“Oh damn, that’s the Battalion Commander… come on, give him a salute… wait, why can’t I lift my arm?…”  When I first started finding consciousness in the hospital, I was overwhelmed and confused. I had to be told what had happened to me multiple times, and I still wasn’t good at comprehending it. One of the first times I realized how paralyzed I had become was when my Battalion Commander, then Lieutenant Colonel Meissel visited me in the hospital while our battalion was at a training event in Yakima, WA. I vividly remember trying to salute him as he pinned the Army Commendation Medal to my medical Jonny (that open-backed hospital garment). It was so difficult being celebrated and retired from this unit. I felt like I did not deserve the award, all I did was survive. I tried to lift my paralyzed arm and it felt like I had a truck parked on it. All I could do was twitch my deltoids. All I wanted was that one last salute to my commander.  That’s when it hit me. My days of b...

  Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone can do a little reflecting on 2022 as we move into 2023. I feel like the last three years were a sort of fever dream. Things got really weird when Covid hit the world stage and the years have blurred since then. I made a lot of changes and growth since then. I cut out the news from my life (mostly). I locked down with my little family. It took two years for me to actually get the viral infection and believe me it kicked my ass when I did. 2022 was my favorite year yet. There were tons of incredible milestones including marrying the woman of my dreams . I watched as businesses reopened and masks started to vanish. Gatherings finally started to feel normal. There were also hardships, like the loss of family members. Reminders about how fickle life is. Reminders of how important it is to make the most out of each day. 2022 was a year of philanthropy for me. A year of chasing goals and pursuing passions. A year of refining myself as a man and ...

Warning: proceed with caution, spoilers ahead. I will mark the movie spoilers with a red font if you want to skip them. Number 1: “Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot” This movie is on Amazon prime video and is an extremely well put together biopic following the life and trials of Portland cartoonist & quadriplegic John Callahan. John had a hard upbringing and never came to terms with it and self treated his anxiety with alcohol. This film follows him dealing with quadriplegia among many other obstacles after a drunk driving accident that left him paralyzed. The main focus on the film is the way that John fights his addiction to alcohol by joining AA. Sober & with a clear mind, John finds love in an old nurse he had and he begins to draw crude and satirical comics. It gets very mixed reviews but John ignores the critics and becomes a comic staple item in Portland, OR. A few different things really stick out for me from this movie. The first thing that I had to ask ...

  To start this one off, we’re going to have to take it all the way back to 2015. I had just started talking to this girl from back home. She was beautiful and we had incredible conversation. I remember her birthday was approaching and I wanted to get her something but I wanted to keep it modest because we weren’t officially dating yet. I ordered her some flowers to be delivered. I had no idea that her favorite flower was a Gerber Daisy. Luck of the draw I guess.  The next 2 1/2 years would be full of trips to Washington for her and trips back home to New Hampshire for me. Our weekends consisted of trying to fit in a Sunday night FaceTime date while we went through the trials of a long-distance relationship. I knew this girl was the one. On one of her trips to Washington state we thought we would make a fun game of it and go look at engagement rings. In reality I was using this to get her ring size but she had no idea. We both talked about the future and what it would hold. We...

Well I just had the best week of my life! A week full of love, faith and commitment. I got to marry the love of my life and what an experience it was! However, I will do a separate, more in depth post about the burning love that I have for my WIFE! This post will be about something different. A huge insecurity that I had going up to the wedding was based around something stupid. You probably notice that I rarely wear a suit or dress clothes. More than often you will find me in sweatpants and a hoodie or a baggy comfortable shirt. Adaptive jeans have been a great find & truthfully, even jeans are dressy for me now. Body dysmorphia is huge. Leading up to the wedding I was getting very anxious about how I was going to look in my suit. Sitting is a hard look to rock. I had a few different meetings set up at Men’s Wearhouse to get the perfect look to match my beautiful bride, but it was a gut punch realizing how difficult it was to get dressed up now. Nostalgia came and went once the su...

  Time is such a strange concept. Just a unit of measurement while we spin around a giant flaming ball of gas. Sometimes I wish more than anything it would speed up and sometimes I wish more than anything that it would slow down. But somehow it keeps on flying. I will preface this post by saying how blessed & fortunate I have been with my family. I haven't been witness to much of it within the last few years but my grandpa is currently battling dementia. I haven't been able to expose myself to it to see him because I don't want to overwhelm him but it really makes me reminisce and think about life. I've been trying to dig up pictures of my grandpa and I together and I realized something... I only have one. I realized the same thing when I got out of the Army and it is sad as hell. If you document a bunch in the military, or take selfies and "cool guy pics" you almost get labeled, so like a lot of other guys, I never did it. I wish more than anything that I...

