I WOKE UP with a doctor looming over me. It took a few moments for the anaesthetics to wear off and for me to remember where I was and what was going on. Then it came back to me in a rush. The mission. The land mine. The pain. The surgery.
The surgeon standing by my bed put it to me bluntly. “I had to cut off both your feet.”
“But they told me my left foot would be okay,” I said.
“Nope, it was too damaged. I had to take it off as well,” he said. Despite his bluntness, I could tell he was upset, probably with himself, for not being able to save my other foot. Half of my brain wanted to yell out, “Hey, go back in there, get my fucking foot and reattach it right now!” But the other half—the more sensible side—knew the surgeon had done his best.
He went on to explain that I had suffered compound fractures of the tibia and fibula on my left leg and the foot was so badly damaged that it was pretty much backwards. “Even if I’d managed to save it, it would have been useless to you.”
I imagined a club of meat at the end of my leg.
“I made the decision to amputate mid-calf—on both legs—to try and give you the best chance possible to use prosthetics in the future.”
Was I hearing correctly? I thought I’d lost only my feet, but now the surgeon was telling me I’d lost part of my lower legs, too. My initial reaction was to go into denial mode. This won’t mean the end of my career in the Canadian Armed Forces. No way. I thought to myself, “There are lots of guys in the Force who use prosthetics.” Or so I thought.
I was so convinced of this that the day after my surgery, when all the snipers, including Barry, Kash and Gord, came by the hospital at Kandahar Airfield to see me, I said, “Guys, I’ll be fine. I’ll go home for a while, do some rehab, get some prosthetic legs, learn how to walk with them and be back on the next mission chasing Taliban.”
There was lots of nodding and encouragement, but I’m not sure the guys believed this.
My legs were still all bandaged up, so I couldn’t see them. My legs—or what was left of them—were swollen, and the bandages were bloody. I had an external fixator on my left leg. The surgeon had saved as much of the shattered bone as he could and the fixator would hold it in place until, at a later time in Canada, steel plates could be put in. At this point, I was on so many drugs that I didn’t feel the pain.
Over the next couple of days, my condition stabilized, until I was strong enough to begin my long journey home to Canada. I flew to Bagram Airfield first, which is the biggest American air base in Afghanistan, located north of Kabul. I had some minor surgery there, and the American doctors made sure that my wounds were free of dirt and debris from the explosion.
A couple of days after that, I flew from Bagram to Kuwait, where we picked up a few more injured soldiers before heading to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. From there it was a short drive to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl. There, I shared a room with another injured Canadian soldier, whose vehicle had been blown up. A Canadian Challenger jet was coming to get him in a couple of days, and I very much wanted to go home with him on that plane. The normal turnaround time at Landstuhl is about two weeks, but my recovery was going well enough that I was given the go-ahead to leave.
On the day of the flight, I was pumped full of blood thinners and pain meds. I was loaded onto the Challenger bound for Toronto. When we touched down, my whole family was there to greet me, as well as my girlfriend. The doors of the jet opened. I was on a stretcher, and as I looked down I saw my brother. “Hey, you’re wearing my favourite hat!” I said, which made everyone laugh. Once I was off the plane, everyone wanted to say hi and seemed really happy. I remember soldiers there as well, and it was nice to see some troops in uniform. As I was wheeled away, I gave everyone a big thumbs-up.
They wheeled me on a gurney over to an ambulance, which would take me to intensive care at Sunnybrook hospital. But on the way to the ambulance, one of the medical personnel—she was actually a captain in the Armed Forces—leaned over to me and whispered, “Just so you know, we don’t have any idea what we’re doing.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, “What the fuck does that mean?” It was a very telling comment, one that set the tone for the administrative side of my recovery in the months ahead.
The captain was right. It had been a long time—forty or fifty years—since the Canadian military health care system had had to deal with wounded soldiers coming home from combat. Historically, our military simply hadn’t played an active combat role. Our system knew what to do with soldiers coming back in body bags; it also knew how to treat small injuries. But for anything in between—requiring months of rehab and recovery—it was foreign territory.
Once I was checked into the ICU at Sunnybrook, I found out one of the nurses on my floor was Kash’s sister. Talk about a small world—I was on the same floor as the sister of one of the key guys in my sniper unit in Afghanistan. I assumed that this would mean I would get some extra-special attention, but as it turned out, I wasn’t ever under the care of Kash’s sister.
