Austin Brotman, right, cheers on a JSerra swimmer with his fellow students during a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman talks with friends while writing notes for seniors during a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

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Luke Prendiville, left, a JSerra senior, talks with Austin Brotman during a swim meet at JSerra High School in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman, 16, broke his neck in a diving accident almost two years ago. He recently got a perfect score on the ACT, the college aptitude test. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman talks with a JSerra coach during a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)



Austin Brotman watches as a race begins during a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman, right, talks with Maddie Nosek, a JSerra junior, after arriving at a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman, 16, broke his neck in a diving accident almost two years ago. He recently got a perfect score on the ACT, the college aptitude test. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman watches as a race begins during a swim meet at JSerra in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)

Austin Brotman, 16, broke his neck in a diving accident almost two years ago. He recently got a perfect score on the ACT, the college aptitude test. (Photo by Matt Masin, Orange County Register, SCNG)



Austin Brotman stands on the beach in Florida the day before his injury. (Courtesy Shelley Brotman)

Austin Brotman rests after surgery on his spinal column at Tampa General Hospital in Florida. (Courtesy Shelley Brotman)

He dreamed of being perfect.

Of the 2 million-plus students who took the ACT college readiness exam in 2016, only about 2,200 got a perfect score. That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent. Still, he set out to do it. He took ACT prep. He tried to relearn punctuation. He fretted over grammar.

Since his earliest days, his mother remembers, he had always chased perfection.

But what is perfect, really?

Austin Brotman was once a 15-year-old kid, a muscular swimmer at JSerra High, an academic whiz kid with the grades and the drive to set his sights on medical school. He was tan and fit and popular. “The girls,” his mother Shelley said, “had just started to notice.”

That was then.

And now … His legs sometimes burn mysteriously in the middle of the night, worse pain than he could have ever imagined. He can’t feel his feet. His fingers have begun to atrophy. His goal is to stay strong enough to propel his own wheelchair. He DOES NOT want a motorized wheelchair.

Perfection isn’t what it used to be.

Perfect is creating opportunities with his mind when his body won’t cooperate. Perfect is affecting other people.

Austin, now 16, crushed the C-5, C-6 and C-7 vertebrae in his neck while vacationing in Florida on June 16, 2015. The emergency room doctor explained the injury to Austin’s parents by turning a styrofoam cup upside down on a table and squashing it with his fist.

Nothing could have prepared him for the difficulties he faced as he prepared to take that college exam.

Head first

The Brotmans, who live in Ladera Ranch, won a trip to Florida at a fund-raising auction when Austin was in middle school.

They finally used the plane tickets between Austin’s freshman and sophomore years at JSerra.

What a great trip, at least at the beginning. They visited the Kennedy Space Center and Universal Studios. And then, they got an idea that hadn’t been part of the plan. The Brotmans decided to rent a boat and tour Sanibel Island, which is known for its seashell filled beaches and very few residents.

Austin didn’t want to go, but his mother convinced him. “Get off your computer,” she said. “You’re going.”

Austin took a new pair of goggles on the boat ride. He wanted to test them in the water to see if they would stay on his face so he could use them on his swim team.

Shelley Brotman said her son had been warned several times about the local waters. It was difficult to judge the depth, so he shouldn’t be diving off the boat as it approached the island.

“I have selective hearing,” Austin said.

He stood on the edge of the boat, and his mother yelled, “DON’T DIVE.”

The teenager went head first.

The water turned out to be about 6 feet deep.

“I didn’t feel my head hit anything,” Austin said. “There was no pain, only numbness. I thought I had broken my shoulder.”

Then he realized something was wrong.

“It was taking a long time to get to the surface,” Austin said. “I was really confused.”

His uncle Matthew jumped in and pulled Austin to safety. He laid Austin on the beach.

The Brotmans knew something terrible had happened.

“I touched something wet and cold with my hand,” Austin said. “It was my leg.”

There was nothing anyone could do. The emergency helicopter needed 30 to 40 minutes to get there.

Austin and his mother thought he would die on the beach.

“My breath started to go,” Austin said.

They prayed together. Austin asked for his younger brother, Aiden. They hadn’t gotten along so well growing up.

“I told him I was proud of him,” Austin said through his tears.

