by Travis Mills
Then I was with Genghis Khan. Ole Genghis and I were fighting a real barbarian horde. Genghis had a big hairy beard and he smelled something awful. Arrows flew by me. I fired back.
Then I looked outside my window. A SWAT team was coming into the hospital. Two teams. And the two teams were shooting at each other. Real bullets. Zipping in and landing an inch from my head just like we were back in Afghanistan.
Two of my cousins and I were riding skateboards along with Rob Dyrdek on the TV reality show Fantasy Factory. The show might have been on TV while I was in the room, but I thought I was actually on the show.
I was playing hockey in the NHL. I played for the Washington Capitals. We were on the ice, and the ice was cold. I skated around with pads on and a hockey stick in my hands. Fans were screaming. The puck came toward me. I slapped it hard against the boards, and into the net it flew.
A fifty-year-old go-go dancer crawled on a leash down the hallway of Walter Reed. She had a red bikini on, and she was old and wrinkly. I could see her clearly in the hallway. But I was still in my bed too. I was in two places at once. I wanted to go talk to her, but something held me fast in the bed.
Kramer from Seinfeld stopped by. He sat in my room with a head full of high wild hair, and I saw him as clearly as I’d ever seen anyone. We carried on a conversation for at least two hours.
“Giddyup,” Kramer said. “I’m useless, Jerry. Yo diggity dog. It’s like a sauna in here.”
“But it’s not a legitimate business,” I said. “Those pretzels are making me thirsty.”
“Stick a fork in me, Jerry, I’m done,” he said. “What day is it, anyway?”
“It’s just the first day,” a voice said. Only it wasn’t Kramer anymore. It was my father. I think.
A tube was stuck down my throat and I tried to spit the tube out. I shouted, “Hey—take this tube out of my neck!”
“It’s okay, buddy,” said a voice. “We’ll get it out for you, buddy. Just hang on, buddy.” This was a nurse. A male nurse with a bald head.
“Is the tube out yet?” I shouted.
“Not yet, buddy. Don’t worry, buddy. We’ll get it out in a minute, buddy.”
I hated this man. I hated him desperately. I shouted, “Stop calling me buddy!”
Kelsey later told me those words actually came out of my mouth. But I was talking really slowly in this hollow Cookie Monster type of voice, dragging out words so they were almost unintelligible. “STT-OO-PP-PPP…CALL-INNNNG…ME-EE-EE…BUDDY-YYYY!”
Everyone thought at the rate I was handling coming out of the Ketamine coma (or wasn’t), I was going to have permanent brain damage. It was quite frightening for everybody who saw me, I was told later, but I had no idea I was putting them through this terror.
Once, somebody was stealing Chloe. That hallucination was the worst. She was out in a field, and somebody was running after her, wanting to hurt her. “Don’t touch my daughter!” I yelled. “I’ll kill you!”
The times when I was semi-lucid, I was still frightened. Angry. Confused. Insistent. I could talk sometimes. Sometimes I couldn’t. It was my mother’s birthday, and I gave her a necklace. I think that actually happened. No, it was Mother’s Day. Maybe that was it. I accused my dad of stealing from people. My dad never stole from people. But I was certain he did. My brother, Zach, came for a week, but I accused him of never showing up. My dad showed me pictures. Zach was here. So was my sister, Sarah. Everybody was here. The pictures were real. I made my dad phone Zach at three in the morning because I was convinced Zach was choking to death on a chicken bone. Dad placed the call. Zach was fine. Sleepy, but fine.
One night my mom was in the room with me. My eyes were as big as marbles and I was hallucinating. My heart pounded out of my chest. Fortunately, I never wigged out on my mom during that whole time. I think I wigged out on just about everybody else. Later, she told me she’d asked a nurse that night when I was coming back. The nurse didn’t have a good answer. “He might not ever come back” was all the nurse could say.
—
Josh was in my room.
I could see him clearly.
“Josh,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I see dead people. Don’t you?”
“There are no dead people in the room,” Josh said flatly. “Go back to sleep, Travis.”
Five minutes went by. “Josh?”
“Yeah?”
“Those dead people are still there.”
“Are you serious?”
