by Chris Norton
Growing up, I loved Louis L’Amour books. He described a hero in his westerns as not having any backup. That was my dad to a T. He never complained, enjoyed life, took what was thrown at him, and always worked hard.
My dad had two favorite sayings. One was, stay in the Word, meaning the Bible, and, sometimes you have to arch your back, meaning when life gets tough, dig in and give it your all. I saw my dad’s look on Chris’s face every day in rehab. He would set his jaw and make a face, and I could tell he was giving his all and not quitting until the task was done. Unfortunately, my dad and Chris never got to meet, as Dad died of liver cancer at age fifty-six.
A lot of people asked us after his injury how Chris felt about football and if we’d ever question someone playing the game. Neither Chris nor anyone in our family blamed football, because his was such a freak accident. There was a patient at Mayo who rolled out of bed, hit his head on the nightstand, and broke his neck. Another guy broke his neck at a tailgate party. There were just so many ways to get hurt or injured, it seemed ridiculous to steer people away from an organized sport.
Several media people asked if Chris still watched football. I had to laugh because he loved watching the sport. I had a hard time watching games at Bondurant-Farrar High School and Luther College only because Chris played for both of those teams and it was emotional, but watching a good college football game on television was one of our favorite pastimes.
We were so engrossed in working hard during rehab that we sometimes forgot how Chris’s story affected others. A friend told me that reading our CaringBridge site had changed his opinion and renewed his faith in the goodness of people. It did the same for me whenever similar stories came in about how the site was encouraging other people who had suffered spinal cord injuries, or had lost their faith, or were battling depression. Stories were also shared of how Chris was impacting people we didn’t even know. Every card and e-mail we received motivated me to keep posting about Chris’s progress and to keep the posts positive. Certainly there were times when we felt discouraged or he suffered a setback, but we decided not to air that on CaringBridge because it wasn’t just about us.
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“Many people would hear that grave news ‘you have a 3 percent chance of ever regaining any feeling below the neck’ as validation to resign to a fate we had no control over. But Chris made the choice to hear those words as a challenge. He made the choice to be a living example to people with spinal chord injuries and to those without, proving that one is never out of the daily fight to be the best possible version of yourself until you choose to be.”
~ Rich Holton, Luther classmate and friend
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Some teachers were using Chris’s story to inspire kids in school. A middle school class in Carroll, Iowa, watched all of Chris’s YouTube videos and wrote Chris letters telling him about the impression he’d made. Often classes would take Chris on as a project. A grade school class from northeast Iowa collected pennies and spare change for Chris, and sometimes he received packages of cards from elementary schools.
To me, what was amazing about Chris was that he wasn’t amazing, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Chris wasn’t a professional athlete, he wasn’t a superstar, or a rock star—he was a regular guy from Nowhere, Iowa—and that’s what made his story amazing. He worked hard, had faith, had to overcome, and had the determination to succeed. He wasn’t perfect, and I’d never put him on a pedestal because he had faults like all of us, but to me, the special part of the story was watching people focus on what a regular guy could accomplish when his mind and heart were in the right place.
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Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
~Matthew 19:26 NIV
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MY THERAPISTS seemed to amp up the intensity of rehab after Thanksgiving, probably because I wiggled my toe for the first time. Sensations in my legs and my upper body were firing and feelings were coming back slowly. I had more energy and was thrilled by the changes I saw happening. Everything seemed to be coming together.
The therapists had a plan for my therapy and did a good job explaining why they did certain things and the expected outcome. The more time I spent in therapy, the more information I learned about spinal cord injuries, and the more comfortable I became suggesting things to work on or things I wanted to try. For example, if I said I wanted to work on my core strength and balance, and asked what kinds of exercises they’d recommend, they’d give me some ideas and we’d run with it. By that point in rehab, I felt like a layman therapist.
At the very beginning of rehab, the idea of plateauing after nine months wasn’t even on my radar. I was convinced I was going to walk out of the hospital, and I had so much to work on that I fought the urge to look too far down the road. I couldn’t think negatively and make it through the often-grueling therapy sessions. As the months wore on and improvement seemed painstakingly slow, I did start to worry about reaching a point where I no longer progressed. Fortunately, Megan kept up with the latest research that indicated patients didn’t plateau. Nine months became the focus when insurance companies discontinued paying for intense therapy after that length of time. Armed with this knowledge, I stopped looking at the calendar and worked full steam ahead.
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“To continuously challenge Chris and provide him with cutting edge evidence based therapy principles, I found myself researching article after article to provide myself with answers of what we were experiencing together. His recovery was indescribable and he was responding to the program.”
~ Megan Gill, PT, DPT, Clinical Lead Physical Therapist for Spinal Cord Injury, Mayo Clinic
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Once I’d regained feeling in my legs and began working hard in therapy on walking, each day felt gratifying, but I began to get frustrated with the slow return of feeling and control in my wrists, hands, fingers and triceps. My triceps were so tight I couldn’t straighten my arms and reach out to grab things. Even if I could, I needed my hands, and they just weren’t coming back as fast as I wanted. My biceps were stronger than my triceps, but they’d get so tight that my hands would come up and get stuck on my chest, under my chin, and by my face, especially when I slept. I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic feeling and needed help to straighten my arms.
