Next, I waddled around, walking and shuffling and doing whatever I could. I had two canes to help me stay upright. I wandered over to a guy who was trotting around with a harness for support and said to him, “Okay, dude, let’s go! You and me!”
He just looked at me for a moment, then smiled, and we were off. I tried to move my feet as quickly as I could, and I fell face-first—splat. As soon as I hit the floor, my therapist pulled out a piece of paper: an incident report form. She told me she had to fill one out every time a patient falls in therapy.
I just laughed. “Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to get a lot of those!” She looked at me like I was crazy. I added, “It’s really not a big deal. I fell in gymnastics all the time. I’d just get right up and go on. It’s no big deal, and I don’t know why you guys think it is.”
She tried to explain it to me, but the rule still made no sense. I mean, falling was just a part of learning, whether walking on new legs or skating or skiing for the first time. I’ll give her an A for effort, though—she tried for a while to keep up with me, but I fell a lot. After a while she just stopped doing the reports.
Soon, after falling a few dozen times a day, I started making real progress with my therapy. That was when my therapists started asking, “What are your weaknesses? What are your strengths? What are you comfortable doing? What are you not comfortable doing?”
I thought about that. “Well, I’m comfortable walking uphill. I’m comfortable strolling around inside the clinic.”
“Well,” they said, “we need to get you outside. We need to get you comfortable in real-life situations.” Then they told me, “Walking downhill is really hard.” They were right. The therapy clinic is perfectly flat, perfectly level, smooth, and not very crowded. That’s not how the world is.
“All right,” I said to one of my therapists, “let’s work on that. If you see me walking around the clinic, every once in a while come up and shoulder-bump me. Walk into me like we’re in a crowded place.”
This was important, because in the real world, people don’t always realize I need extra space. Even though I wear shorts most of the time—and the reason I do that is so people can see I have prosthetic legs and maybe give me a little room—not everybody sees or notices that I have C-legs. When I go to a crowded place—a mall, a ball game, or whatever—people might bump into me, thinking I’m just an ordinary guy. I knew I’d need to know how to handle that. Kind of like someone taking self-defense classes or maybe learning first aid. You might not be looking forward to the situation, but if something bad happens it’s good to be prepared. Having my therapist push my limits on a daily basis is how I learned to just react—and after losing my legs, it was a skill I had to learn all over again, as if I’d never walked before.
Relearning stuff like that—stuff we take for granted—is a lot of work, and not everybody is up for it at first. Starting over from scratch with stuff you’ve been able to do all your life is a pain in the ass. It’s frustrating in a way that learning something new just isn’t. There was this one girl at Walter Reed who I heard grumble, “I swear to God, if I fall off these prosthetics, I’m ripping them off and I’m never getting back on ’em.”
That was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. I couldn’t believe she said that. What was she thinking? That they were magic legs? Did she think she’d get it right away? Without having to work for it? No, of course not. That’s insane. If I could go back in time, I’d tell her, “If you ever want to walk again, you’d better get ready to fall at least a thousand times, because that’s the only way it’s ever gonna happen.”
Falling on your face isn’t easy, and picking yourself up over and over again is even harder. It helps to have a good reason to get up and keep going. Some folks want to win a race or break a record, get better at a sport or an activity, recover from an injury or an illness so that they can enjoy life again, or because people they care about are counting on them.
As far as I’m concerned, any reason that gets you back on your feet and ready to fall again is a good one, and you should hang on to it for as long as you can, and let it take you as far as possible toward your goal.
I woke up in Walter Reed on October 30, 2005, and I was discharged from the hospital roughly six weeks later, on December 14. During that time I’d had more surgeries than I could count, and I’d received more than 120 units of transfused blood.
The first month was the hardest. To extract all the shrapnel from my torso took more than one operation. When I first woke up, my chest and my gut seemed mostly fine. But after one of the follow-up surgeries, I woke up with my abdomen still open and my gut swollen like a basketball. I learned that when surgeons cut through your abdominal muscles and pull everything out, they can’t just shove it all back in when they’re done—it’s not that easy. Your abs hold stuff in place. To give the muscles they’d cut a chance to heal, they put in a black rubber thing that helped keep all my insides roughly where they ought to be, and then over a few weeks they slowly cinched my gut closed, a few millimeters at a time.
After I left the hospital, I was still living on the Walter Reed campus while I started my rehab. Normally, learning to walk on prosthetic legs is a long, slow process. First, you have to let your wounds fully heal. Then you need to be fitted, and after that you start retraining your muscles. It’s awkward as hell, and it hurts even more than you think.
A bilateral amputee like me—a person who has lost both their legs—starts rehab by learning how to walk on shorties. You can’t do much on shorties except waddle around like a penguin, but you have to master them before you can graduate to taller legs. From shorties you move up to ten-inch legs, and then a slightly taller pair, and after that you finally get full-size legs and start learning to walk again.
Most bilaterals need two weeks, give or take, to get through each stage and move up to the next one. Going from shorties to full-size C-legs is usually a two-month process.
I decided to do it all in one week.
