It is one year after my accident, one year since I tore my foot off, one year and so many surgeries that I have lost count. My foot has been reattached somewhat unsuccessfully and I am still in so much pain that it seems unreasonable to go on. But on I must go. There is no other alternative. I have a new surgeon who feels confident I will walk again, given another year of corrective surgery to fuse the ankle.
That will happen soon. I feel apprehensive and yet positive that he will get it done.
So where is my head at? What have I learnt? Will I ride again?
It is an interesting place, this constant pain seems to have driven me to the edge of sanity and I am in it alone. Some days it feels better than others, some days it is all encompassing. But I have to push on. Serious trauma and constant chronic pain changes a person.
I have taken some positive steps though, now I am managing some days without any pain medications at all, and most weeks I manage to exercise is some form or other and I think this has been the best thing one can do after so many surgeries. Gotta keep the blood pumping around my body in order to generate some new growth in my bones, this seems critically important above all else as the damage was so severe. Not only were my bones smashed to pieces but the tendons and nerves were also ripped assunder and will take a long time to recover if ever. CRPS is awful, the best way to describe it is that I feel like there are electric worms wiggling around my foot constantly. My left leg is now so decimated it looks like a twig but I don't really care about that.
Mentally I have been places that I don't know how share with you, but I have started rebuilding that too. I have started focussing on the future again, I've been thinking a lot about my life with or without motorcycles. Motorcycling has been a constant in my life and I don't know how to replace it if I can't ride anymore. That's a harrowing thought. I have two motorcycles sitting in my shed waiting for me. But realistically now I have spent well over one thousand Aussie dollars keeping them registered and insured and for nothing except the hope that I will ride again.
I think the Indian FTR kept me alive inside in the hope that I would get to ride it, do the first service and enjoy it like I intended.
But now, now I have to realise that this is quite likely, highly unlikely. With my ankle fully fused at 90 degrees I will have no flex at all, which means being my left foot it is going to be mostly impossible to shift gears.
Bigger than that though, do I want to ride again?
Is that a smart thing to do?
Will me leg just be a weak point that won't overcome the weight bearing from holding a motorcycle up, kicking a foot stand down, picking it up in the chance of an off?
These things weigh heavy on my mind and I decide, perhaps foolishly but perhaps not, that the best thing to do right now for me financially is to sell them both.
It's a shit decision to make but I haven't worked, Scotty has had to carry me fully and there is no compensation coming that I know of because the accident was my fault. Having to pay for these motorcycles that provide nothing, is now like me, nothing more than a burden.
And surely, if there is a motorcycle in my future I can just get another one?
CanAms keep drifting into my consciousness, but with their fucked up dual car wheels up front and one at the back I feel like that won't scratch my itch. They are great, sure they are fast and fun, but I feel like they are more a go-kart than a motorcycle.
I would rather pick up something, anything two wheeled and get a push button drag shifter installed so I could do all the foot work with my left hand. It's been done a million times before and I feel like if I can eventually walk again, if I can do enough rehab to build that leg up, then I can technically ride again, and that means two wheels.
I can't let go of it.
Scotty doesn't understand. He tells me that if I do ride bikes again and I have another accident, that will be the end of him, the end of us, he can't do this again, he'll just pack up and go. And I know he isn't joking.
This has been the biggest shit show we have ever dealt with. Wheelchairs, knee scooters, a new puppy, a guy that can't work or even drive a car, I am a liability. A one legged, fifteen digit costly liability.
And that is the worst thing for me, the thing I struggle with the most, being a liability. I am a positive person and I like to contribute whether that is with housework, cooking, gardening, cleaning, organising the sheds, keeping the vehicles or working in the food vans, if I am not contributing I feel bloody useless.
So that is what I have to overcome and that is what I am focussed on more than anything right now.
So the motorcycles have to go.
Old mate Apollo came to the rescue and picked up the FTR and took it off to the shop that bought it. Thanks bro. Sad day.
The only good thing to come of this is the pandemic has killed the supply chain so badly that secondhand bikes are in high demand and I can command a good price for both. One is a fairly well restored Yamaha XT 600, the other a brand new Indian FTR 1200.
The XT600 money shot on BikeSales. It sold straight away.
So that is what I do, with the help of a few good friends, you know who you are 👍
Focussing on these mini projects gives me something to do. It gives me a purpose again other than suffering.
There is something else driving me forward in my disability that I haven't spoken about yet too. That' mostly because most people will view them as taboo.
Target Shooting.
Another mate so far unmentioned has been into Target Shooting for a long while and suggested that it is something I could do in my current situation without any impact on my leg; you see he is an amputee has a fake leg and sits down to shoot. He offered to come get me and take me to the club he shoots at and we can try it out.
