By Rick Bontkowski
Ten years ago, I was searching the internet trying to understand amputees. Today, I’m beginning to understand what the longtime amputees were trying to show me.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my computer doing something that, apparently, has become completely normal in my life. I was coordinating flights for three amputees.
Gini Thomas was coming from Birmingham. Cam Ayala from Austin. Jason Barnes from Atlanta. Three very different people. Three incredible amputee stories. Three completely different energies, all flying into Chicago to spend a weekend helping us create the teaser for I AM AMPUTEE, a documentary project that has consumed a pretty significant piece of my brain lately.
Flights. Hotels. Transportation. Production schedules. Who gets in when? Can we get everyone to dinner? Does everybody have a room? And, because apparently this is what my life has become, I was probably thinking about whether we had enough prosthetic legs, arms and interesting people in one place to qualify for some kind of group discount.
Then I stopped. I looked at the names on my screen and had this incredibly simple thought: How did I get here? Not geographically. I know how I got to Indianapolis. I mean here. Here, in this strange and wonderful place in my life where three accomplished and extraordinary amputees are getting on airplanes from different parts of the country to collaborate with me on a documentary about limb loss.
Because there was another version of me who wouldn’t have understood any of this. He was lying in a hospital bed about ten years ago. His right leg had just been amputated. There was a massive bandage where part of his body used to be, and he was holding a phone. Searching. Scrolling. Lurking. Trying to figure out what the hell an amputee was supposed to look like.
Who Are These People?
I remember discovering the limb-loss community online. There were amputees running, lifting weights, traveling and modeling. There were amputees making jokes about their missing limbs. There were people talking about sockets, liners, knees, feet, phantom pain and prosthetic technology as casually as other people discuss lawn equipment.
I didn’t speak the language yet. I didn’t know what any of it meant. More importantly, I didn’t know where I fit into it. I wasn’t an advocate. I wasn’t a podcaster. I wasn’t making documentaries. I wasn’t writing columns about limb loss. I was a guy with one leg missing and about a thousand questions.
I would look at some of these people and wonder: Who are these people? How did they become so comfortable with this? How are they traveling? How are they exercising? How are they laughing? How are they just…living?
And maybe the question underneath all of those questions was the one I wasn’t ready to ask yet: Am I going to become one of them? At the time, the idea seemed almost impossible. Today, I think about that guy in the hospital bed and want to tell him something. Buddy, this is going to get weird.
Thirty Years?
Every so often, I’ll come across someone on social media who casually writes, “I’ve been an amputee for 30 years.” Thirty years. When I was newly amputated, a statement like that would have sounded almost mythical. Thirty YEARS? I was trying to figure out how I was going to get through thirty minutes without thinking about my leg. How could someone possibly do this for three decades?
But something has changed. Those numbers don’t shock me anymore. Maybe because I’m approaching a decade myself, and I honestly don’t know where the time went.
There was no ceremony marking the transition. Nobody mailed me a certificate. Congratulations! You are no longer a rookie amputee. Your membership has automatically renewed. There wasn’t a specific morning when I woke up and suddenly felt experienced. Life just kept happening.
I learned how to walk. I learned how to fall. I learned what hurts and what doesn’t. I learned that sometimes a tiny prosthetic problem can consume an entire day and that Allen wrenches somehow become an essential travel accessory. I learned how to explain limb loss to strangers. I learned when not to explain it. I learned how to laugh at things that once would have devastated me. I learned something else, too: eventually you stop keeping score. In the beginning, everything feels like a milestone. First steps. First shower. First trip to the grocery store. First time driving. First flight. First vacation. First time walking into a room and forgetting, even briefly, that everyone else might notice your prosthesis before they notice you.
Somewhere along the way, being an amputee stopped being the biggest story in every room I walked into. It simply became part of the person walking into the room.
Somewhere Along the Way, then came the podcast.
