I am not sure exactly what you consider c spine but my brother in law broke c5 - c6 and he is now an incomplete quadraplegic. Christopher Reeves broke a bit higher more like c4 and he lost the ability to breathe on his own. I think it all depends on how close to the base of the brain you injure yourself. Dale Earnhart died instantly when he hit the wall and his neck snapped. So I am guessing that if you break high enough you will die instantly, if you break lower you will suffocate and if you break even lower you will only be paralized.

Good answer. My brother broke C-1 and C-2 and died instantly in a motor vehicle accident. The lower the injury the less is damage.

I learned the following rhyme in Emergency Medical Technician school: Three, four and five keep a man alive. This refers to the fact that the spinal cord inside the third fourth and fifth cervical bones control the autonomous nervous system. Without the control at that level, normal impulses such as breathing are not performed by the body. Christopher Reeve was able to survive a break in that area, because he received immediate medical assistance, including ventilation to sustain his oxygen levels.

Yes, c1-c3 are usually fatal...down from that are commonly fatal but there are survivors with sever paralysis...

Just to set the record straight. The nerves in the human body can be separated into two major groups - the autonomic system which controls msucles you have no conscious control over but are necessary for life e.g. the muscles in the digestive system, the internal sphincter in the bladder allowing urine to be released (you have no control over this but luckily we have an extrenal sphincter as well which we can control :-). The other group are somatic nerves which control voluntary muscles such as those in your arm. The diaphragm is the major muscle in breathing and lies from left to right in your body, dividing your torso into the upper thorax (chest) and lower abdomen (tummy). When the diaphragm contracts, it flattens, pushing the abdominal contents (stomach, intestines etc) down, and increasing the space in the thorax. This lowers the pressure in the lungs (in the thorax), and causes air to be pulled into them. When you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and the air is pushed out. The nerves that control the diaphargm as mentioned before are C3,4, and 5. (C3,4,5 keeps the diaphragm alive). This means the nerves leave the spinal cord at the third, fourth and fifth cervical vertbrae in your neck, travel down through the chest and reach the diaphragm. They are autonomic so you don't have to think about breathing. Hence, if you fracture the spine at C3 or above, you damage these nerves and they cannot control the diaphragm, therefore stopping you breathing. You also have other accessory muscles to aid breathing but these usually help more with exhaling forcefully after exercise and cannot compensate longterm. ptrask's answer was slightly wrong in that the entire autonomic nervous syetm does not leave via this section of the spine - there are loads of other autonomic nerves that control other parts of the body that leave nearly all the way down the spine. "Ah," I hear you cry, "but I can control my breathing, therefore it cannot be autonomic." Well, this is where it gets complicated. The diaphragm is not an autonomic muscle, it is actually skeletal, meaning it is under voluntary control. You can hold your breath for example. So it also gets somatic innervation. However, the autonomic innervation will override this eventually - no matter how hard you try to hold your breath, your diaphragm will evetually contract under orders form your brain, hence why you can't commit suicide simply by holding your breath. If you were in hospital when you fractured your spine and lost innervation to the diaphragm, I think you could be kept alive by CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure), whereby the air is forced into your lungs at a higher pressure, thus overriding the need for the diaphragm to contract. However, in reality this could not be organised in time and evetually may damage the lungs anyway so this is not a long term strategy.

I broke my C-2 and I didn't know about it for a year. .

depending how severe the fracture is then yes you can die but i have nursed patients who have had different severities of breaks to different bones in the c spine. and they have left hospital and are still living

No it is not true. i crushed c1 in a car accident in 1979 and I am walking. Believe it or not it grows back. My doctor did tell me that I was very lucky.