ASHLAND — Just after his car accident on April 18, most doctors wouldn’t have given Ernie Thacker two cents for his chance of recovery.

Those doctors should have seen him this week, belting out three verses of “Zion’s Hill” a capella with his buddy, fellow America’s Bluegrass Band member Don Rigsby, and friend and relative Junior Blankenship, a member of Ralph Stanley’s II band.

“I’m just glad to be here and see everybody,” he said during a visit to Boyd County Ford in Ashland, where he was presented with an electric wheelchair.

In April, Thacker, 35, was seriously injured in a car accident near his home of Hayside, Va.

“The last thing I remember was, I was on my way to my brother’s house to jam, he lives about eight miles from me, and there were some CDs on the dashboard,” Thacker recalled. “The roads are all curvy and there’s an S-curve there. Those CDs hit the floorboard and I remember bending over to get them and then, the next thing I remember, was waking up in the hospital.”

Thacker broke 12 ribs and both collar bones, ruptured his spleen and crushed his aorta, the most life-threatening of all his injuries.

“The doctor said my aorta was ruptured in three places,” he said. “They had to cut the nerve endings to my legs to keep the blood in the upper part of my body. The doctor had to make the decision to let me live and be paralyzed or let me die.”

Thacker lost 50 units of blood in 13 hours and his aorta required surgery twice before the bleeding stopped.

“They called me the Miracle Patient in Bristol because the doctors said patients usually don’t even make it to the hospital with a ruptured aorta,” Thacker said.

He spend more than 100 days in the intensive care unit of Wellmont Medical Center in Bristol, Tenn., before being transferred to Norton Community Hospital in Norton, Va., where he underwent rehabilitation.

Although Thacker is now paralyzed from the waist down, he’s already singing and playing guitar again, a least a little.

“While I was in the hospital, there was this little lady across the hall from me, she was precious,” Thacker said. “She was getting ready to be released the next day and she wanted to me to sing for her, so I wheeled over there and sang ‘Zion’s Hill’ and it made her day.”

And there was the picking episode.

“(A fan in Georgia) brought me a Blue Ridge Guitar when I was in the hospital and my arm was still in a cast,” he said. “I started playing, I ran down on a G run and the nurses came in there and got all over me to quit.”

Thacker was a serious mandolin player and singer by the time he was a teen, catching the eye of Ralph Stanley, who asked him to join the Clinch Mountain Boys, first as a mandolin player and then as lead singer and guitarist in 1989.

Thacker is a member of the America’s Bluegrass Band which is the house band for the America’s Bluegrass Gospel Show, which airs on WSAZ TV at 9:30 a.m. Sundays, along with Don Rigsby and Melvin Goins, both of whom attended the wheelchair presentation. Both contributed to the purchase of the wheelchair, as did the show’s host, Bo McCarty, and Ken Blanton, Joann Blanton and Charlie Lewis of Boyd County Ford.

Thacker’s own band, Route 23, has been among the top 20 nominees for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Emerging Artist of the Year Award for 1999 and 2000. He’s a regular performer in the Ashland area at bluegrass venues and festivals.

Thacker hopes to be back on stage by the middle on next year, performing at the ever-popular bluegrass festivals.

“It’s going to be hard,” he said. “It’s going to be such a change from what I’ve done all my life. I want to get my good friends back in the band because going on the road is going to be really hard with all these changes. It’s going to be so personal I’m going to want my good friends with me.”

However, he’s still got some recuperating to do.

“I still have a lot of back pain,” he said. “On rainy days, I have pain in the elbow. There was so much swelling, I was in the hospital for two months before they realize it was dislocated.”

Thacker said he must continue with rehabilitation exercises, too, to build back muscle, especially stomach muscles that help with balance in those whose legs are paralyzed.

Despite the horrific car accident, Thacker said he’s grateful to be alive and as well as he is, and he’s found that the accident has changed his life for the better.

“I consider myself a very blessed man,” he said. “I have changed my ways, my ways of thought. I catch myself praying when I’m in an empty room. I thank God for letting me live. I know He let me live for a reason. I don’t know what it is yet. ....I’ve been going to church with my mom and dad and I’m trying to live right for my kids and for my wife.”

He said his wife, Dorthy, has been a huge support to him.

“It’s just like having a doctor take care of you,” he said. “She sees that I do my exercises ... I couldn’t have done it without her.”

To celebrate his progress and their relationship, they renewed their vows Oct. 28. “The kids gave her away,” he said. Their children are Ernest Keith, 12, and Whitley Nicole, 13.

He’s also learned how many good friends he has.

At least eight fundraising gospel shows were organized to help pay his medical bills and he said he’s received help from his fans, many of whom call themselves “Thacker Backers,” as well as fellow musicians and bands from the area and as far away as Florida.

“I’m so thankful for so many things,” he said. “For being here, for God sparing my body and letting me live, for all my fans and friends...it’s so unreal, amazing, how people have come to my aid. I probably would have lost everything I had it if hadn’t been for their help.”

LEE WARD can be reached at lward@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2661.