Legs4Greg

I finished my time in Iraq by convoying 1200 kilometers from Mosul to Kuwait. My Battalion then had a nice fifteen day period to clean vehicles, load them on the ships, and chill out for a couple of days before getting on the plane to come home.  Upon reaching Kuwaiti International Airport we boarded a civilian DC 10 aircraft and made the hellaciously long flight to Germany, then on to Fort Campbell, KY.  When we arrived home a long line of wives, husbands, girlfriends, and boyfriends greeted us. We then made our way into an empty gym on the airfield and had a short 15-minute coming home party.  Next, we were bussed back to the Battalion area where all of our sensitive items (Weapons, bayonets, GPS’s, etc) had to be accounted for.  Finally, we were all allowed to go home and be with our loved ones.

You would think the first emotion one would feel getting off that airplane would be happiness.  Instead it was one of solemn gratitude that the good Lord had brought me home safe.  I could feel the tension of 11 months in Iraq exiting my body, leaving a worn down soldier ready to cash in on some much needed R&R.  It also left me feeling depressed. When your mind gets used to being in a heightened state of awareness and your body gets used to double the normal amount of adrenaline pumping through your veins and that is taken away, it creates a depressed, saddened feeling.  I am normally a real happy-go-lucky, nothing-bothers-me kind of guy, but I have to admit for the first time in my life I experienced the power of depression.  Even though the whole 101^st Airborne Division was redeploying home I somehow felt as though I was “abandoning” everyone that was replacing us.  I felt guilty. 

After sitting through some required redeployment informational classes, I learned the feelings I was having were pretty normal and were part of learning how to cope with being back in a civilized society. I’m sure anyone who has been in a war or conflict can identify with that. Even though I understood the feelings, I still had to contend with the need for that adrenaline rush. So…I bought a motorcycle.  Not just any motorcycle; a 2004 Yamaha YZ450F race dirt bike.  This thing was one huge, rear tire spinning, front tire lofting, arm jerking, behemoth loaded with more power than should be legal oh-oh-oh (Tim Allen’s More-Power Grunt).  I rode it in the woods at a state forest approved riding area a couple of times but that didn’t give me the rush of adrenaline my body was addicted to, so I turned to motocross.   I found a track about 45 minutes away from home and I proceeded to tear it up.  As time went on I got better and better.  I reached a point where I could ride the track smoothly while effortlessly hopping over the doubles and then hitting the triple jump in the middle of the track, which was a pretty impressive jump.  I hit the big triple time and time again flying well over 10 feet high and landing it 35 or 40 feet later.  This was definitely the way to achieve that adrenaline high.

It had rained the night before, but I called my buddy and he was game for a ride on the track that fateful Saturday morning the 6^th of November.  I unloaded my bike and rode towards the track. I usually take one lap real slow to check out the track and see if there are any wet, gnarly, rutted parts of the track, but that morning I did not.  I rode smoothly halfway around the track, hit the corner, and rolled on the throttle.  My back tire squirmed as the bike launched forward but as I reached the face of the jump I up-shifted one too many times and instead of flying level I left the ground and my front wheel instantly started nose-diving.  When your back wheel is at about 10 feet off the ground and your front wheel is about at 6 feet you know something is pretty wrong.  I remember heading towards the ground at a pretty good clip with my hips securely locked onto the handlebars.  My head touched ground first and I remember my motorcycle helmet visor being ripped off and then seeing nothing but dirt.  I was then knocked unconscious. 

