Mark Ormrod (6)
The way I look after my prosthetic limbs is the same
as the way I used to look after my rifle.1
Mark Ormrod, blog post, 2015
RESEARCH HAPPENS in places other than Imperial. Other universities, hospitals, government laboratories and sometimes, exceptionally (because this is Mark Ormrod), in private houses and private lives. Mark Ormrod works every day at finding the best way to live as he is now. He may not be inside a science facility, but he is his own experiment, testing his limits and consolidating his gains, even when they are small and not what he was hoping for. He’s making YouTube videos now, and in one of them he dances a bit before beginning his workout. Pretty good dancing, shoulders and hips working in rhythm – he’s come on a long way since learning to stand at Headley, learning to dance upright for his wedding. He’s grateful every Christmas Eve, the anniversary of the day of his wounding (and he celebrates by throwing some weights around at a gym session), the day he didn’t die, but mainly that he gets to go and have Christmas Day with the girl who sat by his side on the floor, and his three children, but he’s also grateful for the people that help him with the ongoing research project that is life as Mark Ormrod.
Mark left the military in 2010, but he still runs his life as if he was a Marine. They made him efficient, resourceful, a planner. But it was only after he was injured that he learned just how much these skills would mean in his new life. Each of his three prosthetics, which he got from the Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics company, cost a great deal more than his rifle, and he inspects them and maintains them as carefully as the weapon that guarded his life. There’s no sergeant-major looking over his shoulder, but then no sergeant-major has ever been as critical of Mark as he is of himself now (occasionally, and at their peril, he takes private clients as a personal trainer and coach). Each day he moves forward, and at the end of each day he prepares for the next.2 He makes a list, every night, of what he wants out of the next day, on a piece of paper or on his phone. He puts them in order of importance, sets a deadline, and then it’s the first thing he sees when he wakes up after a proper amount of the deepest sleep he can get.
Mark has thought a lot about goals since those that were set in his first meeting at Headley with the team that is going to get their patients back up on to their new feet. He knows that, without goals, someone in a tight spot withers and succumbs to their circumstances early.3 He’s seen those people leave Headley no matter what, in a wheelchair. But not him:
Have you seen that person who faces the same set of circumstances but sets themselves goals and has focus and direction? What happens to them? They thrive!
Once you have goals it awakens a drive inside you and makes you feel alive and like you have massive purpose […] if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit nothing […] [Goals] will challenge you, excite you and make you feel alive, the way you’re supposed to feel.
And just in case things change (as if they’d dare), he always has a crash bag packed, like they do in the army: small, carry-on size, full of the things that are essential to him, for his prosthetics, which he can’t afford to forget, because if he ever did, he wouldn’t be able to walk.
Every evening, his crash bag stowed away and his list made, he prepares his clothes for the next day. He changes a lot, and changing clothes as an amputee is complicated and takes longer than otherwise, so he lays out what he needs, in order. He looks at his list and sees what prosthetics he’ll need. Gym prosthetics usually, because he works out most days, and then different legs for walking and stairs. A set of work clothes, trousers and shoes, and if he has a function in the evening, a smart suit. Clothes are always tricky for an amputee. They don’t fit properly on their new body shape – worst of all on a double above-knee amputation. Mark has a 32-inch waist but needs to buy a size 34 so that the shorts (because, like most amputees, he wears shorts with almost everything) are big enough to fit over his sockets without being too tight, and look smart. Same problem at the gym, which is where he does most of his work: the fit isn’t right and gets in the way. So Mark goes custom, even for the gym, and has his gear specially made for him by a tailor on Jermyn Street in London. The tailor has been going to Headley for a while now, because she understands that severe casualty poses practical problems on top of the physical complications, so she custom-makes shirts and jackets that fit over sockets and stoma bags, with trousers in all kinds of leg length, and she even brings walking sticks that do the job of crutches but which look considerably more dapper (hand-carved ebony woods with buffalo horn handle and engraved initials).
Mark keeps his office tidy, paperwork to a minimum, stacked up tidily at night ready for him in the morning, and he keeps his inbox and his phone stripped back of anything that isn’t necessary. He backs up computer devices regularly, as we’re all supposed to. His car is vital to him. He drives one-handed, and he really can’t do anything else, like reach for a ringing phone or a bag slipping off a seat, so everything needs to be exactly as he wants it before he sets out, all complications anticipated. Complications might mean dependency. Mark has been dependent, while he was brought out of the desert, while he lay in the back of a Chinook, while he sweated through fevers at Birmingham and pain at Headley, and he doesn’t care for it. Dependency is chaos, being overwhelmed. Preparation beats it all back.
