[ad_1]
FRISCO, Col. — In a different world, 75-year-old Jon Kreamelmeyer would have been competing for the Masters World Cup cross-country skiing in Canada last week.
Instead, he was learning to lead life with one foot.
In January 2021, International Paralympic Committee technical classifier Kreamelmeyer, who helps determine the competition class for new athletes and a former U.S. Paralympic coach, noticed a dull pain in his right leg. A warm feeling radiated from his calf to his feet. He felt the ball of his right foot fill with marbles.
But after I finished the study, the pain mostly went away, so he just ignored it. That is, until last August.
One day, Kreamelmeyer climbed a mountain near his home in Frisco. Later that evening, he felt a painful jolt behind his right knee, as if something had come loose.
“I knew something was wrong with my leg,” he said. “My wife looked at me and said, ‘We have to go to the Emergency,’ I said, ‘I’ll go in the morning.'”
Doctors took one look at his right foot and boarded a Flight for Life helicopter to Denver. It turned out that the aneurysm behind the knee formed a blood clot and cut off the blood flow to his right leg.
“The doctor told me ‘you’re going to lose your leg,'” said Kreamelmeyer, who coached the US Paralympic cross-country ski team from 1998 to 2006. Paralympic Hall of Fame in 2014.
After coaching athletes with various leg amputations—he began his Paralympic career as a blind guide for blind skier Michele Drolet and won a bronze medal in 1994—Kreamelmeyer quickly realized that preserving at least part of the limb would increase his chances of surviving. sports he likes and gives him more options to get around overall.
So he responded with a directive rather than hysterical: “Try to save as much as you can.”
He had six surgeries in eight days until his entire right leg was gone. Still, he kept his morale high.
I said, ‘Let’s go ahead and get it working,'” he said.
He was home for about a week. Then, inexplicably, his entire body gradually shut down. She had trouble writing her name one afternoon. The next morning he could not move. His family took him to the hospital and he was once again taken by ambulance to Denver. There he fell into respiratory failure.
“I’m dead,” Kreamelmeyer said, raising his eyebrows still in disbelief. “Then they intubated me and brought me back to life.”
He came in with pneumonia and spent about two months in the hospital. At the end of November, he finally returned home. These days, you’ll see him drop his crutches to jump around the living room or shovel the driveway or blow snow. He also went back to Nordic trails on a sit ski. He recently spent an afternoon coaching a group of masters who are raising their money to buy himself a SkiErg fitness machine to strengthen his upper body and special winter hats that read “ONE JK ONLY.”
“It was different from walking around the tracks on crutches and describing what I saw verbally,” Kreamelmeyer said. “What was frustrating was not being able to show it.”
He hopes a prosthesis will allow him the option to hit the trails again while standing instead of sit-skiing. But she also keeps things in perspective and is grateful for being able to prioritize getting back to sports – after all, learning to walk on one leg changes nearly every aspect of one’s daily life.
“The challenge is that you don’t get up and go to the fridge, open the door, or go out,” Kreamelmeyer said. “It takes a lot of time. There’s another layer to consider.”
It is everyday activities that still stumble upon Kreamelmeyer’s friend and amputee, Willie Stewart, who lost his left arm in a construction accident at the age of 18 but goes on to win a Paralympic medal under Kreamelmeyer’s coaching. Stewart completed the Ironman triathlons and the grueling Leadman race, which consisted of 280 miles of trail running and cycling over 10,000 feet.
But just because she’s learned to live without her arm doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss him.
“The thing I feel most handicapped about is trying to button my shirt,” Stewart said.
Still, she said losing a limb was a blessing because it gave her the opportunity to travel the world, make great friends, and overcome obstacles. Such feelings are instilled in Kreamelmeyer.
“It’s full circle now,” Stewart said. “Here’s a 75-year-old man who helped so many people in his life, had multiple amputations and died seven times. I tell him, don’t die now, or I’ll write ‘give up’ on his tombstone.”
According to his apprentices, Kreamelmeyer has always had a talent for teaching others to remove difficulties in their path.
“We gave him the nickname Baby Buddha,” said Nordic skier Mike Crenshaw, who lost his lower right leg in a tractor accident nearly 50 years ago and won a Paralympic medal under Kreamelmeyer’s supervision. “He always had a positive attitude and was always saying, ‘Everything will be okay’ if we train hard. He was also a really good skier. It made us want to work really hard for him.”
Kreamelmeyer’s wife, Claudia, said that if anyone could put their best foot forward, even with one foot, it was her husband.
“He will probably never do the Masters World Cup again, but he will find out what athletic activities he can do,” he said. “It’s Jon’s nature to have an open mind and an open heart. It is my hope that it will continue to engage with the International Paralympic Committee.
“He had a good understanding before,” he added, referring to his keen eye for movement analysis and determining what Paralympic athletes are capable of as a strong man. “But now he will have an even deeper understanding.”
Kreamelmeyer’s amputee friends have long jokingly called themselves the “gimp club”. Kreamelmeyer humbly accepts his membership.
“I don’t know if it’s ironic or a blessing, but I’ve had 20 years of disabled athletes experience, so I have an understanding of what’s going on,” he said. “I’m proud to be a part of the club. On the other hand, being a part of the club requires a lot of acceptance. I’m still in that period of trying to accept what I can and cannot do.”
After all, the word “disabled” did not suit Kreamelmeyer at all.
“When a machine goes down, it breaks down,” he said. “But you are not broken. You are changing. It is a matter of embracing the change and then transforming into what you will become.”
[ad_2]
Source link