Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  Standing up from a seated position proved one of the most physically difficult things to relearn how to do—and it continues to be physically difficult today. Think of all the intricate motions required to stand up from a chair. You’ve got to lean forward slightly, then push off with your arms while simultaneously pushing up with the muscles of both your quads and calves working in tandem. I didn’t have any calf muscles anymore, and since my nub was so high on my right arm, there was almost nothing to work with there, which meant the bulk of pushing up my body’s weight fell to my left arm. Therapists worked with me a long time on this. I learned to sort of throw my hips forward, then push up hard with my longer arm. I succeeded, but it continues to be one of the more difficult tasks I do.

  On a mental plane, I didn’t experience anything that might resemble post-traumatic stress disorder, but every once in a while I had dreams about the war and of being wounded. One night I dreamt I was on a mission with my platoon. The firefights were heavy and I was running around with my machine gun, taking care of business like I always did. When I woke up, I completely forgot I didn’t have arms and legs. For a moment it felt like I could leap out of bed and go attack the day, same as I’d always done. Then I remembered my new reality. I lay there for one dark moment feeling sorry for myself, then mentally clapped my hands together as if to say “Enough!,” got up, put my prosthetics on, and got on with my day.

  We discovered that the bone on the end of my right arm had started to grow again. Bones that have been cut off can do that, we learned. It began to get pointy on the end and was causing a lot of nerve pain and bruising. I got frustrated. They offered to do another surgery to shave the bone down, but I didn’t want to have another surgery. A buddy of mine, Tyler Southern, had been wounded and had experienced a similar problem. He told me he’d just beat his arm against a hard counter until the pain went away. It sounded horrific, but the principle was surprisingly sound. The process of repeated hammering against the end of the bone would chip the point away and pound out the end of the nerves. So I tried it. I beat the end of my stump against a counter until the bone chipped and the end went numb. Afterward it was sore and bruised, and the doctors were like, “You did what?!” But eventually the pain went away altogether, and I didn’t need another surgery. That was a huge relief. All I wanted to do was continue moving forward.

  Here’s how Kelsey describes what it was like to go through the process of therapy with me:

  People call my husband a hero, and I know he’s that, but he doesn’t like to be called a hero. He’s just doing what’s needed.

  I’ve always been independent, quiet, strong, an introvert. I’ve never been outgoing. When we were first married, Travis handled everything. But his being wounded has brought me out of my shell. There were many times, particularly right after the injury, where I had no choice. I needed to make phone calls. I needed to make medical decisions. I became not only Travis’s wife, but his nurse and caretaker too. That was hard, but I just thought, “Well, if he’s doing all he’s doing to get better, then I can certainly do this.”

  How did I help him? Often, I just listened and let him vent. Being wounded in that capacity is obviously a hard thing to deal with, and it’s natural to feel so many things so strongly. He needed to work through a lot of emotions. I just listened.

  Overall, I was proud of him. When he walked for the first time, I would show people videos of it later. I could feel so much joy from him. Since the day he started walking, he hasn’t stopped. He’s a beast. Even if he’s feeling sore or tired, he’ll put on his legs and walk around. He’s the first at the gym, and the last to leave every day. His therapists loved him, because he was committed to putting in those long hours.

  They say that something like 90 percent of marriages that go through a tragedy don’t make it. But with us, it’s brought us closer. It’s made us stronger. We don’t fight about stupid things that normal people get divorced over. Who takes the trash out? Who cares? We never fight about petty things anymore. We don’t take life for granted anymore. We’ve started a new life now, and we’re all together, and that’s all that matters.

  It’s true, we lost a life that we thought we’d live. There’s been heartache and sad days, but things could have been much worse. I could have lost Travis. Sometimes people will imply that losing him would have been easier for me. But that’s a lie. There’s no way I’d want to lose my husband.