I cracked a grin. “I’m just messing with you, dude.”
“You jerk,” Josh said. But Josh was smiling. If I was cracking jokes, then he knew I was back from the effects of the Ketamine, truly back. He leaned over me and pressed his forehead against my forehead. He’d been doing this every so often ever since I’d been wounded. A manly sort of bonding. Just to let me know family was there.
“I don’t want to die anymore,” I said. “I don’t ever want to quit.”
Josh was crying then.
So was I.
My pain was gone. My hallucinations were over. The Ketamine coma had worked. My mind was clear. Nothing was destroyed. Josh straightened up and sat back down again. I looked over to the side. The same plaque with the Bible verse was there. I couldn’t help but read the verse again.
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.
JOSHUA 1:9
Earlier that verse had made me so mad. But when I read it this time, that anger wasn’t there, at least not to the same degree it once was. My anger wasn’t gone completely. But in my mind and soul I felt for the first time a flicker of hope. My situation sucked, yes. But I was beginning to see some perspective. There was much work still to be done. Huge work. An enormous challenge lay ahead of me, yet the thought of that challenge didn’t repulse or dismay me anymore. Back in normal days, I’d loved a challenge. The quest to succeed in the army had always been a challenge for me. My situation now as a quadruple amputee held out the same sort of dare to succeed.
Sure, if I could have changed things, I wouldn’t have been in this situation. But I couldn’t change things. Being a quadruple amputee was my new reality. I could quit for good. I could shut myself off from the world. I could will myself to die.
Or I could fight forward and keep on living.
For higher reasons I would never know, I was being called to walk a new and unknown pathway. I would need to be strong and courageous, just like I’d always been. I wouldn’t be terrified. I had a wife and daughter I needed to live for, and God said He was with me.
I stared at that plaque by my bedside.
I stared at it for a long time.
Altogether, I went through thirteen surgeries, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what each one did or the exact dates when they occurred. I don’t remember much about the actual procedures, and some of the surgeries happened right after the blast while others happened as late as eight and nine months later.
But I remember seeing myself in a mirror for the first time. This was maybe three weeks in, right after coming out of the coma. My eyes were swollen, my face was puffy from the drugs, and underneath my eyes were deep dark circles. Between losing my limbs and my lack of eating solid foods for three-odd weeks, I’d dropped a total of 110 pounds. When I was in Afghanistan I’d weighed 250. I was now down to 140. I hadn’t weighed 140 since sixth grade. I felt the wrong kind of skinny, a concentration camp kind of skinny, where nutrients are deficient and muscle mass has been lost. Not to mention limbs.
I wasn’t happy about any of this. I felt self-conscious about how I looked, embarrassed, even ashamed. All the things I couldn’t do anymore loomed large, frustrating me. Small stuff even. If I had an itch, I couldn’t scratch it. If I wanted a drink of water, I had to ask someone to get it for me. I couldn’t blow my nose without someone holding a Kleenex. When I went to the bathroom, somebody needed to wipe my butt—that was the worst. Indignit
ies and inconveniences were now a regular part of each day. I felt out of control. Dependent. Grieved over what I had lost. Altogether, even though I began to progress forward, the mirror proved a stark reminder of my new life. I don’t think I could look in a mirror for about four months without breaking down.
The medical staff at Walter Reed proved great as a whole, but some were definitely better than others. Using a bedpan irritated me because I had two big cuts on my butt that would bleed. Those cuts hurt. One nurse was particularly great. Lieutenant Bussells. He figured out a way to pad my bedpan with foam. Plus he always used heated wipes. Nice.
For a long while, I wasn’t able to put into words how I felt, but I know now that if you’ve been wounded it takes time to work through your anger. You’re angry about little things, about big things, about things you’ve never been angry about before. You need to work through the new harsh reality that your world has changed. You can’t do the same things you once did. For me, I didn’t even look the same as I used to look. And I didn’t look like other people, ordinary people.
