Winter 2012 | Volume 110 | Number 662

A Life They Never Imagined

Photo Credit: Robert Houser

Members rebuild lives changed forever by physical challenges.
by Laura Putre

Cancer. A car accident. A financial crisis. So much, and yet so little, can derail a life. But, as cliché as it may be, what throws us off the track can also force us to make significant – and positive – changes in our lives.

"So often we're so busy attending to our activities of daily living, we forget to stop and think about life's meaning," says Dr. Tanya Edwards, medical director for the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. "Having a major health challenge usually will knock people off their feet and give them the opportunity to stop and think about the meaning of life and what's really important."

Running, Swimming, and Biking Blind

Thrivent member Richard Hunter has needed to figure out what's important to him at several points in his life. In 1989, he was living his dream of being a Marine. He had just graduated from Oregon State University with a bachelor's degree in psychology and was stationed in Quantico, Virginia, as a second lieutenant. He was training to be a motor transport officer, but five months into active duty, he recalls, "the roller coaster started."

During a routine vision exam, a doctor saw an abnormality in his eye. After a series of tests, Hunter was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that eventually leads to blindness. The Marines told him he would have to be medically discharged.

"It was a traumatic time," recalls Hunter, who lives in Folsom, California. "I didn't have a Plan B. I wasn't sure where I should move. I knew I didn't want to go back to the small town where I grew up. I distinctly remember being very anxious and pacing around."

Hunter decided to step back and let his faith in God take over. "That calming presence was definitely something I needed," he says.

He headed to California to be near his girlfriend, Heidi, who was finishing up school, and found a job working with emotionally disturbed children in a group home. He married Heidi, earned a master's degree and spent 10 productive years as a school psychologist.

But in 2004, his condition began to affect his central vision to the point that he couldn't see the students he was observing in the classroom during diagnostic tests for disabilities. "It was the second time I had a dramatic change in direction in my life, where I had to stop doing something that I really liked and found rewarding," remembers Hunter.

He threw himself into volunteerism, chairing the advisory committee for the local Society for the Blind and completing the required 50 hours of education to become a Stephen Minister at his church. (Stephen Ministers are laypeople trained to help church members in crisis. Their work typically supplements that of the pastor's in the congregation by providing spiritual and emotional support to those dealing with difficult life situations.)

Hunter also trained for and finished the Boston Marathon in 2008. When running started to take a toll on his middle-aged body, he turned to cross-training and began swimming and cycling as well. With the help of a sighted guide whom Hunter believes he found with God's help, Hunter competed in an Ironman triathlon in Augusta, Georgia. That race led to other opportunities, including organizing a race for blind veterans and chairing a committee for the C-Different Foundation, which helps visually impaired athletes.

"I've constantly looked for blessings in my situation," says Hunter, who completed a Florida Ironman in November, swimming 2.4 miles, cycling 112 miles and running 26.2 miles in less than 12 hours, becoming only the second visually impaired athlete to finish a full Ironman in that time frame. "To date, I haven't gotten angry."

Rev. Dr. Mel Jacob, the executive director of Lutheran Counseling Services in Winter Park, Florida, and a former parish pastor, says when he first meets with a patient who's just been dealt a blow like a serious illness, his first job is to listen to the person and hear what they're going through. "It takes a while to realize what's left, much less to assess what can be built from what remains," he says. "And out of that can grow discoveries, new possibilities and different ways of seeing yourself."

He also encourages patients to stay connected with the people who care for them and focus on what they can do versus what they can't do. "You can't rebuild your house in one week," he says. "But you can clean up or start to clean up."

Photo Credit: Julia Robinson

Power of Resilience

Thrivent member Derrick Wright has always been tenacious and hard-working. A West Point graduate, he worked his way up to officer in the Army, and then entered the private sector to work for a high-tech company doing project management. During the Iraq War, he took a job protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, where he'd spend three months on the job and then head back home to Austin, Texas, for a month to be with his family before returning to work.

Working hard took on new meaning, however, when a rocket exploded outside the building where he was staying in Iraq. A piece of shrapnel shattered his skull and lodged in his brain.

