Jeremy Warriner had grown up enthralled by his great-uncle’s stories about managing a hotel in Japan. “I had this dream of one day having my own hotel,” he says. He pictured it as “ the place that my friends and family and everybody would stop in throughout their own travels around the world.’

Warriner was making strides toward that goal in October of 2005, when his car burst into flames after another driver’s miscalculation led to a horrible collision. He woke up five and half weeks later in the Richard M. Fairbanks Burn Center at Eskenazi Health (then at Wishard Hospital) with his jaw wired shut and his legs amputated above the knee. Everyone was surprised by his calmness during the later rehabilitation, given the shocks he’d endured and the “immense” pain he was suffering. That calm, however, masked a grim determination: Warriner had “no intention of surviving” his new life at his parents’ home, he says.

What changed his mind was finding the police report of his accident. He was moved to discover how much had gone into saving him. After he reached out to the police officers and civilians who had fought the fire and removed him from the burning wreckage, his family invited them to a thank-you dinner.

Touched by the support of his family and the “almost revolving door” of coworkers and other friends who had visited him in the hospital after the accident, Warriner began to assess what he could do to help other burn survivors. He recalled his relief in talking to another survivor about walking on a limb “not biologically connected to you.” That encounter, which his medical team had arranged, inspired Warriner to join Eskenazi Health’s efforts to formalize such peer assistance by becoming part of a national program.

Phoenix SOAR® (Survivors Offering Assistance in Recovery) at Eskenazi Health offers individual peer support visits to patients like Warriner. Now a longstanding peer supporter who has met with countless survivors, he says, “It’s one of hardest struggles in life to adapt to having some form of disability. And for me that was a very traumatic experience that not only changed the way that I moved through the world, but it changed where I was moving through the world and who I was moving through the world with.” One person he is now “moving through the world” with thanks to his volunteer work is his wife, Irena Warriner, manager of supply chain data integrity at Eskenazi Health.

Warriner says after his experiences, he believes Eskenazi Health has “the best team for trauma, and not just for dealing with that trauma, but for getting that person back.” Describing the “immeasurable” impact Eskenazi Health has on its patients, he adds, “Just the fact that  there’s still so many health care workers still in the Eskenazi Health system . . . all this time later is beautiful and speaks to their commitment to a personal mission to help others . . . . ”

Following a brief return to his former position after the accident, Warriner chose to leave the hotel industry. He realized he “can’t listen to people complain about their cheeseburgers being made wrong or waiting five minutes to get into their hotel room anymore.” Still, at 49, he has achieved a version of the international adventure he envisioned so many years before. As a charter member of Rotary Club of World Disability Advocacy, he fights for the human rights of those with disabilities globally. Now the chief executive officer for Walking Spirit & Spirit Therapies, his own consultancy, he assists Eskenazi Health in developing a disabilities-focused employee resource group. And for nearly twenty years, he has helped those with new disabilities navigate an unfamiliar terrain that — with the assistance of programs like Phoenix SOAR — has more to offer than they might realize.

Patients who meet with Warriner soon discover that they’re not just learning to cope with the loss of their previous mobility; they’re also “ going into a new world that has this history and this culture that’s actually set up to try to help make things easier for you,” he says. “And that the more you embrace that instead of fighting it, the easier it is to move to whatever that next step is.”