Russ is almost 60 and has been in a wheelchair for nearly 3 years. A former triathlete, he was hit head-on by a woman coming out of a parking lot while biking a 50 mile ride from Malibu to Manhattan Beach. Somehow, it wasn’t the woman’s fault and he was stuck with all the bills. Good thing his wife stayed with him!
Russ calls himself the “Norm” (Norm from Cheers) of Precision Rehab, my spinal cord injury clinic. He knows everyone, knows how they got stuck in their various situations, and spends his time between workouts offering encouragement to ther other patients. Russ himself is a huge success story, he is a quadrapalegic — with a bag attached to his leg and all — and a couple months ago started hauling himself around the gym in a walker. What I mean by that is that he still spends the majority of his time in his wheelchair, but 2.75 years post injury, he is just getting enough strength to pull himself 100-200 ft around the gym in a walker, with 2 plactic boots on his legs to stabilize them. Pretty amazing, considering most people get a window of recovery that is just about 2 years post injury, with the majority of that window occuring in the first 6 months. He says his secret is that he just keeps at it, while most people would give up, but I see a lot of folks at this gym and not everyone gets his kind of results. Maybe it’s his focus. I am really not 100% sure, but my guess it that its diligence, focus and a good attitude — or at least seemingly good! I am most impressed with the way he relates to the younger guys, Russ always goes out of his way to connect with them and offer advice and encouragement. However, he is definitely a guy’s guy so unfortunately he is not very good at encouraging the ladies! He gave me a nice compliment the other day, which is that his goal is to get to where I’m at.
On that note, I’ve been receiving some nice compliments all around recently. This past week, my PT said that one of her other patients singled me out to say, “I want to walk on the treadmill hands free like Tonya does.” Honestly, I was very humbled that among all these horribly afflicted people someone called me out to say they wanted to be like me at all. Although I am diligent, focused and determined, I am certainly not positive or gracious about how I came to have my injury. So that is the part that is humbling, because not one of these people deserves to be in the situation that they are in regardless of whether it was an accident or not, and I think many more of them are quite positive and gracious about their tragedies in comparison to myself.
The other thing that is very nice — very cute, in fact, is that my PT, all of 26 years old, is very proud of me and started bragging to her colleagues the other day that my left calf muscule has gotten so big lately she had to double check to make sure she hadn’t grabbed my right calf!
That is all for now. Thanks to everyone for their continued support while I battle through the trenches.