  When we got married, I said I’d marry him for better or worse, and I meant that. Sometimes, after the injury, Travis would say to me that I didn’t need to stay with him, and I’d be like, “I’m not going to leave you, so shut up. I didn’t marry you for your limbs. I married you for who you are, and you’re still the same person.”

  That’s the truth. When I look at him now, I don’t see his arms and legs gone. I see the same man I married. And I love him for it. I’ll love him always.

  Driving was important to me, and when I was still at Walter Reed, they taught me how to drive again. A driving specialist, Major Tammy Phipps, helped me learn. The hospital had a handicapped-equipped van, and we figured out how I could grab the steering wheel okay with my new arms and how the gas and brakes worked when pushed by my prosthetics. Then it was off to the races. Tammy had a brake on her side of the vehicle too. When I first took the wheel, I felt as nervous as when I was sixteen and taking my first driver’s test. We drove around the campus of Walter Reed at first. Then I graduated to slow speeds on city streets around the campus. Then faster roads. Then the expressway.

  A foundation called Help Our Military Heroes bought me a wheelchair conversion van, and we took it over to Ride Away, another great company, which specializes in providing adaptive driving equipment. Their technicians sat down with me and figured out the best configuration to help me drive. A small lever was positioned near my short right arm: if I pulled the lever back, it throttled the car forward, and if I pushed the lever forward, it acted as the brake. On the steering wheel, they affixed a tri-pin clamp that gave me a really firm grip for my left prosthetic hand to steer with. On the door, a button was set up that my left thigh could hit. The button controlled the turn signals, horn, dimmer switch, windshield wipers, windows, and cruise control.

  After I got the van, I took Kelsey out for a drive first. Kelsey was a bit nervous about me driving with Chloe aboard, so just the two of us went out and Kelsey was reassured. She had forgotten how great it was to be the passenger sometimes. I took Chloe out the next day and over to a friend’s house. It felt so good for me to be able to drive my family around again. I mean—driving felt huge to me. I’d gone from basically just lying there in a hospital bed to being able to hop into my wheelchair to walking to being able to hop in my van and drive wherever I wanted. My dad jokes that I’m a better driver today than I was before my injury. He can even take a nap in the car with me driving now, but he never could do that before I was wounded.

  In the winter, I went with hospital staff to Breckenridge, Colorado, and tried skiing. The first few times down the slopes I used a monoski, where you sit in a bucket and have support staff helping you along. It was fun, but if I fell over I couldn’t pick myself back up. In the afternoon, I tried snowboarding while using my short legs. That was even more fun. I could clip in and out of the bindings by myself, and I got to the point where I didn’t need to hold the hands of the instructors anymore. I got more and more proficient with snowboarding, and by the end of the day I was off the bunny hill and going down regular slopes. It felt pretty awesome to be able to do that. Kelsey had grown up skiing, so this was a sport we could all enjoy as a family again.

  In the summer, we returned to Colorado and I went downhill bike riding. The particular bike I used was specially adapted with four wheels. To use the brakes you squeezed a lever between your thighs. I had both my right and left arms on and they were duct taped to the handlebars so I wouldn’t lose my grip over the rough terrain, and I was strapped into the seat with a helmet on my head. We went up about 9,0
00 feet on this mountain, then flew down the side of the steep terrain. It was an incredible feeling to have so much freedom. Nobody needed to steer the bike for me. I roared down a narrow dirt trail and swerved around stumps and fallen trees. It was a full-on adrenaline blast. Before the day’s end, I’d gone up and down that mountain five times.

  On that same trip, I tried kayaking and canoeing. Kelsey loves kayaking. With my arms, I could hook on to a paddle and even bail out of the boat if needed.

  Back at home I tried playing wheelchair rugby. It was fun, but my right arm wasn’t long enough to help me move by myself, and there were no prosthetics allowed in the game. So unless the rules were changed, I decided that was a sport I wouldn’t pursue.

