pong balls in a gold cage. A city employee spun the cage between draws. Each ball had a number that corresponded to an applicant.
Seven applicants got called. Then eight. Then nine. Coleman’s number was not among them. In his head, he put the odds at 4 percent.
“One ball left,” he said. “A 4% chance of winning. Well, that’s that.”
The cage turned. The tenth ball dropped.
It was his.
What KAI Became
Coleman opened KAI Dispensary in Grand Junction. The building was designed by his brother, an architect. The space includes a gallery that rotates a new local artist every month.
But Coleman is quick to step away from the architecture.
“We could have the coolest building in the world,” he said, “but if people come in and have a bad experience, they’re not coming back.”
He is open about what the place owes to the years before it. The crash. The hospital. The hotel. The walker. The flower that helped him sleep. The lottery. All of it sits inside the building somewhere. The hospitality reflex picked up running boats in Nicaragua. The patience learned in a wheelchair. The bud tender training built around how he wished he had been treated, back when he was the guy in the ninja turtle suit trying to figure out how to sleep.
KAI, he says, is what those years became.
Coleman’s account reflects his personal experience with cannabis as part of his recovery and is not medical advice. Individual results vary. Anyone considering cannabis for similar purposes should consult a qualified physician.
