The Seven Longest Yards

by Chris Norton

  “I’m serious, doctor,” I said. “If you’d just take off my shoe and look at my toe, maybe . . .”

  The doctor sighed. “Chris, you’re experiencing what we call a phantom feeling,” he said. “You want to believe you can feel something in your left big toe. You tricked yourself into thinking it’s real, but it’s not. I’m sorry.”

  I frowned, trying to keep my jaw from dropping. “I’m telling you, I haven’t felt anything like this until today. I know something is different,” I insisted.

  “This happens all the time with people who have spinal cord injuries,” the doctor said. “But at the end of the day, the fact is, you’re not going to be able to move anything in your legs ever again.” And with those lovely parting words, he nonchalantly walked out of the room.

  To say I was crushed would be putting it mildly. He had cast aside everything I had been working toward and praying for as if it were all for nothing. I’d never worked harder for anything in my life, and this doctor had just shut the door on my hope of moving anything soon. My dad, who was with me during that pleasant exchange, grabbed my hand. Tears welled in his eyes as his voice broke, “Chris, do not let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do.”

  That was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. I teared up too as I promised him, “I never will.”

  I now had a new goal: prove that doctor wrong. Over the next week, I worked up to three hours of therapy a day. That still wasn’t enough for me. I asked for a fourth hour, which, I was told, no one had ever asked for before. Eventually they gave it to me, but they drew the line at a fifth hour. Undeterred, I asked my physical and occupational therapists to write up workouts I could do on my own, outside of my scheduled therapy time.

  After a week of nonstop work, I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and felt a new, even stronger sensation in my left big toe. My physical therapist, Megan Gill, had barely walked into my room for our therapy when I blurted out, “My big toe! I think I can move it!”

  She pulled back the covers, and there it was: my big toe twitching on command. Seeing that toe jerk to life felt better than every Christmas morning and football win I’d ever experienced in my life, put together. I yelled for Katie and Alex to come see.

  “Look at this!” I yelled. My sisters screamed when they saw me wiggle my toe.

  “Chris!” Alex burst into tears. “It happened! You did it!”

  “We have to get Mom and Dad back here,” Katie said. They had stayed in a hotel the night before and hadn’t come to the hospital yet. They were in for quite a surprise.

  When my parents arrived, I told Dad I needed help. “Can you give my feet a pep talk?” I asked. Every once in a while, my dad would stoop down by my feet and scream in a sarcastic motivational voice as if he could inspire them enough to move. “I feel like they need it today.”

  My dad laughed, pulled back the covers, and took his usual position at the foot of the bed. “Move!” he screamed in that voice. When my toe wiggled, Dad’s eyes popped wide open as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “Did you just do that?” my mom cried. She broke down in tears when she saw me do it again as if it were nothing. Finally she took a break from sobbing to smack me playfully. “You knew you could do this and never told us?”

  I’d never been so thankful for a moving toe in my life. I was downright giddy. “Someone bring that doctor, Dr. Phantom, in here, and you tell him to phantom this,” I asked everyone who came into my room that day. It’s probably for the best that he was gone that day.

  The movement in my toe aside, over the next few months, it became increasingly obvious that walking out of the hospital unassisted—my definition of “beating this”—wasn’t going to happen in the time frame I had set for myself. Throughout those months, I clung to God as if my life depended on it. Rather than dwell on the fact that I was not going to walk unassisted any time soon, I chose to forget about what I couldn’t do and instead focused on what I could do and the progress I was making. By God’s grace I grew to believe that my injury would not define or limit me. I was a realist, which meant I accepted where I was but held out hope that I could go much, much further.

  But I didn’t feel completely comfortable with my new identity until March 20, 2011. It was my nineteenth birthday, and I was home for a weekend visit—we started going home once a week that month. About ten of my friends planned to take me to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch college basketball. We were running late, and when my friend transferred me to the front seat of his car, he accidentally hit the lock button on the car door. Before we realized what had happened, he slammed the door shut. I looked and saw his keys sitting on the seat next to me.

  He turned to my buddies in disbelief. “Oh my gosh. I just locked Chris in the car.” My friends called to me, “Chris, just hit the unlock button. It’s right next to you.” But I couldn’t do it. By this point I’d regained limited movement in my arms, but there was no way I could reach up and hit the button to unlock the doors. I did not have the strength. My eyes stung with embarrassment as my friends kept asking me to unlock the door. I felt completely helpless.

  I was just about to lose it and start crying when one of my best friends, Richie, leaned forward and fogged up the window next to me. He rubbed off the fog and put his hands dramatically over his eyes, as if he was peering in with binoculars. “Chris, conserve your oxygen!” he yelled in a fake panic. “You have five minutes to live! I need you to breathe slowly!”

  My other friends stared at him in shock. Making fun of the situation seemed like a terrible thing to do, but for me it was the best thing he could have done. I burst out laughing as he took me through mock breathing exercises, as if I were running out of oxygen, as the other guys ran to their house to get spare keys. The forty-minute experience could have made for an awful night, but the whole thing was turned around by a little laughter. Right then I realized that being in a wheelchair, with limited physical ability, meant that life might not always be smooth. And that was okay. In fact, it wasn’t a big deal at all.