I had received excellent personalized care in Afghanistan and Germany, but I now had to adjust to a whole new system that was entirely different. The staff at the hospital seemed overworked at night, and there were times when my urine bag was overflowing. My girlfriend and my mom (along with anyone else who visited) became my unofficial nursemaids, a job that no one had signed up for. It was a stressful time, for them and for me. My girlfriend at one point got into an argument with one of the nurses, who seriously lacked bedside manner, and this became yet another source of stress for all of us.
One night, my pain medication stopped working after all my family had gone home. I could self-administer the morphine drip by pushing a button at certain intervals, which would release the medication through IV. But on this night, the morphine just wasn’t working, and I was in intense pain. It felt like dogs were gnawing on the broken ends of my legs. I pushed the call button on the side of my bed to have my nurse come by and check out the problem. A good thirty or forty-five minutes went by and she still hadn’t come by to see me. I was in agony.
Finally, the nurse arrived.
“I haven’t been in this much pain since the explosion,” I told her. “Can you please call a doctor? Something is wrong.”
“Sure,” the nurse said. “There’s an anesthesiologist on call.”
But another two hours went by and nobody came to check on me. At this point, I was in more pain than I have ever been in in my life. In the dead of the night, I had no escape. Even thinking about it now, I’m overwhelmed by the memory of that pain. At the time, I broke down completely. I was crying, the tears streaming down my face. My hand was gripped around the call button, which I pressed over and over again, but still, nobody came.
Eventually, the nurse came back to my room.
“Nurse! I can’t take it. Is the doctor coming?”
“It’s been a busy night. I’m sorry, but he can’t come to see you.”
“The pain. There’s something wrong. The line’s cut off. I’m not getting any pain meds. I swear there’s something wrong.”
She went to the IV and checked the settings and the line. “I don’t see any problems. Just press your button when you need it.”
I writhed in pain for the entire night, with no relief. The next morning, a new nurse was assigned to me after shift change. She was a sweet woman who had always gone out of her way to make sure I was comfortable. I was so happy to see that woman’s face.
“Thank god you’re here!” I said.
“Jody, what’s wrong? You look terrible.”
“I didn’t sleep. I’m in terrible pain. Please, you’ve got to help me. The pain meds stopped working last night.”
The nurse walked over to the IV machine and pushed a couple of buttons. “Okay, Jody. Try pressing your morphine button now.”
I pressed it. Within seconds, the pain disappeared.
“Holy shit. What did you do?”
Later, I found out that on that night my morphine drip had only been dispensing one tenth of my usual dosage, and at twice the normal interval.
•
One day during the next two weeks, while a nurse changed my bandages, I got a look at the stumps of my legs. They were covered in stitches and staples and still pretty swollen. I felt embarrassed looking at them. I was always used to being one of the tallest guys in the room, and now I couldn’t even stand up. A funny thing about your mind when you lose your feet is that your brain doesn’t always remember the loss. There were nights when I’d need to go to the bathroom, and up I’d get, forgetting completely about my accident until I abruptly realized that I didn’t have feet to swing off the bed and plant on the floor.
In the daytime, though, I never forgot what had happened. I made an effort to keep moving and to get out of bed on my own.
About ten days into my stay, a nurse came to talk to me. “Jody, we noticed that you urinate, but we’re a little concerned that you’re not doing much else.”
“What do you mean? I go every day,” I responded.
“That’s impossible,” the nurse said. “You’ve never asked for a bedpan for that.”
“Correct. I get to the bathroom on my own.”
“What! How? You never ask for help.”
“Because I don’t need anyone’s help with that,” I said.
The nurse was so taken aback that she asked me to demonstrate. Not only that, she called five or six of her colleagues to watch.
“I need a bit of room here,” I said. “I’m not used to such a big crowd for this.”
They stood back. As soon as I started to pull myself off the bed, one of the nurses came running forward to assist me.
“Just back off,” I said. “Because if I land on you, you’re going to be the one in this hospital bed.”
I shifted to my wheelchair, rolled to the bathroom, and even let the group watch as I transported myself onto the toilet. They watched in amazement.
“Ta-da!” I said as I sat down.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” one of them said.
“I guess we’re not used to dealing with soldiers,” another one commented. That was true: they weren’t used to dealing with soldiers, who generally had a high fitness level, good upper-body strength and an ability to work around difficulties, especially physical ones.