  I got to where I could actually run in my prosthetics. I was never much of a long-distance runner before being wounded, but going to a park and flying along a path on my new legs felt pretty awesome. Someday if Kelsey and Chloe want to run 5Ks, I’ll be able to do that with them.

  Due to all the medication I took, my hair started thinning, but eventually it grew back. That’s about the only side effect I experienced from taking all those drugs. Another side effect of the injury (although not drug related) was that my body continually felt hot. Since I don’t have any limbs anymore, my blood doesn’t circulate the same distance in my body as before. Circulation helps a person lose body heat, so I find myself always warm, even on snowy winter days. Since the injury, pretty much all I ever wear are shorts and a T-shirt, even in winter. Plus, my legs are always capped due to the prosthetics, and they don’t breathe very well through the liners. So my legs are always hot. At least that’s what the ladies say.

  —

  On Patriots’ Day, April 15, 2013, we heard the horrific news that two bombs had gone off toward the end of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and some two hundred and fifty were wounded. More than two dozen people had limbs amputated, either by the blast or afterward in surgery.

  Two weeks after the attack, I got a call from the general in charge of wounded troops. He was assembling a team of four wounded warriors to go to Boston to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and meet with some of the victims. So we did that. At first the staff and administrators seemed a bit reluctant to let us see the patients, like maybe they didn’t agree it was a good idea. They took us on a tour of the hospital, but I was like, “So what? I already know what a hospital is like. I’m here to talk to people.”

  After they hemmed and hawed for a while, another guy on the team and I decided to take matters into our own hands. We slipped away from our handlers and took an elevator to the fourth floor. We found a nurses’ station and said, “Hey, we’re here from the army to talk to the bombing victims. We think it’s going to be beneficial for them.”

  A nurse nodded and shrugged, and before you knew it, we were going from room to room and talking with everybody we met. Face after face went from discouraged to encouraged. We answered a lot of questions about how to do tasks without limbs. And person after person was like, “Wow, it can be done.” It was a really good day. We came back the next day and met with one of the victims, who told us that after we’d left, he’d gone to rehab and worked out harder than he’d ever done before. That was our big message: It does get better. You can overcome this challenge.

  We attended some therapy sessions with the patients. There were no photographers or publicity teams around. It was just us hanging out. A couple of patients were having a hard time that day in therapy, and I introduced them to an innovative tool that has helped me over many a rough patch. It’s called the Ten Second Dance Break, and basically you just dance like a big goofball for ten seconds and then go back to work. Hey—it helps.

  —

  In the fall of 2013, I was still at Walter Reed, and Kelsey and I decided to rent out our house in Fayetteville. The longer we were away from North Carolina, the less we figured we’d end up there permanently, particularly since I was just about out of the military for good. Kelsey and Chloe flew down by themselves first to pack the house up along with Kelsey’s dad. A couple days later I drove my van down by myself. It’s a six-and-a-half-hour drive from Walter Reed to Fayetteville, and this was the first road trip I’d taken by myself since the accident. That felt like a milestone right there. I drove by myself. I got gas by myself. I stopped at rest stops and fast-food restaurants by myself. The trip provided one of the last bits of emotional healing I needed.

  I spent a few days in Fayetteville, then it was time to go back to Walter Reed. Kelsey and Chloe joined me for the trip home, and that was another milestone—them joining me in the van. I remember so distinctly pulling the van onto the freeway and looking in the rearview mirror. Chloe was having fun, watching a Disney movie on a DVD player in the back of the van. Kelsey was sitting in the passenger’s seat next to me, calmly reading a book on her Kindle. I was driving my family on this road trip, just like I’d been able to do before I was blown up. I didn’t say anything out loud, but my pulse quickened and I felt a lightness in my chest at the thought of me being able to drive my family someplace like that again. Sheer excitement—that was the feeling. I could take my family on road trips again! You have to realize how huge that was.