  About seven months after my injury, my family and I decided it was time for me to move home.1 But I didn’t stay there permanently. That fall I returned to Luther College. My sister Alex got an apartment less than a mile from campus so she could get me to my classes, take me to therapy appointments, and help me with homework when I needed it. On campus I lived in a cluster, with a big common room and six double rooms around it. That meant I had ten friends nearby who could help out. And everyone did. That support system gave me the confidence to pursue my education and not give up.

  Before classes started I was terrified that the whole college experiment was doomed to fail. But my friends showed me that I could live a pretty normal life. I could get back to how I used to be, but now from a wheelchair. The week before classes started, they even convinced me to go with them to float down a nearby river on inner tubes. “There’s no way I can do that,” I’d told them when they first asked. “That sounds way too scary.”

  My friends refused to take no for an answer. “You can do it. Let’s just go,” they said. Finally, they convinced me to suck up my fears and let them bring me along. They gave me a raft that wouldn’t tip and had a backrest. We bought rope to tie my raft with theirs so they could be close by. We left my chair in the vehicle, and two guys carried me to the riverbank, one under my shoulders and the other under my knees. Floating freely in the river turned out to be one of the best experiences I’d had since my injury. I looked and, more importantly, felt like everyone else having a good time floating down the river. For the first time since my accident, I felt “normal.”

  While the accident impacted nearly every area of my life, one aspect it thankfully didn’t affect was my family’s finances. Because I was injured in an NCAA game, I was covered by their Catastrophic Insurance Program, which, combined with my mom’s great health insurance policy through her employer, paid for everything I needed. Even after I got out of the hospital, I didn’t have to worry about the cost of physica
l therapy or the specialized equipment I needed. I could even pay for friends and caregivers to help me get up in the morning or drive me to physical therapy. I soon discovered that my situation was the exception, not the rule, for people who suffer injuries like mine.

  On a trip back to Mayo about a year after my injury, I ran into a friend I’d met during my hospital stay. He’d fallen off his tree stand while deer hunting and stayed just one room away from me at Mayo. Both of us were from Iowa, and we bonded during our time there. “What are you doing here?” I asked as we greeted each other in the hall of Mayo Clinic’s rehab center. I was surprised to see him because he had to travel two hours each way to get there.

  “Physical therapy, man,” he said. “There are no clinics back home that have this kind of technology. Plus I can use their bike afterward.” Mayo had an RT300 leg and arm therapeutic bike that stimulates your muscles and is great for people with spinal cord injuries and strokes.

  My friend wheeled back and gave me the once over. “You’re looking strong. I bet you’ll be walking again in no time.”

  “I don’t know if I’m there yet,” I said. “But my therapy has helped a ton.”

  My friend didn’t say anything, but I could see pain behind his smile. I knew he wondered how I could afford all the therapy and equipment I had. I realized how unfair the system is. To me, it’s not right that money limits how far good, hard-working people, like my friend, can go in their recovery. To this day, it makes me uncomfortable how fortunate my circumstance is compared to him or anyone else going through this.

  I had all this in my mind when I was invited to speak at the Lynch Family Foundation’s annual banquet. This foundation was created to support those who find themselves in financial need, especially need created by health problems. They had heard my story and wanted me to share it.

  “Something you should consider is that people get paid to speak,” they mentioned. “As you recover, this could be a career for you. There will be a few speakers in the audience who will speak before you. They might be able to help you get started.”

  I’d never spoken anywhere, except in class, but I thought it sounded amazing. I knew I had a powerful story to tell, and who knows, maybe it could help someone.

  Despite being extremely nervous, that first time speaking in front of an audience was unbelievable. I shared about making the tackle, my life being flipped upside down because of my spinal cord injury, and the highs and lows of my recovery process. Here and there I saw some nods, some sparks of connection. So I kept going. I emphasized how your circumstances do not determine your future. Your responses to your circumstances do. Even though I felt I didn’t deliver a very good speech, everyone was entranced. The audience laughed and cried, and when I was finished, they gave me a standing ovation. Okay, that was fun, I thought. I want to do that again.

  Afterward, the person who’d booked me came to shake my hand. “If you ever want to do anything to help other people or host a fundraiser to pay for anything you need, let us know,” he said. “We can help you out.”

  I opened my mouth to say I didn’t need anything, then it hit me. Maybe I didn’t need anything, but I knew plenty of people who did. What if I could help others suffering from spinal injuries with equipment and recovery options they couldn’t afford? That thought prompted me to approach my dad with the idea of starting our own foundation. I knew we could fill a void for people without the kind of insurance I had. My cousin helped me design a website, and we called every family friend who was an accountant or lawyer that we could think of to help us get started.