I awoke a couple of minutes later with my head on the track owner’s lap and my buddy, Chris, at my feet with a kind of perplexed look on his face.  I asked what happened and Chris told me the bike had landed on me.  I reached under my helmet and wiped my mouth off and said, “I could be mistaken but I think I could use some work on my landings!”  We all chuckled; then Chris asked if I was in pain and for the first time I thought it kind of weird that I really wasn’t in much pain.  I asked Chris what was wrong and he said my foot was laying the opposite way of my body.  At that point I thought I was just in shock and that any moment waves of pain were going to come flooding over me.  During the time I was waiting for the ambulance, I started to realize I couldn’t feel anything below the bottom of my ribs.  Time rolled on as I lay there on the ground.  Both the ground ambulance and the life-flight chopper showed up at the same time.  They looked at me and put a neck brace on, after carefully removing my helmet.  They then proceeded to cut off my jersey, pants, and underwear.  I was naked and freezing. They injected me with morphine, put me on a backboard, and put me in the helicopter.  We lifted off at about 1:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon. After a 20-minute ride to Vanderbilt Medical Hospital in Nashville, I was rushed onto the trauma floor operating room where the doctors poked and prodded, reset my left knee, and took off my left motocross boot.  After about a million and one x-rays, a cat scan, and two or three MRI’s, they took me to my room at 1:30 Sunday morning.  

I awoke mid-morning Sunday to pain and doctors looking down at me asking me if I knew what was going on.  They proceeded to tell me I had crushed two vertebras in my back, fractured a couple of ribs, and had air between my lungs and my chest cavity.  Then came the news that I was paralyzed and a T7 complete paraplegic, which meant I couldn’t feel or move anything below my ribcage.  The doctors then told me three out of the four ligaments that hold my knee in place were torn.  This injury is pretty common in sports and is called the “Unhappy Triad”.  They then went on to tell me they were assembling a team of doctors and I would have my first operation on Wednesday November 10^th. 

Wednesday arrived and the assembled team included a trauma surgeon, a cardiologist, a neurologist, and an orthopedic surgeon.  They put me under anesthesia at about 7:30 a.m.  and wheeled me back to my room at about 8:00 p.m. that night.  During that surgery they opened me up from the left side, removed one of the more intensely injured ribs, deflated my left lung, removed the two crushed vertebras and replaced them with a section of a cadaver’s humorous bone.   The next surgery the following Wednesday was to anchor this new section of bone.  After this first surgery I was put on a morphine drip, where you can give yourself a drip of morphine every 6 minutes.  Oh boy did I love that!  I really “thought” I was in pain so any painkiller I was allowed I took advantage of.  Then along came Sunday and the pain had subsided enough so I was taken off the morphine drip and started taking oral pain meds.  I don’t remember this period well, because of the high levels of painkillers still in my system, but my wife Alicia said I looked like a crack addict in a detoxification center. I couldn’t stop “wigging out” and scratching all over.  My body had become addicted to morphine in that short amount of time.   

The next Wednesday the 17^th of November I was rolled on a gurney into the operating room again.  I went under anesthesia at 7:00 a.m. and wheeled back to my room at about 10:30 p.m.  In this surgery, I was sliced open right down to my backbone.  They anchored the previously free-floating humorous bone that was covering my spinal cord to my T6 and T10 vertebra.  I thought I knew what pain was with my first surgery but when I awoke during the middle of the night after my second surgery I suddenly realized what real pain felt like.  I was put on a morphine drip again but it didn’t do the trick.  The hospital mixed up a nice painkiller cocktail that worked quite nicely and provided a level of comfort for me while I was on cloud nine. I was on the intravenous painkillers for about a week after the second surgery and then once again became a struggling drug addict going through detoxification.

 I stayed on the trauma floor until November 22 when I was moved to Vanderbilt Stallworth Rehabilitation Hospital, right across the courtyard from the hospital I was in.  They let me get settled in over the Turkey Day Holiday and then the next Monday morning I met my rehabilitation specialists, an occupational therapist and a physical therapist.  The OT was to teach me how to do all the activities of daily living a person takes for granted when he can walk.  The physical therapy was to increase my strength and teach me how to work out and stretch my limbs so they didn’t get stiff and become unusable.  I had a plastic shell keeping my upper body straight and they gave me a leg immobilizer for my torn ligaments.  The OT and PT made me work hard through the pain but they both had great senses of humor, which made the frustratingly slow and painful process of healing a lot better. 