Life as an amputee is complicated and tiring, even for Mark, who is young and energised. Life as an amputee requires him to be an athlete, every day, even though he isn’t aiming for an Olympics of any kind. It took him a while to realise this, and when he accepted that from now on he was going to have to be an athlete as well as an amputee, it gave him structure and order. He’s clear in his own mind what his life means, and he’s good at explaining exactly what that means, every day:
Being a double above-knee amputee […] takes between 300 and 500 per cent more energy to do anything than it would for a normal able-bodied person. If you woke up in the morning and spent the entire day jogging around from one place to the next instead of walking, if while you stood still you were jogging on the spot, and if you wore a weighted vest when you were doing things like getting up off the floor or standing up from a chair, that’s pretty much the same level of energy that it takes for me to get through a normal day as a full-time prosthetic user.
Wherever you look in Mark’s home, things are ready for him so he can go on being exactly who he needs to be, that day and the next. He thinks about everything, every single thing, that he eats. He always has breakfast, no skipping. And healthy snacks, ready prepared, the preparation thing in everything. He drinks plenty of water, starts the day with hot water and maybe a slice of lemon because it gets his digestion going. He does all this because, like the prosthetists at Headley, he knows that weight fluctuations are complications that it’s better to avoid. Soldiers, especially those who serve on the front line, can eat anything they like, because their metabolism simply burns off excess and they come back from there thin and undernourished, a real problem in Critical Care at Bastion or Birmingham. So by the time they get to Headley they can’t eat what they like but they do, and usually this means putting on weight. It took Mark about a year to put on muscle mass but take off weight, and he did it by cutting out junk food, carbohydrates and alcohol. Instead he kept his body energised with smaller regular meals, which helped but weren’t enough for the demands he made on his body, especially once he went back in the gym almost full-time, at Headley and then back home. He’s still working on what constitutes the perfect diet for him.
Back and forth, a bit like Headley, gym work, results, mobility and looking good, as good as he has ever looked, and then exhaustion, falling, failure. Start again, new routine, fail but maybe fail better. This kind of original research is always difficult, never straightforward, and Mark doesn’t have a supervisor to guide him. He’s supervisor, researcher and student all in one. The 300–500 per cent energy demands aren’t just about the gym; they are about every waking moment of every day. The only time he didn’t need the extra energy was when he was sleeping, in his bedroom, the one with the crash bag ready in the corner and the next day’s clothes hanging on the wardrobe door. Otherwise, every step, every lift up from a chair and every single stair – more energy, and still more – not just the increasingly technical exercise regimes he devised for himself in the gym. Mark’s is a body never really at rest. To get it to function as he wanted, he once again had to choose who to listen to, and finally he chose to listen to what his new body was trying to tell him. Not standard academic language but clear:
There’s not much point having a killer body that looks good if you’re constantly miserable trying to maintain it and every day feels like a struggle, believe me when I say that because I’ve been through that process several times myself.
Every day feels like a struggle. A struggle, as he puts it, while wearing a weighted vest. Mark has a family, and he knows the impact of his research project on them. His family see him when he struggles, when he flings aside whatever he has been working on because, no matter what he does, no matter the pain, nothing is working. He knows, above all, that a lot of the time the focus of the family is on him, and how he’s doing, and that just acknowledging that is helpful. Also they have what he calls ‘Fat Boy Fridays’, when the entire family gets to eat what they want (ice cream mostly, judging from his Twitter feed pictures), not just what is working for Mark that particular month. When his children run and fall, Mark can go to them himself, and help them up (by carefully engaging the right muscles in his whole body and all his strength). So he’s become the dad he thought he should be, not dependent, but still something of a challenge for his children, starting with the eldest, his daughter.
Other children, at school or locally, would ask why her dad had funny legs and a hook instead of a hand. At first he tried to spare her the sight of him in front of her friends and stopped picking her up at school. He considered never going to the school ever again, so they would forget and she wouldn’t be the girl with that dad. Ultimately he let his daughter choose who to listen to, and she told him she could take it and that she wanted it to be him who stood at the school gates and waved her in and came back at the end of the day to collect her. The children who saw him were curious and they asked her lots of questions, questions that were complicated for her to answer, and it got her down.
Together they came up with something that might help. Mark had started doing motivational speaking by this point, so he had some practice in explaining himself to audiences. They decided he would speak at her school assembly. He thought it couldn’t possibly be harder than a room full of top execs in suits. But it was. Mark was more nervous than he had been for a long time: rows of little faces looking up at him, one of them his girl, and he didn’t want to let her down. But he didn’t, and he took all their questions and explained everything, and then there were no more questions, or if they were, someone who had been paying attention in his assembly explained the answer to the others. He has more children now, and he expects to do more assemblies because ‘I don’t want to cause any problems for them going through school as I know it can be tough enough anyway without anything extra to deal with.’ He’s prepared now: speech for assembly, crash bag in the corner, next day’s clothes on a hanger, family behind and in front of him.