  Within six months we formed a nonprofit and raised thirty-five thousand dollars with our first fundraiser. That was enough to purchase a therapeutic bike like the one my friend used at Mayo, only this one went to Winneshiek Medical Center in Decorah, Iowa, the first place I was taken by ambulance after my accident. I wanted those who couldn’t go to an elite medical center to still have access to top-notch equipment. To raise the funds, my sister Alex and I went door-to-door to different businesses in town to ask for their support in our mission. Today the Chris Norton Foundation has raised close to one million dollars. We’ve helped patients get treatment they couldn’t otherwise afford, sent people to camps for spinal cord injuries, and even started our own camp.

  As my foundation evolved, so did my recovery. For far too long, I was convinced that I needed my physical abilities to be happy. My foundation helped me realize that life is about giving yourself to others and helping people. I began to see how I could have a richer life than I ever imagined, even if I never took another step as long as I lived. It also gave me contentment in the present while still having hope for a recovery.

  5

  Not What I Expected

  EMILY

  Dear God,

  About four months ago I met the most amazing person. I was planning on being single for a while, but that completely changed when I met Chris. There was something different about him, and I knew I had to give it a chance. This is so crazy to say since we have only been dating for a few months, but I am going to marry him and spend the rest of my life with him.

  He has made me feel something that I haven’t ever felt for any other guy. He has already changed the way I look at life. He has helped me appreciate the small things I used to take for granted. He has helped me not stress out over things that don’t matter in the big picture. He has shown me that with hard work, anything is possible. I now believe that I can achieve my dreams and goals in life. He has helped me to be more positive and not complain.

  Chris and I had an immediate connection. After hanging out a few times, I just felt so comfortable around him and I felt like I had known him my whole life. I truly believe that you brought us together, and I am so thankful for that. I love having him in my life, and I don’t want that to ever change.

  I could hardly believe the words I’d just written in my journal. A few months earlier I’d have bet you any amount of money that I’d never be in a relationship that I was pretty sure was going to lead to marriage.

  I felt called by God to help girls like Whittley as a vocation. The demands of college had kept me from working with girls as hands-on as I had in high school. But I wanted to change that. Whittley and I still talked on a regular basis, but I missed being close enough to spend quality time with her. On top of that, when I broke up with my old boyfriend, I had told all my friends that I was through with relationships for a while. I needed to take care of myself and refocus my energy on what mattered most to me, and that’s what I planned to do the summer after my junior year of college.

  My friend Danielle didn’t buy it. “Come on, Emily,” she said when I told her I wanted to take a break from dating. “You’ve been with the same guy since you were what, fifteen?” She shook her head. “You need to see what else is out there.”

  “I’m serious!” I protested. “We just broke up. The last thing I need is another relationship.”

  “Who said anything about relationships? I’m talking about dating around, having fun.”

  I laughed. “Oh, please. No way am I going out picking up guys. That sounds awful.”

  “You really have been out of the dating scene awhile.” Danielle pulled out her phone and opened an app I’d never seen before. “There’s this website where you can meet guys in your area. You just look through the ones that come up, and if you think he’s cute, you can get matched up and start talking.”

  I watched as she swiped through picture after picture. The idea that you would start talking to some stranger because you saw his picture was weird to me. “So you really do this? You’ve talked to guys from the app and gone out with them?” I asked.

  “I have a few times!” She paused on an attractive photo. “It’s not like I’m trying to meet my soul mate or anything. It’s just a good distraction. That’s what you need.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but the next thing I knew, Danielle had me downloading the app and entering my information. She even helped me p
ick out a photo to use in my profile.

  “That’s it!” she said. “You’re all set up!” We swiped through a few pictures together as she gave me advice on red flags to look out for. I picked a few guys I thought were cute and set my phone down.

  “You know I’m not going to actually meet up with some random person, right?” I told her. “This is just for fun.”

  I didn’t think about the dating app again until my phone buzzed with a notification a few days later. I glanced down and saw, “Congratulations! You have a new match!”

  I sighed. Ugh, I forgot to turn off the notifications. Before I could change my settings, a message popped up from a guy named Chris Norton. “Hey, what’s up?” it said.

  Wow, I thought. That’s your big opening line? What’s up? I mentally blamed Danielle for talking me into signing up for this stupid app.

  I couldn’t help but notice that this Chris Norton guy was wearing a cross necklace in his pictures, which made me think he might be a Christian. This was important to me. Even though I had attended church sporadically since moving off to college, my faith was still important to me. In my last relationship, my longtime boyfriend didn’t have a strong faith in Christ. It wasn’t a priority, and I wanted to make sure that my next boyfriend not only had a strong faith but was living out his faith.

  I hoped this Chris Norton guy did. There was a link to his website in his profile, so I decided to check it out before I replied to his message. I couldn’t believe the professional-looking website that popped up. Another picture of the same guy appeared, but this picture showed him in a wheelchair. I read about his injury, how he recovered and went back to school, and how he was using his story to help people with spinal cord injuries who can’t afford the treatment and equipment they need.