I had been at Sunnybrook for only two weeks when I was transferred to St. John’s Rehab, a centre affiliated with the hospital. The nice thing about St. John’s was that I could now work towards the goal of walking again. I got my first set of prosthetics in March. One of the first things I asked about them was “Can I carry sixty-five pounds’ worth of gear over thirteen kilometres on these?” I was thinking about the army’s Battle Fitness Test. “So, will I be able to do that in about a year?”
The prosthetist hesitated. Then he said, “Well . . . we’ll definitely have to see.” I’m not sure the prosthetist had ever been asked that question before.
From that point on, I made it my mission to learn to walk again. I treated rehab like a military course. When the military wants a soldier to learn something, they send him on a course. So that’s the approach I took with my rehab. If you can imagine using stilts, that’s probably what using prosthetics feels like. My centre of gravity was completely off, and it was weird that I couldn’t feel where my feet used to touch the ground. At first, it was very hard to move. I used parallel bars to support my weight, moving from one end of the bars to the other. This was a major deal, something I’d been working towards for a while. My mom was there, alongside the physiotherapist and the prosthetist. By the time I made it to the other end, Mom was crying and the physiotherapist was crying and the prosthetist was crying, and so was I. The best thing about the first day: peeing standing up—something I hadn’t done since before the accident.
From that day on, I never looked back. I grew comfortable with the prosthetic feet. Around that time, I got a letter from some kids at Kennedy Public School in Scarborough. They wanted me to visit and talk about superheroes. I decided that I would leave my cane behind and walk into the library without it, which was the first time I’d done that in public. The kids were all seated quietly and clapped when I arrived. They’d set up a stool for me at the front. I sat down, told them a bit about me and what I’d done in Afghanistan. They asked lots of great questions that I was happy to answer. Overall, it was a great day.
A while later, I got some very good news. A few months earlier, while I was still on tour in Afghanistan, I had fallen in love with a bike that I saw on the cover of Motorcycle Mojo magazine. I actually emailed the magazine guys asking how I could get my hands on one of those bikes. But after the accident, I had to send a follow-up email telling them that my situation had changed. I wrote, “I lost both my feet and part of my legs overseas. By any chance, has anybody built a thumb-shift motorcycle? LOL.” I assumed that was the end of it.
A few weeks later, my brother, Cory, made up an excuse for us to drive up to Barrie, Ontario. When we got there, we pulled into the Harley dealership.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” Cory said.
When we got out of the car, the dealership unveiled a custom-made Harley for me—complete with a thumb-shift. The Motorcycle Mojo magazine editors had called the Harley owners in Barrie, and the Harley guys were inspired by my story. They decided I deserved the bike of my dreams. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was absolutely shocked and moved to tears. Just when I thought my dream of riding a motorcycle was over, these guys kept my dream alive. I’ll always be grateful to them for that.
By this point, I’d recovered enough to be transferred to ambulatory care. I went to the facility for two or three hours each day for rehab sessions and consultation. We now started to talk about where I might live and transitioning me to a short-term accessible apartment in Toronto. I’d sold my house in Chalk River by then and needed to get set up with a new home. The admin person from the Armed Forces offered three apartments in the area, but none of them were going to work for me. They were either not in the right location for me or they weren’t accessible. I could live in military housing in Oakville, but the daily commute to St. John’s would have been too long. I gave up on the so-called mobility-friendly options I was being offered and decided to search for myself. I fired up my laptop and punched in “Toronto apartments for rent.”
I found a place that was only a few blocks from the rehab centre. I went to the apartment, and sure enough, the doorways were wide enough and the bathroom would do, though it wasn’t exactly spacious. I took the place. Yet again, it was obvious that the military system just couldn’t quite cope with my needs. Sure, I was offered help with all sorts of things, from rehab to finding a home, but no one truly understood the needs that are particular to a returning soldier. And neither did I.
Once this became clear to me, I started talking to Armed Forces people about ways in which we could improve things for our wounded troops, ways to cut through the red tape and help injured soldiers get what they required during their time of recovery. I talked about wait times and why faster was critical for wounded guys returning from their tours of duty. Sometimes, by the time I was at the top of the list for a service I’d requested, I was past needing it.
My suggestions seemed to get attention, because one day I got called into the Armed Forces base in Toronto to talk about my situation. It didn’t quite go the way I’d expected. It was suggested that there might have been complaints that I was being uncooperative and unresponsive.
