Inspirational story--NY State Trooper loses leg and returns to patrol

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"We never thought you could come back":
A Trooper's courageous battle to return to the road

By Chuck Remsberg
Senior PoliceOne Correspondent

A few days after waking up from a four-week coma, Trooper Matthew Swartz swung out of his hospital bed, started to walk to the bathroom-and fell flat on his ass. Sprawled on the floor "buck naked," that was the moment he realized he no longer had a lower left leg.


More than 19 months later, the 34-year-old Swartz today continues on a remarkable journey of self-renewal on which he has pitted gut determination against formidable odds to reach a goal many thought impossible. He has become the first trooper in the 89-year history of the New York State Police to work what that agency terms "full and strenuous duty" on the road, despite an amputated limb.

Nationally, he's part of a small but no doubt growing band of cop amputees, perhaps 70 to 75 in all out of some 800,000 full-time LEOs in the U.S., according to his informal research. Most, like Swartz, are believed to have lost lower legs; a few, hands. But all, he's convinced, share a common struggle.

"We take on our 'disabilities' like we take on evil on the job," he says. "When something bad happens, we crush it, we break it, we squash it-and then we move on to the next dangerous or challenging thing. That's what cops do."

At the time fate changed Matt Swartz's life, he was a veritable poster boy for American law enforcement. The son of two small town New York police officers, he served as an Air National Guard security specialist in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Deployed to Panama, he was awarded an Air Force Achievement Medal after his keen observation skills and fast decision-making saved the life of a civilian heart attack victim. Back home, he worked as a deputy sheriff and in a series of small municipal departments before joining the State Police in 1999. As a lawman, he has survived two shootings, one in a suicide-by-cop standoff, the other on a burglary-in-progress call.

Assigned to road patrol in a 12-trooper station in rural upstate near the Adirondacks, far from any prompt backup, he grew accustomed to operating as a self-reliant "one-man army." In his spare time, he rose to the rank of captain as a volunteer firefighter and served on a wildland search and rescue squad.

"Life was good," Swartz recalls. He and his wife Alison had no children, but two chow dogs and a horse "kept us busy. We were in the process of building our dream house" on a country spread near the tiny settlement of Meco, with Swartz doing much of the work himself.

After a sad weekend in November 2004, during which one of their dogs died, Swartz was driving his wife to work on "a beautiful cool and sunny fall Monday" when "our lives suddenly came crashing to a halt"-literally-at 0734 hrs. Just a couple of miles from where they lived at the time, a 22-year-old male with a dismal driving record unexpectedly turned left in his purple Monte Carlo to cross their lane of highway into a rural driveway.
Matt with wife Alison
Apparently he had not looked to see them coming.

His car smashed into the driver side of Swartz's Ram Charger pickup, causing the truck to "spin, flip and roll over four times." Alison survived with only minor cuts and bruises-"my gift from God," Swartz says. So did the errant driver. But Trooper Swartz was hurled back through the rear window of the extended-cab truck and thrown to the pavement with major injuries: three skull fractures, traumatic brain damage, severe arterial bleeding, a broken arm and elbow, a crushed left leg, and more. He was bleeding out of his eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

Airlifted to a hospital (ironically from a chopper landing zone Swartz himself had set up on behalf of the SP), the young trooper was put on critical-care life support, with a tracheotomy, gastric feeding tube, catheter, and other life-sustaining paraphernalia.

Swartz has no recollection of the collision or its immediate aftermath. His last memories of that general time period are of their dog Pudgy dying and his burying her a day before the accident at their new house.

At the hospital, doctors placed him in a medically induced coma to help his brain heal. Still near death, he "slept" through his birthday, and he was not cognizant when physicians discovered that his broken lower leg bone had shredded his tibial artery, causing potentially fatal internal hemorrhaging. They tried for over two weeks to save the leg, but when gangrene set in they decided amputation was the only reasonable alternative.

With Swartz himself comatose, Alison alone bore the responsibility of consenting to the surgery. "They chopped it off six inches below my knee," Swartz says.


Alison gently told him what had happened when he groggily regained consciousness early in December, "but I wasn't able to retain any grasp of things then," he explains. Much of the time he couldn't remember even where or who he was. It wasn't until his abruptly aborted trip to the bathroom days later that he began to fully comprehended that part of the limb that had helped make him a high school track star and a balls-to-the-wall peace officer was gone from his life forever.

"But you're still you," Alison assured him. Which meant, he observes, "I still had heart."

Whether he wanted to return to policing once he recovered from his amputation was never a question, Swartz says. His focus from the beginning was on how it could be done. The obstacles could easily have cowed anyone with a less aggressive mind-set.