I soon learned that whenever somebody new saw me, he was bound to give me a long look before turning away. Either that, or the person would glance away quickly, stare at the ceiling, and deliberately not look at me again. Some looks contained pity. Some contained shock and horror. Some contained gratitude and respect. I couldn’t control the looks I received from others. I could only control how I reacted to the looks. If a person wondered what happened to me, then my preference was that he should just ask me. It didn’t bother me to talk about it. I’d just tell him I was bitten by a shark and we’d have a laugh. That would set us both at ease, and then I’d explain how the injury really happened if he wanted to know more.
The truth is this took a while to work through, and some days I was growlier than others. One morning I needed a test and was wheeled down the hall to another room. A kid was hanging out in that part of the hospital visiting someone. I needed to wait out in the hallway before going into the test room and the kid stared wide-eyed at me, her mouth agape.
Normally I like kids, and I tried to shrug it off. But the kid kept staring—and staring and staring—and the kid’s parent saw her do this but didn’t do anything about it. Finally, fed up, I hissed to the kid, “You know who did this to me? The bogeyman in your closet and the monster under your bed.”
Just then I was wheeled into the test room. I chuckled darkly to myself. Hey—chalk one up for Uncle Travis.
On another occasion, a representative for the army’s mental health unit came by my room. I know that some guys go to counseling after they’ve been wounded, and it works well for them. But I’m pretty straightforward as a rule, and I didn’t think counseling was for me. She started asking me all these questions, but I just gave her my name, rank, and serial number, then pretended to be asleep. She sighed, exasperated, then came back a while later. I was eating cereal, but as soon as I saw her I closed my eyes again and feigned snoring. I didn’t think my problems were anybody else’s business. I knew what my problems were. I could see them plainly. My stumps were all too obvious.
—
The one silver lining to the particular type of wounds I’d received was this: despite the severe extent of my injuries, my cuts were surprisingly clean. What was gone was gone. What was still left was still there. Basically, surgeons just cleaned my cuts, folded skin over my stumps, then stapled and stitched up the loose skin. All I needed to do after that was heal. I had no skin grafts. No burns. No internal organ damage. No brain damage. No intense recurring pain after the coma had done its work.
My right arm had been blown off near the top of my biceps. The main artery in that arm had been severed when I was wounded, so the arm bled really badly at first, and then the wound scarred up on the front of my right armpit where shrapnel tore through it. That’s my shortest limb, and I had a shoulder and a tiny bit of an arm left there.
My left arm was the one they’d amputated at the hospital. I had the biceps, elbow, and about half the forearm left.
My right leg was ripped off in the middle of the knee. I didn’t have a kneecap or a joint anymore. The leg was amputated again surgically about two inches above the knee, so it’s shorter than my left leg. I had scars around there from big holes they needed to sew up.
With my left leg, I still had the limb down to the kneecap, but that’s it. That was the leg that had still been minimally attached after the blast. Medics had lashed it underneath me for the flight to Kandahar. When doctors removed my clothing on the operating table, my leg came off with my pants.
I had a scar that ran down my back about four inches. And I had a big dent in my butt cheek where a big piece of meat was gone. The dent didn’t hurt, but it made my twerking look funny. I’m just joking. My twerking looks phenomenal.
It took a while for me to realize how lucky I was—in a manner of speaking. Despite the severity of what I’d been through, I could still go forward. I didn’t need to wait long for my body to recover before I went to work. My new mission was to get better. My immediate task was to learn how to function in my new world. And I could do that. I genuinely could.
One visit helped enormously. A guy about my age walked into my hospital room about five days after my hallucinations stopped, and I did a double take. He was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and I could see that he was a quadruple amputee just like me, except that he had prosthetic arms and legs already in place. He was walking on his own, unaided by a wheelchair or canes or crutches or anyone holding him up. I wondered at first if I was seeing another hallucination.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Todd Nicely.” He was friendly and forthright, and he asked me if I wanted anything. I said a ginger ale, and he walked over to the fridge, bent down, grasped a can of pop, opened it up, and handed to me.
I was like, “Wow. How’d you do all that?”
“It gets easier,” he said.