2017 - Sad, angry, bitter & exhausted... I rolled out of my hospital room & into the office of behavioral health at the VA. I had finally capitalized on the open invitation from my care team. I needed help.  I kept apologizing to her. “I wasn’t worth all of this investment”. “You’re a fucking Ranger, man up”. This was replaying in my mind while I reclined my wheelchair during my first session. We agreed on guided meditation... baby steps. I fell asleep in 30 seconds... my hour long session was over and she gently woke me up. I started sobbing. This was the best sleep I’d had in months. We continued to meet weekly in various areas of the hospital. My favorite was the Fisher House Foundation’s garden. I felt like a semi truck had been lifted off of my chest. I didn’t realize the weight I was carrying.  I never looked back... and with my mental strength came my physical strength. I started crushing physical therapy & kicked all of my pain meds.  I started to expe...

Madigan Army Hospital, one of the oldest and largest hospital systems in the military sits proudly inside the gates of JBLM (Joint Base Lewis-McChord). This place evokes a lot of different emotions for me. I spent 4 and a half years on Fort Lewis in Washington, probably driving by Madigan ten thousand times. There were only three occasions where I spent any time in there though. Each occasion completely different and completely profound.  1.  In the military you tend to make really strong friendships when you’re going through “the suck” together. That was definitely the case for someone that I would consider my first close Army friend. Both of us 19, and very naïve but full of potential. We had just gone through Ranger Selection together and were at the current highs of our lives. We dawned our tan berets, and left Georgia for 2/75 in Washington. Then we got separated… and he started making dumb decisions. I had to step away from the friendship one night after he got wasted an...

We’ve all been there. Joining the sweatsuit mafia… especially during Covid lockdown, where pants are always optional.  Being paralyzed and sitting constantly causes a lot of strain on my skin. Keeping my bum healthy has been a main priority since day one in the hospital. I don’t talk about it often but I actually developed a pressure sore on my tailbone when I was hospitalized in 2017 because doctors and nurses had to choose how much I could move side to side while I was hooked up to the ventilator. When they told me that I had a wound developing I didn’t think much of it at the time because it seemed so minimal compared to… ya know, fighting paralysis, pneumonia, and everything in between. This “wound” actually became the bane of my existence for well over a year. So much so that I actually had a surgery done and went on bed rest for months. Skin breakdown is one of the biggest threats to anyone with a spinal cord injury. And what is constantly touching your skin?… Clothing! Befor...

I feel like every month there is a new hashtag on social media. A new calendar of dedicated themes. One that is currently going around in the disability community is #disabilitypridemonth . Seems strange to me, especially following huge celebrations & displays like pride month for the LGBTQ community. I’ll admit that I think you should rock the shit out of whatever your situation is but disability pride is an interesting one. Am I proud to be a quadriplegic? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t wish this disability on my worst enemy. That doesn’t mean that I don’t carry myself with pride in all aspects of life. I try to own quadriplegia & make the most out of every day.  I am extremely proud, however, to represent things inside of the disability community. Artwork, creative writing, motivation, gaming, being a good friend; son, uncle, human being, whatever. Those are things that I’m proud of. But paralysis specifically? That’s a big nope. I get anxious and embarrassed now. Stressed o...

No, I’m not talking about the TV show. This post may come off a little insensitive so I’ll apologize ahead of time. After a traumatic incident you’re faced with two options. You can fight back and push, or you can fold like a lawn chair. You can be a survivor or a victim. Part of me navigating this injury has been finding support groups. My faith. My family. My friends. My doctor. My psychologist. My town. Hell, even my puppy. Social media can be a great tool to find like minded groups of people but it also opens a window into some of the ugliness out there. I’ve seen some pretty shitty people in my relatively short stint in the Army so some of my expectations of people can be pretty low, but somehow someone comes along and sets a new and improved standard. Some of the most toxic people that I’ve had the displeasure of witnessing, unfortunately have been members of a spinal cord injury support page with tens of thousands of “like minded” people on Facebook.  I throw quotations arou...

