Twenty years later...

Some days you just don’t forget.

December 16^th, 1999 was a grey and snow-blown, chilly day in Kamloops. Out east of town in Monte Creek, temperatures hovered around freezing with a wind chill that bit in a few degrees lower than that. Christmas holidays were just starting and I was in familiar surroundings, standing on a work platform, facing east. Home from college in Vancouver for a few days before a planned Christmas vacation trip to Hawaii, I was putting in a couple of shifts to make some spending money while on my trip. This was the first shift back at the sawmill since the summer. It soon proved to be my last shift ever.

Sometimes I think about it. Sometimes those thoughts happen against my will. I can still feel that moment of inevitability in my whole body, looking down at my trapped hand; a flash of understanding about what was about to happen. I remember gut-wrenching nausea, the shaking, a deep cold inside of me. I remember my brother (working the same shift and stacking the wood I was cutting), being there as it all unfolded (he was a calm harbour in that storm. You don’t forget the good parts, along with the bad). I remember my co-workers and the boss; all their actions that got me rushed to hospital. I remember my mom in the air ambulance with me, being airlifted back to Vancouver where I had just come from, for a ridiculous 22-hour-long emergency surgery to reconnect the fingers I’d cut off in that saw.

drugs, good company, and cranberry cocktails kept me smiling

Nothing like spending Christmas in the hospital, amirite?!     

*****

It’s 20 years later now. Today, in fact, exactly. I mark the date every year, even if it’s just in my head. But this year marks a different sort of milestone. As of today, and every day going forward from here, I’ll have lived longer as an amputee than I ever did as a guy with all ten of those wiggly fingers. I had just turned 20 at the time, and here I am now 40.  Half a lifetime since then, and all the rest now yet to come. It’s an odd tipping point to think about.

Those first couple of years were painful and tough. Adapting to loss physically and mentally, and desensitizing slowly—again, physically and mentally.

I’m typing with five fingers on my right hand and my thumb on my left hand. My left index is conceivably long enough to type with, but it hurts too much, so I don’t. I have a bag full of prosthetic

hands and hooks. Round door handles are my nemesis, buying a pair of gloves is always a lost investment, shoelaces and waist ties
are more time consuming than they used to be, and my guitar technique is no better than basic strumming (just to name a few issues).

It hasn’t all been bad, and I’m not a negative person so let’s just end the list of woes, shall we? I’m actually looking forward to mitigating some of those issues with a new, more advanced prosthetic very soon. You may think that the bionic hands you see in movies actually exist these days, and for partial ARM amputees, they do. But for partial HAND amputees, the level of sophistication is very low in the prosthetic world. I’ll keep you posted on what’s to come, but let’s just say that there’s a company out there that is FINALLY going to help me open some literal doors.

What I could never have expected from losing my fingers all those years ago is how it would help my career choices take shape. A budding journalism student at the time of my accident, I thought I was destined to write for a newspaper. Instead, thanks to a work placement during my rehab within the WorksafeBC walls in their communications shop, I fell in love with public relations. I got the jump on a career choice that many now-former-journalist friends are only just moving in to. I also realized early on that I could get on a soapbox and talk about disability and inclusion and have people listen to me; that I was good at that. That was—and continues to be—empowering for me, and I hope, beneficial for others.

I’ve also been exposed to the world of para-sport. Missing a few digits doesn’t qualify me for much (I’m not going to complain that I didn’t lose more function!), but what I have been able to take part in has been incredibly satisfying, and there again, being able to use that avenue to talk about inclusion and access has been great.

I could go on, but that’s enough. I have a few friends who mark their injury anniversary dates as their ‘Alive Day’. Their life-changing circumstances were far more severe than my own, so it’s a bit heavy-handed (pun intended) to note December 16^th as my Alive Day. But it certainly changed my life, and for that, I feel the need to exorcise my feelings on the matter.

Circumstances are what you make of them. I’d like to think that in the last 20 years I’ve consistently strived to make good from the bad hand (more puns) I was dealt, and that I will continue to do so for whatever days I have ahead. I’m resigned to the fact—two decades later—that I’ll never shake off the occasional flashbacks and sensational memories of severing my own digits, and that my fingers probably aren’t going to grow back any time soon. But with more days ahead than behind and the right attitude, I think I’m pointing in the right direction.

That was the last finger pun, I promise.