I was healing rapidly and progressing every day but my insurance didn’t want to keep me in a civilian hospital any longer, so on December 22 I flew from Nashville to the Veterans Affairs Medical Clinic in Augusta, Georgia to complete my rehab.  The hospital in Augusta was hard to get used to, as every hospital does things differently. I just kept in mind this Spinal Cord Injury Unit was the best around, or so all of the doctors and nurses said.  My bowels were 100% impacted when I reached the hospital so for the first couple of days they left me in bed and tried to get me unclogged.  After five days, four heavy-duty laxative treatments, and five enemas later everything was flowing smoothly again.  All of you that have ever had a colonoscopy or a flight physical probably know how I felt after this whole ordeal. 

After the holidays, I was taught a great deal about my body, how to take care of myself, and about the ailments I was susceptible to as a T7 paraplegic.  I did so well in my recover and rehab I was considered independent on pretty much all of the activities of daily living and was released on January 16 to go home and live until it was time to take my upper body brace off.  Alicia picked me up in Georgia and brought me home but a week later the doctors of the Fort Campbell Hospital X-Rayed me and said my back was all healed and I could take my upper body brace off a month early.  Boy was that a feeling.  I now know what an infant goes through.  They took my brace off and none of the muscles in my back were strong enough to hold me upright so I fell around like a little bobble doll.  Since I got my brace off early, I was flown back down to the Augusta VA where I completed my second phase of rehabilitation, which was advanced wheelchair skills and drivers training.  On January 31^st I started learning how to get into my wheelchair by myself and I learned how to drive a vehicle modified with hand controls.  The hand control is just a mechanical lever that mounts to either the left or right side of the steering column and you push it towards the dash to use the brake and pull it down towards your lap for the gas. 

I was discharged from the VA on February 11 and I flew home by myself.  When boarding the plane I had to transfer from my wheelchair to an aisle chair, a skinny version of a wheelchair that the flight attendants can pull you back to your seat on and then you can transfer from the aisle chair to your seat.  It was great to have my freedom at home, but missed having my meals served to me and a nurse at my beck and call in the hospital. 

So now I am home in Fort Campbell, KY, still living on post.  I am still on active duty, but the Army has started the process to medically retire me.  The process should take about 6 months and then they will honorably discharge/retire me.  Once retired, I will be put on the Temporary Disability Retirement List where if I regain the full use of my legs they could ask me to come back on active duty.  For now I am just wheeling around the house on my wheelchair.  I have recently bought a pickup from my dad and had it modified with a transfer seat, a seat that electronically rotates 90 degrees and drops down to wheelchair height, hand controls, and a wheelchair crane that is mounted in the bed of the pickup.  I am totally independent with everything now but it is sure nice that I have a beautiful wife by my side to help me through it all. It is also nice that the VA takes such good care of me since I am being medically retired.  I am not sure what I will do now but the VA gives me a couple of good options like going back to school to get my masters and gives you money to help build a house.  

I want to take a minute and say it is not the motorcycle’s fault I got hurt.  I recognize it was my fault and my fault alone.  I don’t want all the mothers, fathers, wives, or husbands thinking just because I was on a motorcycle (or rather the motorcycle on me) when I got hurt, they are evil. Carpe Diem!  You can get hurt doing anything in your daily life.  There were people in the spinal cord injury ward that got hurt falling down stairs, diving into water, and just tripping and falling so trust me you can’t isolate yourself from all sources of injury especially yourself.   

I would like to thank all of the people who called, wrote, and sent cards while I was in Iraq and in the hospital and still continue to keep in touch.  I appreciated and continue to appreciate all of the special things the people of southeastern Montana have done for me - especially the prayers.  I still cannot move my legs, but I have some very good indicators I will get some feeling back such as goose bumps all down my legs and them being reactive to touch.  Just in the past month or so my legs have began to tingle and burn profusely and I believe this is my body trying to tell me that it’s working on letting me walk again.  Hopefully with continued optimism, hard work, pain, and a lot of praying one day I will walk again.  God Bless!

GREGORY B. MINOW

CPT, EN

326^TH BRIGADE SPECIAL TROOPS BATTALION