First, he knew nothing about prostheses, including the core consideration of how to use one. Assuming he could master "routine" challenges like learning to walk again, could he develop the special strength and agility to reliably use the artificial leg in winning fights and foot pursuits, even to readily get in and out of a patrol car?

There was little about his physical condition to inspire hope. During nearly two months of hospitalization, his weight dropped from 165 to 109, and he transformed from being lean and muscular to being so weak he couldn't open a bottle of water. Because of his broken arm, he had difficulty properly supporting himself on a walker or on the handrails of a rehab treadmill. While his brain was still healing, he shook with palsy and couldn't blink his eyes. His strength was equal to that of a man in his 70s, and the swollen stump of his leg hurt so much he couldn't conceive bearing down on it in a prosthetic socket.

Then there were the staggering costs. A prosthesis alone ran nearly $20,000, not to mention extensive therapy and mounting medical bills. In all, the tab would total about $700,000 (and still growing). Because the collision occurred off duty, workers' comp was out. The driver who hit them had "minimal insurance, and that's an overstatement," Swartz says. His personal health insurance was with a problematic HMO. "They didn't want to pay for anything. Durable medical equipment (insurance jargon for a prosthesis)? 'You got crutches, what more do you need! Oh, you need extended rehabilitative therapy too? How is "No" for an answer?'"

In January 2005, a few weeks after he was discharged from the hospital, his SP bosses congratulated him that he'd been approved for disability retirement. Swartz stubbornly rejected the idea. His heritage, he points out, is Italian and German. "My mom says I have the temper of an Italian but the German backs it up."

As his mind cleared and his determination deepened, he found himself becoming "really in tune" with military veterans coming home from Iraq as amputees. Some of them were actually able to rehab and return to combat, he noted. If they could go back to work in a war zone, why couldn't he go back to being a state trooper? "That helped me to stay focused as I prayed for my future."

Doctors he conferred with told him that perhaps after a "few years" of rehabilitation therapy he could "try" to return to work. But by the time he left the hospital, Swartz had only a dwindling number of leave days remaining with the SP.

The "blue family" (actually grey in this case, given the NYSP uniform color) kicked in to buy him time and opportunity.

During his hospitalization, at least one trooper had stayed in or near his room 24 hours a day. While he was comatose, dispatchers visiting his bedside spoke made-up radio calls into his ear in hopes of keeping his brain stimulated.

Other cop volunteers had worked to finish the new house and got the couple's possessions packed and moved. Now police families and organizations staged benefits to raise funds for his rehabilitation and medical needs, and troopers donated their own limited vacation days to his account, as permitted by NYSP regs and consented to by the bosses. Soon he had a year's worth of leave at full pay he could draw on.

A police chief in the area gave him passes to a swimming pool. One trooper whose son had left behind his workout gear when he went off to college donated an exercise bench, a squeeze grip, and a couple of weights, humblingly puny dumbbells weighing only 2 lbs. and 5 lbs. "It was a start," Swartz says.

He attacked with a vengeance. From other amputee officers he tracked down on the internet, he learned which prostheses seem to work best on duty. The lighter the better, they recommended. He settled on a model that promised to put "spring in my step," provide flexation and handle well on uneven ground. It consists of a socket (which attached with surprising comfort to his stump), a vertical carbon fiber post and a foot that fits into an NYSP combat boot.

Matt with therapist & fellow leg amputee

He located a therapist, herself an amputee, who was willing free of charge to push him through "an extensive and in-depth rehab" to build up his strength and range of capabilities with his new leg. Expanding his physical limits "was pure evil, all about hurt," he remembers. "But pain is weakness leaving the body, and that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger."

The therapist knew how to punch his buttons. She'd have him watch her demonstrate an exercise with her prosthetic leg on some machine, then she'd condescendingly offer to lighten the weight when it was his turn. Trooper friends played along. "If they were around when I was practicing walking, they'd say, 'Is that a little limp I'm noticing there?'"

"running and running and running..."

After walking got smooth and driving became possible, he started running-"running and running and running." Forrest Gump, the other troopers called him. He created a mantra: "Go ahead and call me disabled. I'll give you a 10-second head start, then I'll run you down and show you what disabled really means!"

In truth, even with much practice, it took him 16 minutes to run 1.5 miles. The annual SP fitness test requires it be done in less than 11 minutes, plus situps and pushups.

He practiced doing sprints and slamming to a stop; he practiced jumping out of a patrol car and running a 40-yeard dash; he practiced running stairs at a local factory. "I can almost hear Eye of the Tiger playing in my head as I think back about that stuff," he laughs.