Austin braced for his last breath.

Phone call home

Austin Brotman didn’t die on the beach.

A helicopter took him to Tampa General Hospital.

He asked his mother to call his water polo coach so he could let the team know he would likely miss the next practice.

“He didn’t go into a lot of detail about the accident over the phone,” said coach Paul Cruzan. “There was no solicitation of sympathy. He simply told us to make sure the boys knew not to dive into the pool head first. The team always came first. That right there says so much about him.”

As he was being prepped for surgery, he told his mother not to worry. “They do this all the time,” Austin said. “It could be a lot worse.”

The surgery lasted three hours, and included a procedure in which doctors took out bone fragments, ground them up and placed them back inside his spinal column hoping the cells would grow again.

Shelley found a Catholic church near the hospital.

“I was lying on the floor crying,” she said. She noticed the readings for that week were “miracles and healing,” which made her feel better.

His surgery was a success. So much so that a second surgery, which had been planned, was canceled.

Advanced placement

Almost immediately, Austin Brotman got to work.

Many people who suffer a paralyzing spinal injury make walking their goal. He has some slight feeling in his arms and legs, some slight movement in his fingers and his triceps are still functional, meaning he can operate a non-motorized wheelchair.

“There would be no walking,” he said. “My goals shifted.”

Austin was determined to develop the part of him that still worked best: his mind.

He transferred from Tampa General to Craig Hospital, a renowned center for spinal cord rehabilitation in Englewood, Colo.

Ask Austin Brotman about his nightmares, and he’ll tell you about some of the things he saw at Craig. He met a woman who had been shot in the neck. He met a teenager who contracted a virus and lost the use of her limbs.

He saw a man with curled fingers.

“I looked at his hands,” Austin said, “and they looked almost like skeletons. I was afraid. I really wanted my hands back, more than anything else.”

He had chosen Craig because when the representative from the hospital met him she said, “Did you know you can scuba dive?”

She kept going. He could drive, ski, travel, go to school, live independently and have a family someday.

“I wanted to focus on the things I can do,” Austin said.

Between intensive rehabilitation sessions to work on his body, he could study.

“It was normal for him,” Shelley said. “He could be a student.”

In his hospital bed, he started five classes: Advanced Placement biology, honors English, Latin, pre-calculus and chemistry.

“Everyone was worried about him falling behind, but he actually didn’t miss a single step academically,” Cruzan, his coach, said. “In fact, he got straight A’s. I’m certain this accident had an enormous emotional impact on him, but you would never know it when you talked to him.”

His teachers sent him links to video lessons.

“That was what I was supposed to be doing,” Austin said. “My life has got to keep moving.”

His effort was Herculean. He studied even though he couldn’t hold a pencil or turn a page in a book. His mother sat at his bedside to help him any way she could.

“He got a lot less sleep than anybody else at Craig,” Shelley said. “He continued forward.”

His swim and water polo teammates started using the hashtag #Austinstrong to describe anything that took great effort. #Shelleystrong would have been appropriate, too.

When he returned to Orange County after three months at Craig, he became an assistant swim coach. He went to two formal dances. He started the Spinal Cord Injury Scholars Fund, to raise money for technology that people may need when they can’t use their hands or walk.

He began to think about his college choice, narrowing his myriad choices to USC, Stanford, Cal, UC Davis and Pomona College.

And he started prepping for the ACT.

Chasing perfection

Here’s what he said anyone needs to get a perfect score on the ACT: Attention to detail, practice, a good tutor and a recognition of patterns in the way the questions are asked.

He was worried about the grammar and punctuation part of the test.

Austin took the exam in February with a “scribe,” meaning he had a person who could fill in the answers when he said them. Because of his injury, he had to figure out the math problems in his head.

He’s been forced to figure out a lot of things in his head.

Instead of being a surgeon, he now wants to be a doctor specializing in pain management.

“I saw the amount of pain people were in,” Austin said.

He is determined to help.

“Austin isn’t just any other kid,” Coach Cruzan said. “This young man can truly achieve anything he puts his mind to.

“Austin is a real live Superman.”

It took more than a month for him to get the results of his ACT.

He scored 36 out of 36.

Austin Brotman was perfect.