  At the end of November 2013, I officially retired from the military. We were back at the apartment at Walter Reed then, and first I went door to door in the hospital and invited all the friends I’d made to come to a celebration ceremony they were holding for me in the cafeteria. I was nervous at first that no one would come, but about two hundred people showed up. My mom and dad flew in to surprise me, and also my buddy Adam from high school days.

  I’d been in the military for seven years and eight months total. And by then I’d been in the hospital for nineteen months total. I got up in front of everyone and said how I was going to miss the army and how thankful I was to be alive still. Then I blubbered like a baby, and everybody applauded and wished me well.

  My retirement from the military meant I was done with therapy. I’d figured out how to do pretty much everything I needed to do. Walter Reed truly was an impactful place for me. The military has a brotherhood, but wounded veterans experience a brotherhood that’s even deeper. You understand what other guys are going through. You can recover and go forward together. I don’t think I’d be the same person I am today without Walter Reed and the staff there. I’d probably be sitting at home, miserable. Instead I’m leading my family, living life with every ounce of energy I can muster.

  When we moved out of Walter Reed for good, we went to Texas for a while and lived with my in-laws. Our house in Fayetteville was rented by then, and it didn’t make any sense for us to move back if we weren’t in the military anymore. Josh and Deanna Buck were living in Oklahoma now, so none of our family were in Fayetteville, and it was important for us to live near family. Even though I could do almost everything by myself, we’d found it was still good to have help nearby. We lived with my in-laws from November 2013 to April 2014, then when the Texas heat got too much for me we went to Michigan for a while where it was cooler, and lived with my parents. Residents of my hometown and the surrounding communities had held fundraisers and helped my mom and dad modify their house with ramps and decks and an ADA-compliant bathroom, so that was very helpful anytime I came to visit.

  We were contacted by Gary Sinise and staff members from his foundation: they wanted to construct Kelsey and me a specially built adaptive home to use as our permanent residence. This was incredible news. They were working in conjunction with the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, and the representatives basically said to pick anywhere in the country that we wanted to live, and they’d build us a house for free. The home would be equipped with handicapped-accessible bathrooms and all the newest technology available to help make life as smooth as possible.

  Kelsey and I felt overwhelmed and incredibly grateful. We knew that having a home like this would help us enormously with stability and with many challenges over the years to come. We talked bri
efly about moving to Texas for the long term, but summers in Texas would be too hot for me to take. We talked long and hard about moving back to Michigan for good, which got my vote. But in the end we decided on Maine. Kelsey’s parents had moved in the meantime to Maine from Texas, and she had many relatives in the area, so we were going to have a lot of support. That was fine by me. Michigan will always be in my heart, but Maine was good too, and if Kelsey wanted to go to Maine, then Maine it was. My wife had been through the wringer for me, and I’d do anything for her. Right after I’d first come back to the States from Afghanistan, Josh had given Kelsey my wedding ring, and she’d given it back to me when I was conscious. I’ve worn it proudly on a cord around my neck ever since.

  Foundation staff gave us a couple of guidelines for the house, and we sat down with an architect. I’d met Gary Sinise a couple of times, and I’d said the Pledge of Allegiance for him at that event once. Then a few months later at another event I got in line to meet him afterward, but he came up specifically to see me and say hello. He knew all these things about me; nobody was whispering in his ear. He struck me as a genuinely nice guy who wanted to use his fame and platform to help veterans.

  The foundation built us an incredible two-story house. The shower and bathroom were set up perfectly for me to use, and an elevator would prove a big help. (Going up and down stairs is still one of the hardest things for me to do.) A ton of companies, both local and national, donated appliances, flooring, paint, you name it. The Carrington Charitable Foundation took care of the funding. If I had a thousand years to live, I couldn’t express how grateful we are to all the people who helped. There are so many foundations set up these days in America to help support the troops. There are so many people who want to give back and help. I’m talking everything from multinational corporations who give big donations down to a retiree we met who makes decorative wooden canes for wounded warriors. There are a lot of good people in this world.