Video producer’s cerebral palsy doesn’t stop him from revealing beauty of life – Houston Chronicle

Photo: Melissa Phillip, Staff

Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, works from his home as a video editor and producer for Prayer Powered Productions. His projects are usually for churches and the YMCA.

Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, works from his home as a video editor and producer for Prayer Powered Productions. His projects are usually for churches and the YMCA.

Troy Haney works on a video of a dance recital at his home office for Prayer Powered Productions.

Troy Haney works on a video of a dance recital at his home office for Prayer Powered Productions.

Troy Haney, right, volunteers each summer as a counselor at Super Place Camp, a vacation Bible school-type camp for children with disabilities.

Troy Haney, right, volunteers each summer as a counselor at Super Place Camp, a vacation Bible school-type camp for children with disabilities.

Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, volunteers as a counselor at Super Place Camp, a vacation Bible school-type camp for children with disabilities, in 2016.

Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, volunteers as a counselor at Super Place Camp, a vacation Bible school-type camp for children with disabilities, in 2016.

At 3 and 4 years old, Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, spent 21 hours a day in an iron lung.

At 3 and 4 years old, Troy Haney, who has cerebral palsy, spent 21 hours a day in an iron lung.

A wall of Troy Haney's home office is decorated with Ts because he's quite close to the nephews he helps care for, who call him "T."

A wall of Troy Haney's home office is decorated with Ts because he's quite close to the nephews he helps care for, who call him "T."

Video producer's cerebral palsy doesn't stop him from revealing beauty of life

Troy Haney doesn't walk, yet he can move - move people to share life. He doesn't have peripheral vision, yet he strives to capture the beauty around him.

Both professionally and personally, he creates videos of people's life moments. Haney also leads Bible study and volunteers at a camp for disabled children. One of the church youths Haney took under his wing made Eagle Scout and awarded Haney the mentor pin.

Not bad for a guy whose earliest memories are of life in an iron lung.

Haney, 34, has cerebral palsy, an umbrella term for neurological disorders that result from damage to the brain in utero, at birth or shortly after. CP disrupts a person's ability to control muscle movement, posture and balance.

In Haney's case, he was born seven weeks premature with a collapsed lung; the lack of oxygen to his brain meant he wouldn't meet the usual infant milestones. He got his diagnosis at 8 months old, when he still wasn't sitting, crawling or reaching for things.

The specialist told his parents that it'd come late, but he would walk. Six weeks later, Jimmy and Laurie Haney made an almost superhuman commitment to physical therapy for Troy, not yet a year old.

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Their church funded trips to Philadelphia for treatments three times a year. Therapies cost $500 a month. At home, Haney learned his ABCs on his stomach - 21 hours a day face down in an iron lung. It helped his rib cage expand to ward off pneumonia. A team of 100 volunteers helped Laurie and Jimmy, then a police officer working night shifts, with "patterning," a technique to teach Troy how to crawl.

When he was 3, they laid pieces of carpet on the street where Haney still lives so that he could crawl a mile a day, staying ahead of him to re-lay each piece.

Back surgery at Texas Children's Hospital followed at age 6. He endured physical therapy five days a week. He wore leg braces for a while.

But walking never came, and in fifth grade, when Haney got his first power wheelchair, he declared, "I'm free."

"This (power chair) kind of makes me lazy," Haney says now, "but I can move better."

The thing is, nobody else would describe Haney as lazy.

"He doesn't know an obstacle," says Cindy Stoker, the teacher at Jersey Village High School who nurtured his interest in audio/visual work - no easy feat when CP impeded his hand-eye coordination and ability even to hold a pencil adequately. But he stuck with it.

"If Troy wanted to do it, he was going to do it," Stoker says. "It was, 'I'll hold the camera for you, and you tell me what shot you want.' You can't look at Troy and say, 'Oh, that's the one in the wheelchair.' It's 'Troy, the one with all the ideas.'"

"She was who always fought for me," Haney says of Stoker. He started with school plays and moved on to Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District's local access station.

Haney then pursued film editing at Houston Community College. He was still undergoing four therapies a week, so he took just two or three classes a semester. At last, in 2008, he graduated, and Prayer Powered Productions was born.

His home office is a workshop, where his part of the family business involves culling stills and video to tell a story (Jimmy, who retired as a detective two years ago, does the camerawork, and Laurie designs the DVD artwork). Haney uses Apple's Final Cut Pro X to produce videos of Cypress Creek YMCA dance recitals, vacation Bible schools, graduations, weddings and more.

"He doesn't think he's as good as he is," says Donna Hester, librarian at First Baptist Academy, for which Haney has made videos. Hester is a lifelong family friend who helped Haney learn to crawl, still his main way of moving when he's not in his chair.

"In a society where people want it yesterday," Haney's dedication stands out, Hester says. When a group of church campers returned on a Friday night, she says, Haney had by 2 a.m. completed a video of their experience to be played at services that weekend.

Music is important to Haney, who, according to his mother, "lives in his headphones." His tastes run from Southern gospel and bluegrass to old country, Ray Charles and Fats Domino. His dream would be making music videos.

Haney found tracks of Spanish lullabies to lay over a photo slideshow of a bilingual child's birthday party. He paired Jordan Feliz's worship song "The River" with footage of a church youth group swimming in a river.

Haney's faith leads him to try to help others. For years, he hosted a mentorship gathering for youths from his church, Lazybrook Baptist.

"It's easy sometimes for people to open up to me because I'm going through this," he says of CP. Yet Haney doesn't consider himself an activist for the disabled, just a regular guy. A woman from church whom he now considers a friend didn't grasp at first how to connect to this man in a wheelchair. He describes her approach as, "I'll hug on him."

"I'm kind of more 'normal' than that," he says with an eye roll and a chuckle.

Still, his condition makes him sensitive to those who might be overlooked. As a volunteer at Super Place Camp, a vacation Bible school serving the disabled each August, "I'm being a friend. I know that for me, if I went into a place and didn't know anybody, what would I look for?"

To Josh Eaton, Haney has been like a big brother. The 25-year-old who waits tables and tends bar at the Wyndham Houston-Medical Center took encouragement from Haney's words when he met him as a teen at Lazybrook Baptist. Eaton's father was incarcerated. Haney helped with schoolwork, and the Haney family gave Eaton his first laptop when he went to college.

"He was there for me when I had nowhere else to go," says Eaton, who gave Haney his mentor pin for helping him make Eagle Scout.

"We've been to Chicago together, drove through a tropical storm in a van with no air conditioning just to go get something to eat," Eaton says. "It's not only the big things that he helps you through, but also just those minor details, the little things, that I think matter the most."

To Haney, the time spent in that iron lung 30 years ago, surrounded by adults instead of running and playing with children, was in a way a blessing: It gave him the ability to relate to anyone.

"My situation allows me to help other people. I know we're all imperfect. I'm able to love God and love people through the things I'm able to do."

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Video producer's cerebral palsy doesn't stop him from revealing beauty of life - Houston Chronicle