Mark Ormrod (5)
MARK ORMROD was in the prosthetics workshop on his second day at Headley, getting cast up for his sockets. He’d been told at Birmingham that he would be working his arse off at rehab to walk again, but he hadn’t done that exactly because, as physios had explained, what arse muscles he had left were vital to recovery. Of the many things he found out about himself in his first twenty-four days at Headley, he was finding the chair was not a place he wanted to be, ever. He was also trying to be a parent again, but in the chair and with only one arm, this was becoming the hardest and most frustrating part.1
He had a daughter, born before his injury, whom he saw on the one week in four away from Headley. By the end of it he felt like an utter failure as a father and sometimes a danger, because he couldn’t care for her the way he wanted to. She was small and already walking well, but she still fell down occasionally and hurt herself. Every time he had to ask someone to get to her, to pick her up and to bring her over and put her in his lap, and he had to have parked the chair in the meantime somewhere stable enough for him to use his one arm to comfort her, to tell her it would be all right, and then somehow work out how to help her back down to the ground, where she could run off again. Every time he felt anger if whoever could pick her up and bring her over didn’t do it immediately, when every second she cried in someone else’s arms felt so much longer. Anger because every time he came back and saw her she could run further away from him and do more, like swimming or hide-and-seek, and he could do none of it. He couldn’t even spend time with her, just the two of them. And he could see into the future: a future where, once she was big enough, she would end up pushing him around.
He took that anger back to rehab and channelled it into getting out of the chair and re-learning all the things that his daughter could do better than him, so he could be a dad again. He was quick, really quick considering he was the first triple they had had at Headley, which was its own challenge. So he did what he was told, to the max, Marine-style and was up on his stumps six weeks after the explosion.2 Rattling through each stage. Big legs, cranes and Velcro, family taking pictures. Smiles and stubbies, up and down, walking, working. Then the long legs moment in the spotlight of the workshop. Fitting, gym, positioned back between the parallel bars, battery on the microprocessor fully charged and sensors engaged. Then a deep breath moment, a long extra second, everything about to change. All that speed, to this point.
And he found that this point was sharp, and scary, suddenly suspended above the prosthetic, as if he would smash down on his stumps at any moment. And he was frightened, really frightened, more than he had ever been in his life – and that included anything Afghanistan had found to throw at him. He couldn’t bring himself to move, and he was the only one who could change that. No medics, no helicopter in the distance coming to lift him away, no physios, no one else. If he fell now, everything would get so much worse, and really, how could anything have been worse? Back down, to the place that he loathed more than anywhere else, the place where he had no power, and he couldn’t stay there, so he didn’t. Choose who you listen to. Choose not to listen to the fear. Choose a different part of his brain. Activate it, move muscles, weight, and then the sensors picked it up and the knee joint worked and the leg bent as it should and he moved forward. Struggle, balance, don’t fall, didn’t fall, struggle, balance again.
And so Ormrod worked, and bent his knees, and shouted at them to work, and walked and stood, taller than his rifle again, because he was getting married to the girl who had sat beside him on the floor and brought him back from desolation, and he was going to be a dad who could pick up his children and a husband who had walked up the aisle at their wedding and, later on, who danced with his wife, to their song (‘Amazed’, by Lonestar, in case you are wondering).