Todd was a marine corporal who’d served a tour in Iraq before doing a second tour in Afghanistan. In March 2010 he was leading his men single file across a canal on a crude bamboo bridge in Afghanistan when he triggered an IED hidden at the far end of the bridge. Todd was only the second American quadruple amputee in the history of modern warfare to survive his injuries. I was the fourth. (Army Sergeant Brendan Marrocco was the first, Todd was the second, Marine Sergeant John Peck was the third, and then one more soldier, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Taylor Morris, was injured like this about two months after me, making five surviving quadruple amputees to date.)
Todd and I didn’t talk long, but just seeing him function so well encouraged me immensely. He was already out of the hospital and rehab. More important, he’d moved back into his own house with his wife.
“Things will get better,” he insisted. “You’ll walk. You’ll drive. You’ll feed yourself. It’ll take some time and hard work. You’ll need to learn how to do everything all over again. But you will overcome this. You will.”
Long after he left, his words rang in my ears. Todd’s words and example proved part of the turning point for me. I came to see that what had happened, happened. I needed to quit blaming God. I needed to drop loathing myself. I needed to stop being embarrassed about the way I looked. I needed to quit thinking my injury was caused by something wrong I did. I couldn’t dwell on the past. I had to set new goals so I could go forward. I knew there would be huge hard times ahead. Rigorous rehabilitation and a steep learning curve. But I needed to keep pushing forward. I had nothing else to do at Walter Reed except get better.
The weekend passed, and early Monday morning I buzzed for the doctor. When he came around about 6 a.m. I told him I was going to the gym for rehabilitation.
“No, not yet,” he said.
“No yourself, Doctor,” I said. “This is going to happen. I’m just lying around here in this bed. I gotta start moving.”
“Call me at one p.m. when I come around again. Let’s talk more then. I still don’t think you’re ready.�
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I shook my head. “Look, Doctor, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this today. Either you let me go to the gym or I’ll sit in my bed and do stomach crunches until I hurt myself. What’s it going to be?”
He smiled. “Why the big rush?”
I had pictures of Kelsey and Chloe on the wall so I could see them from my bed, and I told him to look at those pictures. “I’ve got a family,” I said. “I’ve got to be there for them.”
He told me to slow down and take things easy. It would probably take me three full years to get better. (At this point, I couldn’t even sit up on my own.)
I told him I didn’t have that kind of time. My family needed me. They were my motivation. I had to become again the husband and father I’d always been, and I had to do it double time.
He smiled again and said, “Okay, let me think about it. I’ll be back at one.”
I called him at 6:30. At 7:00. At 7:30. At 8:00. For four hours straight I called him every half hour.
Finally he’d had enough. He let me go.
—
My first day at rehab was nothing impressive. I was only there for an hour—that was all I could take. And everybody knew this—including the doctor, who called them ahead of time and basically said, “Look, this guy won’t take no for an answer. Just humor him, okay?”
Todd Nicely met me at rehab. I introduced myself to the staff in the occupational therapy wing and they had me lie on my stomach and stretch out my core and remaining limbs to the extent I could. They put a heating pad on my back. Then I fell asleep. I was finished.
But I went back the next day.
And the next. And the next. And the next. I went to rehab every day from then on. It took me about a week to learn how to sit up again. I needed to build up my muscles and figure out new ways of moving. At first, any movements I did were small. Like bobbing a balloon up in the air time and time again. Then I figured out how to roll over. Soon I did a sit-up. Then another. I went through range-of-motion drills where I moved the remains of my appendages in any direction I could. I did stretches. Soon I gained some speed. I started to feel limber again. Once I got going, I did sit-ups until I thought I’d pass out. I did leg raises without any weights, then leg raises with weights attached to the remaining parts of my limbs. I did arm pulls that were just brutal. Kelsey came with me and would often bring Chloe. My daughter loved sitting on a little mini-trampoline they had there. Sometimes I did ab crunches with Chloe sitting on my stomach for added resistance. Those were the best. Kelsey was a rock—always there for me. Chloe became my life force—her presence spurred me to drive harder. At first I was only able to work at rehabilitation for two hours a day. Then it became four hours a day. Before long it was eight hours a day, five days a week. My job of getting better turned into a regular forty-hour workweek. The only bad thing about recovery turned out to be the weekends, because the occupational and physical therapy staff weren’t there and I couldn’t work toward getting better.