Montreal Gazette - Adaptive Sports Foundation hosts injured soldiers
Finding hope on the slopes
Afghanistan war veterans overcome physical hurdles through a program that helps disabled skiers learn to ski in the Eastern Townships using specially adapted equipment
By RENE BRUEMMER, The Gazette February 20, 2010
MANSONVILLE, QUE: FEBRUARY 15, 2010-- Army warrant officer Sylvain Latulippe, who was injured in Afghanistan, goes down the Chouette run during adaptive skiing course in Owl's Head on Monday February 15, 2010.
Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, THE GAZETTE
They are three very different men with two things in common.
Master Cpl. Sylvain Latulippe, a career soldier, marathon runner and bomb disposal expert, lost parts of both legs in Afghanistan last summer and considered suicide.
Capt. Blaise Lapointe, a man of faith with a ready laugh who went to France for his bachelor's degree in French literature before completing a military-sponsored civil engineering degree, lost his right foot and eight inches of the leg above it in Afghanistan, and considers himself lucky.
Peter Treacy, a former environmental engineer at the IBM plant in Bromont, lost his right leg below the knee in a car fire 29 years ago. He started a ski program run by volunteers for children and adults like himself.
Their second commonality came this week, as all three schussed down the slopes at Owl's Head in the Eastern Townships, relishing the unique freedom that comes with flying on snow. They were part of the new Soldier On initiative, a federal program for soldiers who have suffered life-altering injuries. This year, six soldiers participated in the first four-day Learn to Ski Fest held in eastern Canada, organized in conjunction with the Canadian Association of Disabled Skiers and the Eastern Townships Disabled Skiers Foundation that Treacy created.
The demand is there: Canadian Forces personnel said 28 more soldiers are on a list to join.
All the soldiers who took part this week, four men and two women, are missing parts of one or both legs.
But they share a similar perspective: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," said Treacy, quoting U.S. world-champion figure skater Scott Hamilton.
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Latulippe was in a convoy near the village of Salavat in Kandahar province on June 18 when an improvised explosive device detonated with such force that it blasted the engine out of his armoured vehicle and tore off the wheels.
The vehicle ripped in two like a paper bag, and Latulippe was catapulted out, seven metres straight up.
"The force of the explosion compresses everything," said Latulippe, 42. "You feel yourself being squeezed, like an orange. All the oxygen around you disappears."
He landed on the vehicle, sucking desperately for air that was not there, both of his legs shattered and torn, his right knee split in half.
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Lapointe found an IED with his crew last Sept. 16 in Kandahar province. Near the end of his first tour overseas working as an assistant to a bomb-disposal engineer, the 29-year-old was preparing to defuse it when he stepped on an anti-personnel land mine.
"I thought I was dead," Lapointe said. "I couldn't see anything. My left arm was burning. I thought my face was on fire."
He was airlifted to a hospital in Germany, then another in Quebec. After the operation, he was moved to a readaptation centre to learn how to use the prosthetic foot that is attached to the stump on his leg. It was close to his home in Valcartier, where his wife and three children, ages 4, 2 and one, live.
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Treacy and his wife had just returned from her Christmas office party to their Eastern Townships home on Dec. 20, 1980. Walking by his Cadillac, he noticed smoke coming from under the hood and got inside to back it away from the house while Joan went in to make coffee. He asphyxiated on the fumes and lost consciousness.
Wondering what was taking him so long, Joan came out, opened the car door and found her husband on fire. She pulled his body out, rolling him in the snow, using her hands to slap out the flames melting his three-piece suit and overcoat into his skin. She got one of his burning rubber overshoes off, but not the one on his right foot - her hands were too badly burnt by that time. He would lose that leg. The ambulance attendant said Treacy would die if they tried to make it to Montreal. He had third-degree burns to 60 per cent of his body. They took him to Sherbrooke instead.
Five years later, Treacy was taking his three boys skiing at Morin Heights in the Laurentians, when he saw a one-legged skier coming down the hill. "I practically ran to him, asking him how he did it," he said.
"It changes your life," Treacy said of learning to glide on one ski and two poles with mini-skis affixed to the bottom.
"When you lose a limb, you become isolated. Friends you used to golf with think: 'Well, we can't call him anymore, he only has one leg.' "
Learning to ski meant rejoining friends and family, and becoming whole again. It also showed that all things are possible.
Treacy created the Eastern Townships Disabled Skiers Foundation, starting with five skiers and 10 instructors.
After 16 years, it has grown to 100 certified volunteer instructors to teach the 84 disabled skiers who come to Owl's Head each year, thanks to space, lift tickets and equipment donated by hill owners the Korman family and numerous private and corporate sponsors who cover the $70,000 in annual costs to buy and maintain equipment.
