Finding a Way Back to Music

“I wasn’t just another injured person at Craig Hospital,” 34-year-old Chris Barnett says. “My entire medical team really cared about me as a person during my five-month stay. They got to know me and learned about what made me tick. They learned about my passion for music and my work as a worship leader at my church. And they made sure that music was a large part of my recovery.”

In fact, Chris’s rehab goals included getting his hands moving so he could play guitar, as well as figuring out how to create music once again.

“These objectives also became my goals as his music therapist,” explains Annamarie Engelhard, a neurologic music therapist at Craig. “Improving breath support for singing and developing adaptive instrumentation became our mission. After an injury, returning to music can be challenging because making music tends to look very different after a spinal cord injury. But it was so important to help Chris find his way back to music and make him feel like Chris again.”

 Choosing Craig

An electrician by trade, Chris was working as an electrical supervisor at a job site near his home in Bakersfield, California, in 2021, when he fell through a ceiling, causing a C6-7 spinal cord injury.

His workers’ compensation provided numerous rehab options in California, but none of these allowed his wife, Kala, to be by his side. “We chose Craig because it was the only option for us to be together,” Chris says. “And being together was way more important to me than anything else.”

Once at Craig, Chris and Annamarie got to work.

Because Chris’s injury caused limited use of his diaphragm and the muscles around it, Annamarie worked to teach him how to breathe in a new way so Chris could begin to sing again. In addition, Annamarie experimented with different adaptive tools and taught Chris to play the auto harp and slide guitar.

“I Can Still Hold You”

Before the accident, Chris used to write a song for Kala every year. Not wanting his injury to get in the way of that special tradition, he used some of his time at Craig to write a song for Kala about hope and love, titled “I Can Still Hold You.”

Annamarie adds, “Chris performed his song at the end of his stay. It was such a powerful and intimate moment. You could see the strength and determination that he used to get through this challenging time. It was truly a beautiful moment.”

Looking back on his experience at Craig, Chris feels a great deal of gratitude for music therapy and the donors that fund the program. “Thanks to music therapy, I was able to learn to sing again and find new ways of creating music when I thought I had lost that ability. I’m so thankful that Craig focused on my passion for music because it’s such a large part of my identity. It was also a huge part of my emotional and spiritual recovery. I consider music a therapeutic hobby that brought a lot of joy back into to my life.”