My unit was coming home that January from their tour in Iraq, and I got it into my head that I was gonna be there in Fort Hood, Texas, to greet them when they got off the plane. My doctors didn’t think it was a good idea for me to travel so early in my rehab. They were worried I’d fall and crack my head open, I guess. They tried to talk me out of going, but I told them I didn’t give a shit about what was happening with me, or how hard I’d have to push myself, because one way or another I was gonna be standing there when my unit came home.
“Look,” I said to them, “I was a gymnast. I have balance. Trust me—I can do this.”
I rushed, I crushed, and I fell on my face about a thousand times. I didn’t care how many times I fell, because I knew I needed to accept the falls in order to learn at the pace I wanted. For an entire week, all day every day, I worked my ass off, going from shorties to ten-inchers in record time. I didn’t care how many bruises it cost me, because I knew it would be worth it. It was great that I had that goal, that I had something to look forward to and focus on. I used the homecoming of my unit to push myself to the limit and beyond. I think some people in rehab just didn’t find something in their future to fight toward. And that’s something we all need.
Two days before I was supposed to leave, my doctors gave me a pair of full-size C-legs. By the day of my trip, I still couldn’t walk in the C-legs, but I could stand.
That’ll have to do, I decided, and I flew down to Texas.
My pal Kenny met me in Texas. He was already back in the States because he’d had a hard time recovering from his wounds in Iraq, so the Army had sent him home. Gietzel, on the other hand . . . I felt bad for him because he’d had to stay in Iraq. An ass wound can get you a few days in a bed and light duty on base after it heals up, but it doesn’t get you sent home. So poor Gietzel had had to stay behind and finish his tour.
On January 19, 2006, Kenny and I joined the other guys’ families in the Fort Hood gymnasium. Kenny stood with me while I sat in my wheelchair, passi
ng the time. We were wearing our DCUs, as we knew the rest of our unit would be.
Someone called out, “They’re here!” Buses pulled up outside. Our unit piled out of them and lined up in formation to run inside the gym and be welcomed home. Kenny and I stood up and saluted as our buddies came charging in. They couldn’t believe it when they saw us standing there—especially me, with a big-ass smile on my face. Just think about it. The last time my buddies had seen me I was flat on my back being evacked, my blown-away legs and arm in tourniquets, having trouble breathing. Now here it was just a few months later and I was standing there waiting for them as they came home.
After everyone was inside, the national anthem played and a reporter snapped a photo of me and Kenny standing at attention in front of our unit in formation. I love that photo—it captured one of the proudest moments of my life, and for me it was worth a million words.
Looking back, I can’t tell you how many times I fell during the week leading up to that day, because it’s not important. What is important is that I got to stand, in my uniform, with my friends and my unit, and smile while the national anthem played.
If I’d had to fall a million times to stand up just that once, I’d have called it a bargain.
The cold, hard truth is that getting the hang of a new limb takes time. After getting back from Fort Hood, I kept at it, always pushing myself, always finding some new challenge. Before I left Walter Reed I saw this prosthetic in the lab. The knee looked like a cage with a big shock absorber and a spring inside it. It was really wild looking, and it got my attention right away, so I asked the prosthetics guys, who I’d gotten to know really well, “What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s the XT-9,” one of them said.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s an XT-9?”
“A snowboarding knee,” said the other guy. “Or wakeboarding.”
Jackpot, I thought. I couldn’t use them then: I could barely walk. But I knew one day I was going to go snowboarding.
“Why don’t you hook me up with a set of those?”
They nodded. “All right, Bryan. You got it.”
It was a year before I got to use them. I was back in Chicago and I went out and bought a snowboard.
I wanted to test the knees and try out the snowboard in a safe place before I got on a slope, so I did my first test of the snowboarding knee in the living room of my apartment.
My brother, Bobby, was there and he watched as I put the snowboard flat on the living room floor. Then I put the boots on, put my legs on, and got onto the board. I clipped in. Then I just stood there for a second, trying to figure out how it felt. It was as if I was standing on real legs, with my knees just slightly bent.
“Okay,” I said. “Good start.”
I leaned forward and back, perching the board on each edge, and I was able to keep my balance in both directions. Then I gave it a twist, one way and then the other. I had my brother keep his hands up behind my back while I swiveled the board beneath me, to see whether I’d be able to make it turn.
Once I felt as if I’d gotten the hang of it, I said, “I should be able to do this!” I knew I wasn’t gonna get it all right away; I knew I was gonna fall. But I was ready to give it a shot.
It was time to leave my living room and go find some snow.
I packed up my gear and headed off to a slope called Raging Buffalo, a small hill about forty miles from my home in Chicago. It’s no mountain. The entire hill is only about a hundred yards from start to finish. If I take a deep breath, I can almost spit that far.
It was dark when I arrived at Raging Buffalo. It was a clear night full of stars, and the air was mild. The snow was packed hard. The only way up was a rope lift, which I thought kind of sucked. Then I heard music by Rise Against playing from the PA system on the guard towers; the guy watching over the mountain was listening to one of my favorite bands. I thought that was awesome, because I was listening to the same band’s tunes on my iPod. I took it as a good sign that I could do this.