By mid-December, with a lot of work in OT, I was able to brush my teeth and feed myself using my left hand. I could fork food with a wrist cuff on my left hand and hold things in my left arm, but my right arm and hand weren’t strong enough. Even though I wasn’t using my dominant side, it felt wonderful to do something on my own and regain some independence. I wanted my life back, and being able to brush my teeth and feed myself without the assistance of another person and doing it the way I wanted it done felt awesome.
It didn’t take long to realize how important my hands were. No matter how much movement I regained in my arms, my fingers and hands controlled what I wanted to do, and the dexterity wasn’t coming back quickly. By January, I was feeding myself two times a day plus snacks, and I eventually made a giant leap by regaining the ability to hold a sandwich in my hand. Each incremental step led me further along the road to independence.
Alex stayed with Dad and me over her Christmas break from school, and she really worked me hard during non-therapy hours. We worked a lot on strengthening my core and on shifting my weight from one foot to another in order to mimic the walking motion. As the therapists introduced the standing walker into my PT routine, along with the Lokomat and some assisted manual walking, I came to appreciate how complicated the walking motion was and how much coordination it required from so many muscle groups. I needed my newfound energy and appreciated the exhausting workouts that continued to garner daily improvements.
Alex wasn’t my only overnight guest during the holidays; several lifelong friends visited. Dustin and Andrew stayed one weekend with me, and we were up late into the night watching movies, talking
, and laughing like it was a junior high sleepover. I loved having them around—it meant the world to me. My friends, Shawn and Nick, spent the night with me in rehab and followed me through my sessions over their winter break. It meant a lot to me because I was at the point in my hospital stay where I was with my family constantly. I appreciated my family’s support and I loved being around them, but I was an eighteen-year-old kid, and I just wanted some time with my friends in order to feel normal again.
Growing up, Shawn, Nick, and I were like the Three Musketeers. We rotated houses every weekend, and we knew everything about each other. Nick was a student at West Point, and I knew it was hard for him being so far away in New York. It was nice for us to visit in person because when we’d Skype, I could tell he was pretty beat up about what had happened to me and the fact that he wasn’t there. Shawn was just an hour and fifteen minutes south at Luther College, and he and my roommate, Richie, and my really good friends from Luther came to see me a lot on the weekends. I couldn’t imagine going through rehab without those visits.
We had fun together during Shawn and Nick’s winter break visit, goofing off and talking about things I didn’t feel comfortable talking about with my family. Being with them also helped me reconnect with what other people were doing on the weekends while I was at the hospital and helped me feel a part of that social life.
After a long day of therapy, I liked to blow off steam and have a little fun, especially when my partners in crime were in town. Richie, Tanner, and my temporary roommate, Shay, all got in wheelchairs—I had my power chair, one of the guys got into my power-assist chair, we found a manual chair, and Shay used his chair—and we decided to explore Mayo Hospital. I took them to the basement and the tunnels underneath, but the security guards caught us and told us to go back to our room. As if we’d gotten caught by the college dorm resident assistant, we found the experience amusing.
My therapists put my friends to work as helpers, as having extra hands and bodies during PT helped a lot. They were fun loving, outgoing, goofy guys, and it was fun to laugh and talk with them throughout the day. Having them there was also helpful because to those who weren’t familiar with the types of therapy I received, everything was foreign and no one really understood the equipment and the names of all the accessories. For them to actually see where I was and what we were working on gave them a better understanding of what I was going through, and when we talked and I told them what I did in therapy and how my recovery had progressed, I didn’t have to explain.
At the end of December, with a bit of pushing, Mayo extended my stay from January into February. I was really happy about the additional time because I felt I was making a lot of progress, and I needed the Mayo equipment and the therapists assigned to my case. I had a nice routine, I was comfortable with the intensity of therapy, and I felt like I made great strides under their care, so I didn’t want to break that pattern.
A lot of changes happened after the first of the year. By New Year’s Eve, I was able to hold my own glass of sparkling grape juice and make a toast. My dad had asked everyone to pray specifically for improvement in my fingers, hands, and wrists, and it seemed to be working, because my hands kept improving. As my dexterity increased, I was able to use the computer and my phone by myself. Having the ability to text someone, post on Facebook, or Skype with someone privately felt empowering.
With every taste of freedom, I longed for more. Transitioning from the big power chair with the joystick to a power-assist chair that I’d be able to wheel around using the force of my own arms became a priority. At the time, my core strength was too weak, so the therapists had to transfer me into the power-assist chair and put straps around my chest so I was anchored. My arms weren’t strong enough, and I could barely make it move on my first attempt.
