Second-year Bellevue Hospital resident Arthur Winer, MD, wasn't sure what to expect when he was assigned to care for his first paralyzed patient on his new rotation.

"You have a certain picture in your mind. They tend to have a lot of needs. It's not clear how interactive they're going to be," Winer told MedPage Today.

But when he entered the room of Jan Kwiatkowski, a Polish immigrant who suffered a spinal cord injury after a bad accident, his preconceptions were shattered.

"We started talking [through an interpreter] and he just defied my expectations," Winer said. "He was able to laugh and joke. There was a whole man behind the injury."

Since that first meeting in December, Winer had the chance to get to know Kwiatkowski. He learned the injured man came to the U.S. for work more than 10 years ago, and that he had been living alone in Brooklyn since his wife passed away. He had a son in London and a daughter back in his hometown of Ostroleka in Poland, who had three children of her own.

Kwiatkowski couldn't remember what happened the day of the accident. Doctors think it was a hit-and-run. He only remembers waking up in the CT scan machine days after his injury, which left him paralyzed from the neck down.

But what he did know -- and what Winer found out as he and Kwiatkowski grew closer -- was that he wanted to get home. Back to Poland, to his hometown, to be with his daughter and grandkids.

"It took him a while to allow me to contact them. He was afraid of what they might think," Winer said. "But his daughter was so happy when we got in touch with her. She was very excited about the possibility of him coming home."

Since getting the green light, Winer and other residents have been coordinating Kwiatkowski's return to Poland. They secured a passport with the Polish consulate. They found him housing at a facility in his hometown of Ostroleka, with the help of his daughter. They researched their options for a flight home.

They're also hoping to finance Kwiatkowski's return with the help of a GoFundMe crowdsourcing campaign. So far, they've raised more than $20,000 of the $300,000 goal.

The price tag is so high because a medical flight alone costs $100,000. It's a private charter flight staffed by a nurse, a critical care nurse, and a paramedic: "It's basically a flying ICU," Winer says. But they might resort to a commercial flight with stretcher capabilities if they don't raise enough cash.

The rest of the money will go to paying for Kwiatkowski's assisted living costs as well as future medical expenses.

"He's only 59 so he could have many years of expenses. He'll need medications, feeding tubes, maybe surgical procedures," Winer said. "It can get expensive if he has any issues."

Winer says he's never done anything like this before -- not as an undergrad at Georgetown, nor during medical school at NYU. And not while growing up in Lebanon, Pa., a rural town about 90 miles west of Philadelphia.

"It's just nice to take a step back and to be able to help someone in their life, outside of the medical world," Winer said. "A lot of the time, we don't have the time to make that kind of connection."