My first time riding my board on snow, I made it all of two feet. Maybe three.
I landed on my ass.
It took me forever to figure out how to get back up the hill so I could try again. The biggest hassle was that when I fell, I needed other people to help me up. I couldn’t get back up on my own.
I tried to walk myself upright with my hands, pushing myself up and back, but I couldn’t get all the way to a standing position doing that, and I couldn’t just snap myself straight. It’s important to be straight when you’re on a snowboard. Your center of balance has to be in the right spot, or you’ll be on your back or on your face in no time. So I had to go from a completely bent-over position to straight up immediately, and I just didn’t have the strength to pull that off.
My first solution was to grab somebody or something near me and pull myself up. Then I would push off and be back in motion. But I knew I needed to figure out a way to get up by myself, because sooner or later I was going to fall somewhere when I was alone.
That first night, I fell a lot. My first run, I fell four or five times in a hundred-yard stretch. But I made it down, and I’d gotten the feel of it, even if just a bit.
The second time I went snowboarding, I did a little better. I only fell twice down that hill.
By my third outing, I still fell as many times as I had before, but I had a bit more control. I could turn, and I had started to feel the slope as I was riding it.
That sense of accomplishment was what kept me going. The whole thing was trial and error, but I was making progress, and I knew that I just needed to keep doing it to make more progress. The same thing would be true for anybody. Everyone falls when they learn to ski or snowboard or surf. It wasn’t really that different for me. Sure, I had my own extra challenges, but plenty of people have trouble learning to snowboard. Whenever I heard from people who knew about snowboarding, they’d tell me it takes three times on a board before you actually feel as if you’re grasping the concept. So I told myself, No matter what, you need to go three times so that you can at least give this a fair shot. By the third time, I was saying, Dude! I’m able to do this! As long as I keep at it, I’m gonna be all right.
Pretty soon I was so confident that I tried going into the half-pipe—and slammed straight into the wall. I didn’t go up it—it was just BAM! Dead stop. I dusted myself off and said, “Okay, maybe that’s not the best idea.” I haven’t been back to the half-pipe yet . . . but I will. Count on that. Because I’m a much better snowboarder now.
After my fourth run on Raging Buffalo, I came out to Snö Mountain in Pennsylvania, a really big mountain. I started learning more quickly because I had a longer slope on which to ride. I started staying upright longer, but I would still fall every now and then. One time I fell backward, and I rolled so far that I almost stood up again. I said, “Whoa!” I’d nearly gotten back on my feet—without even trying!
So I let myself fall on my back. My board was facing the top of the mountain, and my head was downslope. Lying there in the snow, I thought, Let me try something.
I did a back roll, like I used to do in gymnastics. I let my board come up over my head, and it pulled me over and popped me straight up. The next thing I knew, I was standing on my board with my mouth hanging open. Then I turned down the slope and kept going.
Just like that, I’d figured out how to get up by myself. These days, whenever I fall while snowboarding, I just do a back roll and land on my board. It’s so easy that I no longer need anybody with me. I can tackle any slope I want, totally on my own, whenever I feel like it.
Once you learn how to pick yourself up—whether literally or figuratively—falling isn’t such a big deal anymore. But you have to be willing to fall as many times as it takes for you to learn that skill. It won’t happen overnight. In my case, a lucky fall is what showed me the way to get up again. That’s why I don’t worry about falling—it’s just another part of my journey.
The bottom line is that falling ca
n be your friend. Don’t be afraid of it—embrace it.
Then get up and keep going.
3
USE THE TOOLS YOU’VE BEEN GIVEN
I’m not going to lie: When I first started recovering at Walter Reed I was bummed. I mean, I lost my legs and a hand. Obviously I was very attached to my body parts—literally . . . and then I wasn’t. My early thoughts were that I wouldn’t be able to do everything I wanted to do, that I was limited. (Little did I know how wrong I was.)
My family and friends never treated me differently, never let me slack. They pushed me. They wouldn’t do things for me that they thought I should be able to do for myself. And I’m grateful for that.
The worst thing—and I still get this today—is when people see me and assume I’m fragile and can’t do things for myself. It pisses me off because I can do everything; I’m completely self-sufficient. And when I need help, I’ll ask for it.
Most of the time, instead of getting angry I just show people what I can do. For instance, someone might see me heading for a door and rush to open it for me. But when I’m in my chair I move really quickly and usually can get there first, throw open the door, and blow right through it. Sometimes I might even hold the door open for the person.
I just want people to see me and not my chair. I don’t want someone to look at me and assume what I can or cannot do. When people see someone who is differently abled, they shouldn’t assume that what they see on the outside is the whole person.
There’s this guy I work with who has cerebral palsy. He’s strapped into a wheelchair, has leg spasms, and sometimes people have trouble understanding him when he speaks. But this guy is brilliant; he’s written five books and is the head of his department. We’ve gone out to lunch together and the waiter will ask me what he wants. I’m like, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.” What I want to say is, “Dude, this guy is probably ten times smarter than you, so don’t dismiss him like that.”
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