Undeterred, my dad (or whoever was with me at night) would strap me into the wheelchair and time how long it took for me to go from one end of a fifteen-foot long strip of tile to the other. On my first attempt, it took me twenty seconds to go fifteen feet. I continued to practice every night until my arms and core got stronger and I was able to sit up without falling over or folding in half like Gumby.
I craved competition, so turning therapy and my power-assist workouts into contests seemed natural. During therapy, I didn’t compare myself to anyone else because everyone had their own problems and their own recovery. I kept track of my times, my distances, and my metrics in order to push myself.
Ironically, a couple of weeks into January, I felt I was ready to move out of the hospital. I was tired of some of the rules and the constant checkups, so when a room at Mayo’s Ronald McDonald House became available, I thought it would be a nice change of pace and offer us a little bit more freedom. I was glad to continue with rehab, but equally glad to get away from the hospital’s daily grind. All it took was that one extra month to be ready to transition to outpatient therapy, and nothing really changed other than where we slept at night. I still had the same amount of time with all my therapists, and I still did everything I normally did. So, it wasn’t too big of a transition other than our struggle to find a competent nurse to get me ready in the morning and at night.
When we moved to outpatient therapy and into the Ronald McDonald House, my dad took on a lot more responsibility. We soon realized how well the inpatient nurses did their jobs, happily doing what needed to be done so I could get on with my day. Suddenly, my dad had to help more than he was used to, and the nurses from the agencies needed time to adjust to my needs and my schedule, so in a way it felt like starting over. Despite the transition pains, I was happy to be out of the hospital.
The worst part of living in the Ronald McDonald House was that the rooms were really small, and traveling from there to St Mary’s in the dead of winter wasn’t fun. The best part was the community atmosphere and just being out of the hospital. There always seemed to be something going on, whether groups came in and cooked our meals, or we hung out in the lounge areas and played cards, it was nice to stay at a place so close to Mayo that wasn’t the hospital or a hotel.
I still saw my doctors for checkups and progress updates every couple of weeks. They wanted to chart my recovery, check me out medically, answer my questions, and make sure I had a plan for the future. My lead surgeon took another job out of state, and when I met my new surgeon, he pulled my X-ray and asked me to explain how the injury happened. He’d never seen a break like mine before.
According to my new doctor, when the spine breaks, typically the bones splinter and shatter, or compress against one another creating a lot of fragments that cause even more damage. My break was unusual because it was a severe dislocation but nothing splintered, cracked, or compressed. I didn’t know how to take his news at first, but I started to think maybe that was why I recovered as much as I did because it was such a “clean” break.
Shortly after the move to the Ronald McDonald House, my dad had to get back to work, so my parents started rotating weeks. Switching helped alleviate repetitiveness and had no bearing on my day-to-day therapy, so it was a good change of pace for all of us.
As a part of recreation therapy, Shay and I got to check out Rochester’s bus system. Having grown up in the country, I didn’t know how the bus system worked. It was nice to know that public transportation was available to people in wheelchairs. While needing public transportation was another reminder of the independence I’d lost, it also felt as if the public was looking out for us and that we hadn’t been forgotten.
My friends from Luther came up after my first full week in the Ronald McDonald House, and we took the bus to the mall using the public bus stop right across the street. It felt good to get away from the family for a while and hang out with my friends outside of the hospital. We had a great time at the mall purchasing matching sunglasses from the kiosks and goofing off together. It was great to be one of the guys again, and even away at rehab, I made a new friend from Luther. Tanner was a freshman football player who was friends with Richie and Sha
wn, and he visited frequently.
Other than moving out of the hospital and my visit to the mall, I hadn’t been on an outing in a while, so my family and I attended the Rascal Flatts concert featuring Chris Young and Luke Bryan. It felt great to do something outside my normal routine. The concert was awesome, and thanks to one of Mayo’s resident doctors, we got backstage passes. Unfortunately, the event happened to be on one of the coldest winter days, with temperatures hovering just below zero.
We didn’t have an accessible vehicle to get to the concert, so we had to take a regular car, and I wasn’t strong enough to get into a vehicle without needing a lot of help. Fortunately, two of my PTs, Megan and Lori, got tickets and came with us. Getting in and out of the car was a challenge, especially because it was so cold. Despite the chill, it felt wonderfully normal to sit in the front seat.
During the concert, my body began shaking and spasming because of the cold temperature. When we got back to the hospital, my hands were cold—something I hadn’t been able to feel for months. Because of my injury, my body didn’t adjust to changes in temperature very well. The cold forced my body to work harder to keep me warm, but it also caused me to shake. Once I got cold, it took forever to warm up again.
I discovered that heat had the opposite effect; it relaxed me and made me feel as if I were melting. I had a harder time in the heat because it made me feel very weak, and because I no longer perspire, I couldn’t keep myself cool. My feet and parts of my legs got a little sweaty, and my forehead would get a little moist, but nowhere near how much I used to sweat before my injury. Because of my body’s inability to regulate its temperature, I preferred to be in the shade, and I had to drink a ton of water whenever it was hot. I learned different ways to cope with temperature extremes.