Social media is a great tool to use these days for so many different applications. With all of the free time that I have now, I find myself more and more absorbed into it. To be honest, if I didn’t have the blog then I think that I would probably delete my personal Facebook account. It just has it’s claws in me too deeply. The tricky thing about running a blog account is trying to maintain transparency. Is it deceiving if I only post my milestones and good events? What about the days that suck? The days that start and I instantly want to try again the next day? What about those days? The lenses of social media certainly make that pretty tough. Most of what you see on my Facebook and Instagram accounts are my personal leaps and bounds in my recovery process, pictures of my beautiful girlfriend Kass and also a plethora of pictures of my dog Kona. I’ll often post pictures of myself out with friends and family. But what I don’t post enough of, if ever, are the bad days... and believe me th...

“There’s no place like home.” I left for the Army right after the 2012 holidays. I rang in the new year (2013) and shipped off to Georgia for basic training. I was so grateful that my ship-off date gave me the chance to celebrate one more holiday season back home. Nothing really compares to being home with family and loved ones after all, right?  I was fortunate enough to be able to come home for the majority of the Christmases while I was away. It always worked out that I had leave days saved up and had the opportunity to come back to New Hampshire. Sometimes it took hinting to my parents that I would need help paying for a plane ticket because I was “Army broke” but we made it work. Dating Kass long distance gave me a new found longing for coming home for the holidays and it was now a necessity. Facebook’s memories always remind me of each year’s holidays because my social media runs rampant this time of year. I came home in 2016 and spent my vacation learning Kass’s family tradi...

Life is nothing but highs and lows. In the words of Ol’ Blue Eyes “you’re flying high in April, and you’re shot down in May”. But hey, that’s life. And if you don’t know Frank Sinatra then I suggest you listen to his classics. My point is that everybody goes through the ebbs and flows of life. Some Monday’s are great and some absolutely suck... much like today did for me. Kass and I made lodging arrangements for the week so that I could go to a drivers rehab program at the VA to learn how to use hand controls to drive again. We (mostly my hardworking girlfriend) loaded up into the van with a week’s worth of stuff to prep for our hotel stay only to get all the way to the VA and find out that the van is broken down and the rehab was canceled. Typical VA bull shit... but what nobody ever seems to think about is how complex it is for me to stay somewhere outside the comfort of home. The logistics that are required are very stressful, luckily I have a very persistent woman in my life. ❤️ Th...

If there is one thing that I hope you take away from my journey, it is that there is always something to strive for. Complacency can seem easy to embrace, especially after such a life changing injury. It would be too easy for me to sit around and mope about how I’ll never be strong enough to push myself in a wheelchair or that I’ll never be able to drive my own vehicle, etc. Well guess what... Here I am pushing myself in a chair. In a few weeks, I start driving rehab to get my van setup so I can drive again. I’m looking into college courses that interest me, after telling myself that I would never pursue a life that wasn’t based around the automotive industry.  When I first realized that my injuries weren’t going away, I made a mental list of short term, intermediate term and long term goals. Exactly how I did with my Squad Leader in Ranger Battalion. I was proud of myself for finding that real-world application for an Army skill. Something that I never knew would be so pivotal in ...

I know, I know... the title is pretty synonymous with my overused statement of “keep moving forward” but oh well, here we are.  So something happened while I was sitting next to my girlfriend and puppy on the front porch this last weekend. The weather felt like a cool and tranquil fall morning which oddly calmed me even though I’m dreading the end of summer. Kass and I spent a few hours away from any and all screens and slow drank our coffees and enjoyed a calm Saturday morning, me in my chair and her and the pup in the pallet bed that she made. I just sat there thinking about how much I’ve grown and changed and about how great my life is.  I also started thinking about how miserable I would be if I were dwelling on how my life used to be. I am so proud of myself for being able to keep old aspects of my life behind me and continue to build this new life with my little family. I was sitting there sipping on my coffee without a care in the world and it was pretty damn nice....

I don’t want to scare anyone but there are only two weekends left in the technical ‘Summer’. Oh, what a summer it has been.  Whether I like it or not, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat all throw “memories” at me every morning. It is very rewarding to see a visual contrast between last summer and this summer each morning so I actually don’t mind these new features of social media. I get to look back and see how uncertain and insecure that I was when I was out. Maybe I put on a brave face and played it cool because that’s what I’ve been conditioned to do... Rules of the Infantry: 1) Always look cool. 2) Never get lost. 3) If lost, refer to rule #1. It is so great to see my therapist’s words actually playing out. That I would get the most therapy by simply living life away from the hospital.  This last weekend I went to a huge country concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, MA and spent the next day rolling through Fenway Park for picnic in the park. I was blessed with the oppo...