"He wasn't really living when they found him," says his wife, Cindy. "But there were a few determined medics that insisted on trying to resuscitate him. They were able to get him breathing again, and then they evacuated him from that area to a field hospital."

In Germany, surgeons stopped Wright's breathing and heartbeat for a short time so they could remove the dead two-thirds of the left side of his brain. They also removed a piece of his skull (it was later reconstructed) to allow his brain to swell and prevent hemorrhaging.

In the months that followed, Wright relearned to walk. He still struggles with reading and remembering things, and he doesn't feel much on the right side of his body. Much of his eyesight is gone, because the entry point for the wound was in the vision center of the brain.

Although he has graduated from most of the conventional therapy, he works on rehabilitating himself at home – practicing his reading, and writing a blog that he hopes will help brain-injury survivors appreciate "the very little things" that he considers progress. He runs the household now, taking care of the chores and methodically mapping out regular bus trips to the grocery store so he doesn't have to buy more than he can carry.

"He has to plan everything like that, and he does a good job," says Cindy Wright. "Something that I would take for granted as taking me a half hour might take him half a day or even the entire day, but he still does it because there's value in being able to do something for yourself."

Cindy finds strength in Derrick's resiliency. "It's just been the attitude that, you know, everything does happen for a reason; you can either feel sorry for yourself, or you can just do the most you can with what you have," she says. "Derrick's just working to do that all the time. He doesn't ever stop to say, 'Poor me,' or 'I can't do that,' or 'I'm disabled now.' It's more like, 'You know, how do I have to change my environment so that I can do this thing that I want to do?' Or, 'How can I relearn this thing I used to know, just so I can live a normal life?'" 

Dr. Detlev Erdmann, a plastic surgeon at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, has seen many patients with major burn trauma, as well as significant limb injuries that despite all efforts required amputation. Those who go on to lead productive lives after their injuries tend to have supportive families, as well as a belief in both themselves and God, he says.

Erdmann recalls a patient he had a year or so ago, a farmer in his forties whose right leg got caught in a machine that drills holes in the ground. Though the man lost his leg, he planned on continuing to farm. "I was impressed how well he did psychologically," says Erdmann.

The doctor says the farmer having family by his side made the idea of going back to his old life possible. "His wife was with him all the time, being optimistic and caring and understanding," says Erdmann. The extended family took care of their two children, cooking meals and getting them off to school and making sure their routines stayed as normal as possible. 

Photo Credit: Jeff and Meggan Haller/Keyhole Photo

Bad Luck, New Directions

Sometimes returning to your old life isn't possible. Thrivent member Ricky Trione, an artist and former rehabilitation counselor in Fairhope, Alabama, has survived two freak roadside accidents that ended up taking his sight and changing his life.

In 2000, Trione had stopped along the highway to check out a mechanical problem on his car when a passing 18-wheeler blew out a tire and a piece of tread hit him in his right eye.

The accident left him nearly blind. Seven years before, Trione had already lost the vision in his left eye in another freak accident, when debris from a logging truck sailed through the open window of his car and permanently damaged his retina.

As he learned to live without his sight, Trione found he had to make some other adjustments in his life, such as learning to accept help from friends and family.

For example, after the second accident, people at his church would ask him if he needed a ride or help running errands, but Trione says he always said no. Finally, a friend said, "Ricky, you know, when you don't accept help, you're robbing me of a blessing, and you're robbing yourself of a blessing. God wants us to help each other."

"That really resonated with me," says Trione, "that I was robbing fellow Christians of a blessing. I started praying about that and asking God to help me let people help me."

That openness to new ideas and assistance led him in directions he never could have expected.

Before his accidents, when he had full vision, Trione did pen-and-ink drawings, but only as a hobby. After he lost his sight, though, an artist friend offered to teach him how to make art using his other senses. Only then did Trione break out of the black-and-white world and start making bright, bold paintings of sea life and Bible stories.

Now Trione teaches schoolchildren how to finger-paint with their eyes closed, traveling with his wife, Bonnie, to classrooms around Alabama and beyond. In addition to art lessons, he also tells the kids that sometimes bad things happen, "but if we let God and others into our life, we can make lemons into lemonade."

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