Severe pain kept Graves away from his favorite pastime — fishing. Now he and wife, Lori, are looking forward to spending quality time together on the Crystal River in Florida.

When 71-year-old Joe Graves was a young man, he found out what it was like to have 220 volts of electricity go through his body during a machine shop accident. Since "lightning" never strikes twice, he thought he'd met his quota. He was wrong.

Graves' next jolting experience wasn't caused by a live wire, though. It happened during a fall he took in September 2003. While vacationing in Daytona Beach, Fla., Graves and his wife Lori were relaxing with friends on their hotel's beachfront deck when he missed a step on a dimly lit stairway. He instinctively reached out for the railing.

"When I fell and grabbed the rail, it was like I'd been hit by voltage off of a line," says Graves. "It sent electrical impulses through my body that made me nauseous." The jolting episodes would come and go, and as many people do, Graves decided to wait it out instead of going to a doctor.

After about five days, the pain subsided enough for him to think he was OK. This spring, though, when he strained his neck while painting the outside of his house, the pain came back in full force.

"When he got up on the ladder to paint the eaves, he got really sick," says wife, Lori. "He would get intense burning at the base of his chest below the throat that spread across shoulders, neck and jaw. His ears would hurt. We thought it had to do with his heart."

The Graveses, who ran a successful bait and tackle business for years, plan on testing out the latest fishing gear as soon as possible.

After a hospital stay in his home town and a thorough cardiac workup, there were no answers. On a physician friend's advice, Graves made the four-hour drive from his home in Beverly Hills, Fla., to Mayo Clinic. He got an appointment quickly with Dr. Geoffrey Gates, a Mayo endocrinologist whom he'd seen before. Some of the symptoms Graves was experiencing were not consistent with a spinal injury but because of the earlier fall, Gates wanted to rule it out and ordered an MRI of the neck and spine.

"When the radiologist called me with the results, I got on the phone with neurosurgery to see who could see him that day," says Gates. "We knew we needed to get him in as soon as possible."

Neurosurgeon Dr. Ronald Reimer fit him in and by mid-afternoon was giving Graves the diagnosis: an area in his cervical spine looked like an hourglass — a telltale sign of severe spinal cord compression. The situation was bad enough that one wrong move could have paralyzed him from the neck down.

"If this moved a quarter of an inch in the spine, that would have been it," says Graves. "And if I'd gone another six months without treatment, there was a good chance they wouldn't have been able to fix me."

Graves was fitted for a neck brace to protect his spine over the weekend and scheduled for surgery Monday morning.

"When we looked at the MRI, there was a classic snake-eye sign," says Reimer. "There were two slits on the cross-section of the film. That showed us that the blood flow to the spinal cord was impaired so much from the swelling that the cord was beginning to fail. When you see that, it usually means that recovery after surgery will be limited because of irreversible damage due to atrophy of the spinal cord."

During the complex surgery, which took about five hours, Reimer first went in from the front, removed the bone spur compressing the cord, inserted a graft into the space and fused it all together with a titanium plate and four screws. He then went in from the back and did a laminectomy, removing the top bone plates of a few vertebrae to allow the spinal cord more room to heal. Eight screws and a rod were inserted to secure the spine. Most patients don't require both procedures, but because of the amount of swelling, Graves' case warranted it. He wore a neck brace for eight weeks to immobilize the repair work. In July, he could finally discard the brace and start physical therapy to strengthen his neck muscles.

"His prognosis is great," says Reimer, who adds Graves' motivation and excellent physical condition from years of exercising helped his outcome. "Once he completes his physical therapy, he should be able to return to normal activity with minimal limitation."

Both doctors say their ability to tend to Graves so efficiently is a credit to Mayo Clinic's team approach. Swift communication that occurs between everyone involved in a patient's care, including lab and radiology techs, nurses, schedulers, the doctors and their secretarial staff, allowed them to quickly coordinate a plan of action.

Graves says he's thankful for the care he received as well as the stroke of luck that pushed him to paint his house this spring. "It sure was a good omen," he says. "Had I not done that, I wouldn't have known how bad off I was."

He and Lori, also a Mayo Clinic patient who was diagnosed and successfully treated in 2004 for two types of breast cancer, now plan to spend more time doing what they love most.

They're going fishing.