I have had so little mental stimulation of any kind that it seems like a fucken great idea to me! I grew up in the country and shot rifles, mostly .22s as a kid so it isn't that foreign to me, and pistols are the absolute top rung of shooting in my mind so of course I want to try it.
So over the past few months as ridiculous as this may sound with all the pain and surgeries and medications I'm taking, I start shooting hand guns at a pistol club, and I'm not bad at it.
I do all the things I have to to get my license and it will take a long time before I am allowed to own one, but with much prompting and a lot of help, I get it done and start competing. Ridiculous right?
In Target Shooting there are many disciplines, but the one I have been lead into is called ISSF. And they have a 'parallel' division for people with disabilities called WSPS - an ancronym for World Shooting Parralel Sport, and as far as we can figure out, I fully qualify for that division, not only for my leg but because I have MS and that causes balance issues on its own merit.
I start training with my mate and he gets me quickly up to a competitive level and before you know it I am travelling around with my scooter, crutches, moonboot, whatever it takes and competing at Regional Opens and doing, well, rather quite well.
So well in fact, I enter a State Titles event in the WSPS category and knockout my coach, the one with an amputation, and win the Victorian State Titles.
I'm utterly gob smacked at my progression and now can see that there is life after trauma and there are always things you can do other than things you used to do. I set my goals perhaps unrealistically on the Olympics. I want to enter the Commonwealth Olympics in 2026 as a paralympic shooter.
Of course, I need to get a whole let better to get to that stage but I have always believed that if you don't set Big Hairy Audacious Goals that are quite obviously unrealistic, then you will never achieve much at all.
It's around this time, a year or more later after applying that I get my Provisional Firearms License and start to unlock the potential to realise my goals. I keep training and practising as much as possible and it has given me hope for the future and a hope aside from walking or riding motorcycles, a purpose to keep going.
I fucking love it.
I read books, all the books I can find, I start to fine tune my 'process' in target shooting and quickly realise there is zero reason I cannot do this. I look at my State Title plaque every day and think, fuck me, I did that. I achieved something so unlikely given the current situation that honestly the sky is the limit.
I have a new purpose, a new sport, and I have never been good at any sport, and I'm competing at every competition I can enter.
Scotty was hesitant at first but after he seen just how far I had come and won the State Titles, he is fully supportive and we make all the arrangements at home to be able to order and purchase my first hand gun, an Air Pistol for the ISSF 10m Air Pistol Mens, WSPS discipline.
I start to improve and now I am focussed on 'breaking grade'. In ISSF this means that over the course of 60 single shots with a maximum score of 10 per shot, you need to shoot at least 500. That means you 'break grade' from D grade to C grade. My focus is laserlike and every time I go to a comp I tell myself, tonight I will break grade, it is just a process, I'm a process freak and I can do it.
This mental fortitude has always worked for me: manifest it and it happens. I truly believe that. My coach ridicules me, but I pay no attention to him and keep pushing forward like a man possessed and then, just like that, I shoot 511 at our club weekly meet. And now I'm C grade and everyone who told me I couldn't do it in such a short time can suck my hairy balls.
But then I have to have another operation and my leg has to be elevated for another 2 weeks 23hrs of every day and I can't move let alone travel anywhere to shoot. For 6 weeks I don't raise a gun, and when I do, finally after another painful shit recovery that I haven't quite covered off yet here, I can go back to the range and I shoot a low 400.
Target shooting is a precision based sport which you need to do all the time or your skill and your process just flies out the window and BAM. You are back on the bottom, but I keep at it and build it back up and well, here we are.
I'm still focussed on breaking grade, but now I want to shoot a convincing 540 to get into B grade, then 560 for A grade, then 575 to reach Masters before I could even been considered for the State team let alone the Olympics, but my mind is set. I have a goal, a new purpose and that is where I am going.
One leg or two, seated or standing, whatever it takes. If I can't ride, then I'll shoot, and trust me the two are very, very addictive disciplines with more in common than you might first imagine. Both are dangerous, both require physical and mental concentration and both make inanimate objects totally dangerous in the wrong hands. The strangest thing about shooting is that while I'm doing it, I am not in pain because I'm so focused on the process. This tells me that there is definitely a mental element to my pain and that I can overcome it.
But despite all of that what I have discovered is that no matter what happens to you in life, you have a choice. You can give up, or you can push on and find something else.
Sure I want to ride a motorcycle again and I reckon one day I will, but I'm also diverse enough to realise that it isn't the only thing in life.
After all, I was 48 when this happened to me, and now I have turned 50 which seems completely unbelievable to me, but I have started a new sport, given it my all and you are currently reading the blog of the Victorian State Title WSPS - 10M Air Pistol champion.
Who'd believe it?
I've got the plaque to prove it :)
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