OTTAWA – For Master Cpl. Mike Trauner, the hard road back began exactly one year ago as he fought to find his balance on new prosthetic legs.
He steadied himself between parallel bars inside The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre while his spouse, Leah Cuffe, and his rehab team watched and worried. Then, for the first time since his legs were severed by a buried bomb in Afghanistan’s Zhari district, Trauner stood to his full height, six-foot-three.
The one-time paratrooper was as unsteady as a giant toddler, yet thrilled to be standing again. He hated hospital beds and felt diminished in a wheelchair.
Trauner shifted his 230 pounds to find the sweet spot on his new legs, one attached below the knee, the other above it. He let go the bars and grinned as he stood eye to eye with Dave Nielen, the man who had built his high-tech limbs.
Then, when certain he wouldn’t fall, Trauner reached to hug Cuffe.
“I could look up at him again,” she says. “I was so proud.”
That same day, Feb. 21, 2009, Trauner walked six lengths of the parallel bars. No one at the rehabilitation centre had ever seen such a thing with a double amputee. Most are exhausted simply from the effort of trying to find a new centre of gravity, to bear the pain of placing weight on a severed limb.
But the rehab centre’s doctors and physiotherapists were just getting to know Mike “Megatron” Trauner.
The next year would reveal to them the full measure of the man.
On Dec. 5, 2008, Trauner was part of a foot patrol assigned to investigate Taliban activity in a town west of Kandahar. It was a cold morning three weeks before Christmas. There was frost on the ground. The soldiers first examined a bomb site, then began to move out in search of the enemy, one platoon “leapfrogging” the next as choreographed in training.
He carried on his back a mortar tube and bombs; his assault rifle was slung over his shoulder, the barrel cradled in his left hand.
Trauner was blown six metres into the air by a remotely detonated improvised explosive device, the Taliban’s weapon of choice.
“I heard them call in on the radio that there were two people seriously injured, one with amputations to the legs. I didn’t know that was me at all.”
Trauner lifted his head and saw his left arm pouring blood. The glove on his hand had melted in the blast.
Trauner was wearing body armour, ballistic eyewear and a helmet. He credits the armour and his height with preventing the shrapnel from reaching his vital organs – or the bombs on his back.
“I wouldn’t be here if they blew up; they were 60-millimetre mortar bombs.”
A medic strapped combat tourniquets around Trauner’s wounded limbs, and within 20 minutes, he was loaded onto a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter.
At a field hospital in Kandahar, a doctor asked him his name, the date and then to rate his pain on a scale of one to 10.
That’s when Trauner finally lost his cool.
“I don’t have any legs! What do you think it is? It’s 100!”
The doctor injected him with a sedative. Medical officials would later tell him he twice flatlined that day before coming back to life.
Trauner arrived at The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre in a wheelchair on Jan. 26, 2009.
Its 62 beds are reserved for the region’s most difficult rehab cases.
For some, that journey is steep and pitted. Others experience a near-miraculous ascent, entering the centre unable to lift an arm and leaving it months later able to dance.
Trauner’s left leg had been amputated above the knee, and his right leg just below. His left hand was rescued from amputation during an 11-hour operation. Doctors had to set 25 bones broken between the end of his finger and elbow. He would ultimately undergo 14 surgeries on his injured limbs.
It was hard to imagine him returning to the military or to his favourite sports. Indeed, physiotherapist Marie Andree Paquin, after assessing Trauner’s condition, wrote down what she believed would be realistic goals for him: to walk with two canes for 500 metres.
Trauner, however, had different ideas.
Trauner grew up in Sudbury certain he would be a stationary engineer just like his father and grandfathers.
But when a high-school friend said he was about to enlist in the army as a cook, Trauner, then 18, decided to tag along.
His first deployment was to Drvar, Bosnia, as part of a NATO-led mission to stabilize the country. He was still there when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked airplanes loaded with fuel and flew them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
He was back at CFB Petawawa in Ontario by late spring to train for deployment to Afghanistan. Soon after his return, he went to a local bar where he was introduced to Cuffe, who had been quietly celebrating her birthday with a girlfriend. She had just moved to Petawawa following a breakup.
At the end of the night, Trauner asked for her phone number, but Cuffe took his instead.
Trauner’s unit, 3 RCR, was repeatedly placed on standby for Afghanistan. Finally, in January 2008, the regiment secured its mission: it would form the core of the next task force in Kandahar. Trauner left Petawawa on Sept. 7, 2009. “It was awful,” Cuffe says of that day.
By mid-2009, his physiotherapist thought Trauner and his legs were ready for a new challenge.
In five months, he had graduated from parallel bars, to a walker, to crutches, to canes to independent locomotion. Physiotherapist Marie Andree Paquin thought he might be able to tackle the grassy hill behind the hospital.
Trauner uses his hip muscles to propel himself forward. And without ankles or a knee to make minute adjustments to his centre of gravity, his trunk muscles must constantly work to control balance. Uneven surfaces pose particular difficulty since a double amputee has no feedback from his feet to warn of divots or bumps.
The scene was videotaped by Cuffe. In the video, Trauner charges up the hill with a wide, determined gait. Paquin trails close behind with the crutches. As the hill steepens, Trauner slows and Paquin offers him her arm, but he pushes it away.
“I don’t want help,” he says, leaning into the hill.
At the top, Trauner turns and grins at the camera: another milestone gained on the hard road back.
Paquin laughs at the memory. She faced problems with Trauner that she had never confronted in her career. Most amputees in the rehab centre have underlying medical conditions such as diabetes or vascular disease. But Trauner was young and fit and so anxious to discover the limits of his new body that Paquin feared he might injure himself.
Trauner’s occupational therapist, meanwhile, had to stretch the fingers of his left hand to regain motion lost to inactivity and scar tissue. It is a sometimes brutal process, says Dr. Nancy Dudek, the physician who guided Trauner’s rehabilitation, but it is the only way to ensure a hand is not “stuck” in one position.
“It was impressive to see what he would withstand.”
Trauner officially checked out of the rehab centre on Jan. 15, although he was back the following week to celebrate Paquin’s birthday.
He also met with Cpl. Andrew Knisley, 25, to mark the soldier’s “Alive Day,” the first anniversary of his near-death experience in Afghanistan. An improvised explosive device destroyed Knisley’s right leg and seriously damaged his right arm.
Both soldiers say they want to return to Kandahar to complete their tours of duty.
Cuffe says she won’t stand in his way.
“He’s been in the military 12 years so I can’t tell him, “˜No,’ “ she says. “After this, you think I would, but it’s something he wants to finish.”
Trauner, 29, has entered the next phase of his rehabilitation at CFB Petawawa. His goal is to pass the military’s battle fitness test, which requires soldiers to complete a 13-kilometre march with a 24.5-kilogram rucksack in a time of two hours and 26 minutes.
He has already walked 10 kilometres and marched two kilometres with a loaded pack.
“In my ideal world, I’d like to stay in the military, do my part, do my job,” he says. If he can’t rejoin the infantry, he’d like to work as an instructor or an intelligence officer.
Seeing him now, Cuffe says, few people appreciate how hard he’s worked on the road back.
“What they don’t see is the end of the day when he gets home and his leg is bleeding, or he’s in pain. He does have bad days and they don’t see that.”
Trauner doesn’t like to talk about those days. He prefers to look to the future, or as he says, to “just soldier on.”
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