"We get no government funding," Treacy said. "We couldn't do it without our donors, and especially all the volunteers who work for free."
The organization now includes waterskiing, sailing and kayaking, hosting more than 200 kids each summer. The name has changed to the Eastern Townships Adaptive Sports Foundation.
Canadian winters are especially cruel for the disabled, as snow and ice further hamper those in wheelchairs and on crutches. But on modified skis, children used to watching their compatriots run away and leave them behind, whether they are amputees, the paralyzed or those with cerebral palsy, are finally on common ground.
"In a wheelchair, everything is a struggle," Treacy said. "Then (once they're on skis) it's 'Oh my God!' It returns them to life. It gives them freedom. They're gliding, flying down the hill. Free as a bird."
The goal is to make participants autonomous enough so they can ski with their family members, whose lives are also constrained by the disabilities of their loved ones.
Three years ago, Treacy read of a soldier from nearby Roxton Pond who returned from Afghanistan minus a leg. In a newspaper interview, he said all was fine, but Treacy sensed "he was lying. He was saying what people wanted to hear."
The soldier killed himself two months later. In his suicide note, he said he no longer felt like a man.
"If he had been in this program, it could have changed things," Treacy said.
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Latulippe used to defuse bombs hidden underwater at ferry docks and above ground, "to clear the roads for our boys," on tours in Somalia, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Doctors inserted more than 40 pins and metal plates after the explosion, recrafting a knee and one heel, hinging his feet back on. But his balance was off, and he would never run marathons again, or compete in biathlons. As well, he suffered constant flashbacks.
"He was in a black hole," said Colette Blanchette, his childhood sweetheart from their village in the Gaspé and wife of 17 years.
"I thought of killing myself," Latulippe said.
A social worker who visited him in a hospital, outside of her normal office hours, finally woke Latulippe to the fact that people cared, and saved his life. Counselling and psychological services supplied by the military have been excellent, something lacking in the past, he said.
"It's the hardest thing a man can do, to admit you need help, to accept help," said Latulippe, 6 feet tall, 200 pounds of muscle, bone and steel, eyes watering. "It's easy to sit and go into depression, to go to the bottle. It takes more courage to go for help.
"I'm very proud of that, because I'm still here. You learn to accept that life will be different, and move on.
"Make sure you write that in your article. They only talk about the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, but there are a lot of injured like me. The soldiers need to know."
Since 2002, 140 Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, and just over 1,440 injured, according to the Department of National Defence. It does not make public details of the type of injuries.
Latulippe has taken up swimming and works out at a gym.
Eight months after his accident, he straps himself into the bucket seat of a dual-ski (essentially a tight-fitting chair perched over two short skis) and learns to fly down the hill, using his hips to carve turns, instructors scurrying to keep up.
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Five months after his accident, Blaise Lapointe is skiing on one leg, even though he has never skied before, laughing his way down the slopes despite the burn in his quadriceps, derrière and lower back.
"It just felt so good to be gliding again, like in hockey," he said. "I really enjoy the speed, the sense of weightlessness."
His readjustment was easier than Latulippe's, he said. "I'm just happy I'm alive," he said.
"I have my family. I can think of the present and the future. And
I have my Catholic faith, which teaches you to accept things and make sense of it," Lapointe said.
"In life, you always have losses, be it the loss of a car, your job, your health. If you just stop, it's your fault. You have to move on."
Blaise plans to take his master's in bomb disposal studies and go back out in the field. And he wants to take up hockey once again. Latulippe is travelling to the paralympic games next month in Vancouver to see what sports he wants to master to compete.
"You have to have a goal," he said.
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"I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy," Treacy said of his missing limb.
But it has given him moments like this: The father of twin boys and a girl who became paraplegics in a car accident that took their mother's life cried like a baby when he saw them on skis 14 months after their accident, laughing like the children they were.
"He said he didn't think he would ever see them laugh again," Treacy said. Now, the boys are members of the junior national basketball squad and training to be paralympic athletes. Their sister is on an elite basketball team.
Five children who were in the program have died. Treacy attended each funeral.
"You have no idea what your program meant to our children," the parents all told him. "You gave them years of happiness." He tells that to the volunteers who make it possible.
"One mother said to me: 'You changed the lives of so many people. It was a good thing, what happened to you.'
"I look at it that way," he said.
On the last day of the Ski Fest, after the races had been run and the medals handed out, Capt. Lapointe's father came over to say his son told him this was the best day of his life, Treacy said.
"That pretty much sums it up, eh?"
rbruemmer [at] thegazette [dot] canwest [dot] com
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