Anniversaries

After much thought and time I thought I should put this up as it's been 10 years almost to the day since I was hurt. 

It’s been 10 years now since my life was changed forever, well it goes back 13 years but the 2001 was the turning point truly.  I ran out of rope 20 feet in the air coming out of a Black Hawk and smacked the ground with terrible force.  Now understand please, I was not a light man in those days I weighed in at roughly 250lbs give or take 10lbs without gear and I was also carrying a lot of gear for my work like normal.  Well fate would have her way with me that day, I snapped all of the metatarsal in both feet, broke the right ankle in two places, broke the right heel away from the rest of my foot and shattered both legs, and there were even fractures in the hips and pelvis regions.  To add to the trauma I had also herniated 6 disks in my lower back on impact.  After what made matters worse was the amount of time it took to get me back to where I could receive “proper” health care.  Once back at a treatment area I was informed I had developed a condition in my right leg called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.  Now I’ve asked tons of doctors after I recovered from this exactly what it is, some say it’s a nerve disorder others say it’s not real and it’s only something that people in Physical Therapy use.  But basically what it was is this, my right leg from mid thigh down turned purple, cold to the touch and when I could feel it, most of the time I had to check to see if it was even still there, but when I could feel it.  The pain was amazing!  So not only was I dealing with damage to my bones on an ungodly scale I was dealing with nerve damage as well.  So off to physical therapy I went, this is where the fun really starts.  I am introduced to my Physical Therapist who after introducing himself promptly informs me of “Let’s see if we can make you scream.”  To call this man a Sadist is not sufficient to describe to you how much this man enjoyed making me hurt and watching the pain I was enduring.  Contrast bath therapy is painful, but for someone with hyper sensitive nerves it’s nearly murder.  Now please understand that I did this for one very important and simple reason, they told me that if I didn’t show signs of improvement within 4 months they would amputate my right leg from the mid thigh down.  So yes I was driven to endure the pain and the long days and weeks to come.  I also was driven to never give the bastard the pleasure I seeing me scream and that was another massively important and driving goal of mine, one of which I achieved.

After all the months of therapy and I mean months of therapy, 6 months total in time and those were some brutal months.  I was off to see the Orthopedic Surgeon again, who promptly and without any regret what so ever tells me I am to be discharged because there is nothing else they can do for me, I still have fractured bones that will take years to heal if they ever do heal right at all.  He also informs me that I will never serve in the military ever again, I can forget about running and I’m lucky to be walking at all.  Which I don’t consider the hobble I had to be much of a walk in the first place.  I was hurting so much I couldn’t hardly take a step, however through all of this they not once checked my back for some insane reason. 

Well with discharge papers in hand off I went to try and make due with the new life I had, very much alone, depressed and to be honest suicidal as can be because I had, had a dream taken from me.   So over the course of the next year I bounced from job to job till I got into college, where I met my now ex wife and that is a story for another time.   Suffice to say as the years went on and I healed slowly, she got tired of hearing me bitch and complain about how much I missed the Army and told me to try reenlisting.  Well being the good husband I was, I did just that I talked with a National Guard recruiter that she tried to talk to and reenlist with and he would have nothing to do with her because of her on injury.  So off I went, back through basic training and everything 5 years later.  5 years and I had recovered from an injury they said I would never fully heal from, an injury that would have crippled most people and there I was running around with people 8 years younger than me and leaving them in the dust.  My body had remembered what it was like to be a soldier and how oh how I missed the feelings I had rushing through my body.  That’s also when my injured back came up and bit me in the balls, hard! 

 I made it through though and off I went, I came back home after all my training and my marriage was turning into a living hell, she couldn’t handle me anymore.  I had become the silent type again; all I wanted to do was cuddle and kiss her.  I would try and be affectionate but she couldn’t handle me not talking or showing emotions.   So on and on it went, then I promised myself that if she left me or something happened to her I would return to active duty and sure to my word when she left me I put my papers in to return to active duty.  Three months before I got my orders my divorce was finalized and I finally had my freedom again, no more chain around my neck of a insane wife who couldn’t handle the name she had and she knew I was always like that, even when she found me in college.  So off I went to Bomb Disposal School better known in the military as EOD or Explosive Ordnance Disposal.  That was 2009, so there you go, a snippet into the monster that is me.