Unresponsive? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I have a cellphone, an email address, a home phone number and I’m on Facebook. I have no missed calls or emails, so what on earth are you talking about?”
I never got an answer to that question. Maybe it was just easier to consider me a problem than deal with the much bigger institutional challenge of how to best assist a wounded soldier. In this area, the American system is more advanced, because they have been dealing with wounded soldiers returning home for a long, long time. To this day, I advocate for adopting best practices from their system so that wounded veterans and their families can be relieved of at least some of the needless stress and focus more energy on recovery.
At one point, the Forces sent me to the Center for the Intrepid, in San Antonio, which at the time was one of the top rehab facilities in the world for soldiers dealing with amputations and other severe injuries. We didn’t (and still don’t) have anything like this in Canada, so I was sent with another soldier and two Canadian Armed Forces physiotherapists to see what we could learn. The Center is a massive, sprawling complex with everything you could possibly need under one roof: hospital, rehab facility, prosthetic equipment adjustments and living quarters. This facility has cutting-edge technology, both proven and experimental, with some amazing gadgets and devices to assist in the rehabilitation process for someone who is trying to recover from losing both legs.
A virtual-reality dome allows amputees to walk on a treadmill that simulates different terrains, almost like the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are exercises where soldiers sit in a boat and lean from side to side to steer through water, building upper-body muscles and practising weight shifts from one side to the other. And just to make sure all of these simulations are safe, soldiers are hooked into a protective harness.
I was completely blown away by these methods of rehabilitation. Most of my rehab had been accomplished on a simple set of parallel bars. I sure didn’t have technological gadgets to help me through. I shared my excitement with the two Canadian Forces physiotherapists on the trip.
“That place is amazing!” I said. “It’s exactly what someone dealing with amputation needs to recover.”
“Pffft. We don’t need these toys for rehab,” I was told, much to my shock and disappointment.
“These aren’t toys to me, they’re fucking tools,” I said. I let them have a piece of my mind, and by the end of my rant, they got the point. This exchange taught me that a lot of physiotherapists were used to working with soldiers who had small issues—sprains, tennis elbow, pulled muscles. Many had little exposure to veterans facing severe injuries and amputations. Those who’d never had that experience found it hard to justify spending millions of dollars—which of course we didn’t have at our disposal—on “fancy gadgets and toys.” The question I had was this: if our veterans aren’t worth it, who is?
The toughest thing for me, beyond dealing with my own mobility and injury issues, was navigating through a system unprepared for what I needed most. I didn’t have a great peer support group around me from the military, either. I was suddenly cut off from this professional family that I’d always turned to for support. In hindsight, I should probably have chosen to do rehab in Ottawa instead of Toronto, because I would have been closer to my home base in Petawawa. There, I would have retained a connection with the gang from 1 RCR. I needed them at that time, through rehab and recovery. It would have been great to have them come by every day and see how I was. One of the recommendations I had for the Armed Forces after my experience was that wounded soldiers should always be at hospitals close to their home base, and that they should be grouped together so they could assist each other throughout recovery. This way, they wouldn’t lose touch with their teams and would have the benefit of the support from their military family.
One aspect of support I did receive from the military was ongoing therapy. After my incident, I was referred to a psychologist, who helped me get a handle on a lot of the things that were bothering me. Of course I needed emotional support for the difficulties involved in transitioning to life without two feet. But ironically, one of the biggest emotional problems I had to deal with was the anger I felt towards a medical system that didn’t seem able to respond appropriately to my needs. I knew this anger wasn’t healthy or productive, and the psychological help allowed me to work on redirecting those sentiments into something more productive.
For the most part, snipers are not prone to suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, probably because we have a better ability to emotionally detach ourselves on the battlefield and look at war as a job. But even as I improved and started to find my footing—literally and figuratively—I started to wonder if all of my experiences were leading me down the dangerous road of PTSD. In my case, I do think I was dealing with a little bit of it because I had both my feet blown off in Afghanistan. There were so many adjustments I had to make, and there was no manual on how to do anything. I’d put on a whole lot of weight because I couldn’t exercise the way I did before my accident. And Dairy Queen is delicious when you’re depressed. So in conjunction with the therapy sessions, I also started taking an antidepressant to help control my moods.
And then there was the other kind of pain—the physical kind. I was still using painkillers to help dull the pain that was there each and every day. I needed that relief so badly. But in the end, that, too, caused me tremendous suffering, and I turned into something I never thought I would be—an addict.