One conversation became another. I started sitting across from amputees and listening. Really listening. I heard stories of trauma, resilience, anger, humor, reinvention, grief, sex, relationships, prosthetic disasters, impossible accomplishments and ordinary Tuesday afternoons. Some stories sounded familiar. Others couldn’t have been further from my own. That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about this community: there is no single amputee story.
The microphone gave me a front-row seat to that truth. I could ask questions I had once been afraid to ask. Sometimes a guest would say a sentence that stayed with me long after the microphones were turned off.
That’s part of what Behind the Mic has become for me. The conversation may end when we stop recording, but the thinking often doesn’t. And over time, something happened that I didn’t recognize while it was happening. The community I had once observed from the outside became my community. The people I once followed online became friends. The questions I once searched for, became questions I was asking behind a microphone.
Today, AMP’D UP211 reaches listeners around the world. Now there’s a documentary in development. There are other ideas scribbled in notebooks and living in my head about gatherings, events, fundraisers and ways to make this strange journey a little better for the next person who wakes up and discovers they’ve joined a club they never applied to.I assure you… none of that was the plan.
That’s what gets me. There was no business plan sitting beside my hospital bed. I wasn’t lying there thinking, You know what I should do with this? Build a media platform. I was just trying to survive. And still, sometimes I look around and think: How did I get here?
Maybe This Is How It Happens
I don’t think we become who we’re going to become in some grand cinematic moment. There’s rarely music playing in the background. Nobody yells “ACTION.” Most transformation happens quietly. We accept a little. We resist a little. We get angry. We adapt. We screw things up. We try again. We laugh. We keep moving. Then one day, we look backward and realize we’ve traveled an enormous distance without ever noticing the mileage.
Maybe that’s what those longtime amputees were showing me all those years ago. They weren’t showing me how to be an amputee. They were showing me that eventually, you just become you again.
Not the old you. That’s an important distinction.
I honestly don’t think we get that person back, at least not completely. And I’m no longer convinced we’re supposed to. Something happened to us. Something significant. Pretending otherwise would diminish what we’ve survived and everything we’ve learned because of it.
Maybe acceptance isn’t the moment when we finally become okay with losing a limb. I’m not even sure what “okay with it” is supposed to mean. Maybe acceptance is much less dramatic. Maybe acceptance happens when we become so busy living the life that came afterward that we stop constantly measuring it against the life that came before. I think I’m beginning to understand that now.
To the Longtimers
So this is, in some small way, an ode to the amputees who have been doing this for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years. You kept going. You built careers. You raised children. You fell in love. You got divorced. You traveled. You struggled. You succeeded. You changed prosthetic components approximately nine million times.
You lived, truly lived.
And perhaps that’s the part a newly amputated person can’t see yet. They see the prosthesis. They see the wheelchair. They see the wound. They see everything that has changed. They see an enormous stretch of unfamiliar road in front of them and naturally wonder how they’re possibly going to travel all of it.
But the longtime amputee knows something the newcomer can’t possibly know yet. You don’t travel thirty years today. You travel today. Then tomorrow shows up. You travel that one too. Eventually the years start stacking up. I’m beginning to stack a few myself.
And now, almost ten years after lying in that hospital bed wondering who all these amputees on my phone were, I’m preparing to stand behind a camera and help tell some of their stories.
Gini. Cam. Jason. Three airplanes headed toward Chicago. Three people trusting me with their stories. Three people willing to give their time because they believe there is value in showing the world what life with limb loss actually looks like.
If I could somehow put these two versions of myself in the same room, I don’t know what the guy in the hospital bed would think of me. I suspect he’d have a lot of questions. I know he wouldn’t believe half of my answers. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him everything. Maybe I’d just tell him to keep going. Because I still don’t completely understand how I got here. Maybe I’m not supposed to.
Maybe life doesn’t always announce what we’re becoming while we’re becoming it. We accept. We move forward. We press into it. We keep living. And somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we become something we could never have imagined.
Sometimes, we even become the person we once went looking for.
And damn.
What a strange, beautiful trip that is.