Scientific research proves a fake lower leg is 25 per cent harder to run with, Swartz says, "so to keep up with the guys who say they're 110 per centers I figured I had to be 125, maybe 130 per cent. Someone's life could depend on my physical ability. I didn't want my fellow troopers screaming on the radio for help and thinking, 'Oh, no, Matt is coming.' I want, 'Thank God, Matt is coming!'"

As he improved ("remarkably" improved, doctors said), Swartz periodically visited his SP station to be certain his name was still carried on the assignment roster. He always wore long pants so anyone looking him over would see only two normal duty boots sticking out from under his pant legs. If he found his name missing from the list, he penciled it back in, a silent but emphatic reminder that he may be gone for awhile but he shouldn't be forgotten.

Even though his captain had started running with him, showing support for his cause, Swartz says he could never get a specific answer from the SP brass as to what exactly he had to do to prove his fitness for duty. His reaction was to incorporate trooper-type feats into his workouts-climbing fences, racing up steps, conducting foot pursuits, wading and swimming in creeks, executing emergency bailouts from a patrol car, carrying a "wounded" buddy on his shoulders. He documented all this with photographs that he kept in a "recovery book," figuring a picture of proof is worth a thousand words of boasting.

In late summer he geared up for the biggest challenge since he'd left the hospital: requalifying as a volunteer firefighter. That required that he successfully complete a "combat obstacle course," which included among other things running a 40-yard dash in 5 seconds (a college football player should do it in 4), dragging a 180-lb. dummy, crawling through a tunnel in full gear and lugging a fire hose up flights of stairs.

Swartz finished the course in 12 minutes, with air left in his airpack.

Soon after, he completed an informal fitness test at the SP academy. He now clocked 1.5 miles in under 12 minutes, plus 48 situps and 52 pushups-"extremely respectable," considering the ordeal he'd been through.

"Cap-able, not dis-abled"

He sent a letter to the SP requesting return to duty. I'm ready, he told himself, and if they say no, I'm ready to fight to prove I am cap-able, not dis-abled.

Presently he was summoned to headquarters in Albany to be examined by a contract SP physician, an orthopedic surgeon. The doctor didn't want to see Swartz's recovery album, but he read questions from a two-page list that covered everything Swartz had anticipated: "Can you quickly enter and exit a patrol vehicle...can you engage in a foot pursuit with a fleeing suspect...can you stand for long periods of time...can you drive in inclement weather..." and so on. And finally: "Are you ready for full and strenuous duty?"

"Yes, I am," Swartz responded.

After the session his captain counseled that this was just one step in a process that would take time. "Just relax and be patient," he said.


But two hours later, the captain phoned again. "I don't know what you did, but you got somebody fired up," he said. "Report to the station at 7 o'clock Monday morning, understand? I hope you've got a clean uniform, because you did it. You're back."

"I was bawling my eyes out," Swartz recalls. "My wife, too."


In another phone call that afternoon, his commanding major told him, "You'll only get a half-issue of socks this winter!" a joking reference to his amputated foot. Then on a serious note the major said that when Swartz had declined the SP's offer of disability retirement, "We all thought, 'This poor kid doesn't even realize what's happened to him. Let's back off and give him time. It'll hit him eventually.'

"We never dreamed you could come back. We were wrong in thinking that, and you proved us wrong. You made us proud."


His first day back on patrol was Oct. 10, 2005-one month short of a year after the crash. Swartz was temporarily assigned to ride with a young trooper he'd broken in as an FTO. "It was payback time," he says. "He was calling me 'rookie,' and sending me to fetch him coffee and drag a tree that was down in the road."

Since then, Swartz has handled the full range of trooper calls. He's worked in snowstorms and rainstorms, he's fought with suspects and chased suspects. He has has won gold medals in his state's Police and Fire Olympics. He has taken the sergeant's exam, addressed academy classes on the will to survive, and has been named a firearms instructor, one of about 120 out of New York's some 5,600 troopers.

But he's happiest where he's always been happiest-on the road on full and strenuous duty, a one-man army in the remote reaches of the Empire State.

http://policeone.com/writers/columni...rticles/139863

[ChiXJeff]

And on an equally inspirational but sad note: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/25/bra....ap/index.html

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Carl M. Brashear, the first black U.S. Navy diver who was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the 2000 film "Men of Honor," died Tuesday. He was 75.

[SilverZuk]

That was an inspiring story.
All that know him are proud they do.

[APRILRAZZ]

Originally Posted by ChiXJeff

And on an equally inspirational but sad note: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/25/bra....ap/index.html

I just found out about that last night when they were talking about his funeral.
BTW it is at Little Creek today.

[YotaRedneckGirl]

Now that's heart. A truly inspirational story.