Stockwell's story: 'Little Leg,' big heart and positive thinking
Courtesy of Melissa Stockwell Melissa Stockwell's big heart dwarfs the purple one she received after she lost a leg in Iraq."This sounds cheesy," she says, "but I love life. I love it. In the car, the music on, the windows down, I just love it."
She always sounds positive. She calls herself lucky. Appreciates her journey from U.S. Army officer to the first female Iraq war amputee to a Beijing-bound Paralympic swimmer. Wouldn't go back to the way things were before. Wouldn't trade all that has happened, and the things she has learned about herself, not even for her leg.
She isn't naïve or simple. It's just that she's the exact opposite of cynical.
Before they meet Melissa, most figure this has got to be bull. The outwardly positive person on display has to be a woman hiding from reality.
Melissa says she gets that a lot.
"There are some reporters," she says, "that constantly say things like, 'Tell me about the anger.' There is no anger."
After only a few hours, I believe her. I do not understand her strength, and I am nearly certain that I would not be capable of it, but it is real.
Maybe it's the magnets floating around the Paralympic Headquarters. It's one of those "Save the Date" things, mostly used for weddings. Except this one is a window into Melissa's slightly sick sense of humor.
It says "Follow Little Leg to the Paralympics."
It has a picture of what's left of her left leg, the one blown off by an improvised explosive device (IED) on Baghdad's infamous Route Irish, wearing a swim cap. She gave it to friends and family, reminding them that she will be representing America between September 6-17. Little Leg, by the way, is her name for the stump. She throws it birthday parties on the anniversary of the injury.
Maybe it's the pedicure story. In Washington with some girlfriends, they did what groups of women are known to do: get pedicures. When the bill came, Melissa was charged the same as everyone else. She laughs easily about what happened next: "I'm like, 'Wait a minute, I only have one foot. Shouldn't it be half the price?'"
Maybe it's climbing a mountain. She says that the hardest thing is to go up stairs. The prosthetic leg makes that very difficult. Some people just give up stairs. She did something slightly different. With a group of fellow Paralympians not long ago, she climbed what might be the toughest staircase in the world: the Pike's Peak Incline. It's a mile and a half, practically vertical, made of old railway ties. The other trail to the same place covers four miles. That's how normal people do it.
"I don't want to be normal," she says.
Traces of this amazing woman have always lived inside Melissa Stockwell.
She's always loved her country, decorating her room with American flags at a young age, baffling her parents with talk of joining the Army. She's always been athletic, playing sports in high school in Eden Prairie, Minn., even turning down an offer to join the diving team at Clemson. She's always been positive, albeit in small ways, like the ability to keep a flat tire or an empty gas tank in perspective.
Watch 'E:60'
Melissa Stockwell, of course, isn't the only inspirational athlete who will compete in the Paralympics Games next month in China. South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius was born without fibulas, or calf bones, and both of his legs were amputated below the knee before his first birthday. Today, Pistorius has become a hero to disabled athletes everywhere -- not just because he is a dominant sprinter in disabled races, but also because he routinely out-runs the able-bodied. Last season he finished second in the 400 meters in South Africa's national championships.
Earlier this year, the world body that governs track and field banned Pistorius from racing against able bodied athletes at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing because they said his prosthetics gave him an unfair competitive advantage. In May, the ban was overturned, but Pistorius was unable to make the Olympic qualifying time in the 400 meters. Still, after the Paralympics, he is aiming for next year's world championships in Berlin and the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
Reporter Jeremy Schaap speaks with the "Blade Runner" as he is often called, one of the most intriguing athletes in the world today. Watch "E:60" at 7 p.m. ET Tuesday on ESPN.
That first mission lasted 10 minutes.
It all happened so quickly. A bomb exploded. It didn't really hurt at first, she remembers, just a burning sensation. Then they put a tourniquet on her, which she recognized as a bad sign. They put her in the back of a vehicle, bound for an aid station.
"I remember thinking 'It's probably not that bad,'" she says. "I thought I moved my foot. 'This is good, I still have my foot.'"
She realized she had lost a lot of blood and, mostly because it happens in movies, told someone riding with her to tell her parents she loved them. She didn't actually think she was dying. "I didn't know what else to do," she says.
Mostly, she sat in silence, trying to figure out what to say to the stranger next to her. "It was awkward," she says. "I remembering thinking it was awkward. Because I didn't know what to say to him. And he's like, 'Nice weather today.' I didn't really know him that well. What do you say? So you talk about the weather."
They got her into surgery and when she awoke, she found her husband, Dick, staring down at her. He was also serving in Iraq; they'd been in ROTC together at the University of Colorado."I think something happened to my leg," she said.
"It's gone," he said.
A doctor asked if she wanted to call her parents.
Her mom answered, excited to hear her voice, as all mothers are. Melissa stopped her short.
The facts came quickly.
Something bad happened.
I was in an accident.
She called her best friend and former college roommate. It was the middle of the night when Tiffany Meister answered the phone.
"Her voice was kinda shaky," Meister says.
The conversation was simple.
"I was in an accident."
"Are you OK?"
"Well, I lost my leg."
"We both started crying hysterically," Meister says. "Then immediately, I was like, 'But you're alive. And you're coming home. It could be so much worse.' We started talking about all the amazing things they're doing with prosthetics."
The call, Meister says, calmed her friend. That didn't mean the coming months weren't going to be difficult. Infection set in. Doctors worried Melissa might die. Inch by inch, they took more of her leg. "Me and the IV lady were pretty good friends," she says.
She was even released once, only to be urgently readmitted a week later because infection had returned, traveling dangerously fast up her leg. That was one of the few times she wondered why this had happened to her.
Mostly, she stayed positive. She saw the other soldiers, some missing both legs, some missing all four limbs, and reminded herself that she was, despite outward appearances, lucky.
Somewhere along the way, Dick brought her a brochure about the Paralympics. Told her she should go to a meeting about it. At first, she was reluctant. But the more she learned, the more she realized that she had finally found something worthy of her passion. Her friends noticed a change when she started training, knocking seconds off her time. "I've never seen her have so much focus," Meister says. "I think it's because she was never so sure of something to focus on."
"This isn't Camp Olympiad," coach Jimi Flowers likes to remind them. "This is the Olympic Training Center."
No one really expected her to make the team.
"When I came out here," she says, "it was a long shot. Absolutely a long shot. I knew that. Everybody knew that. Jimi knew that. My teammates knew it."
But her times came down. They started to believe. Something else happened. She felt at home in the water. She felt whole. Even her coach sometimes forgot what chain of events had brought them together. Once, he gave her one of the new high-tech Speedo swimsuits. It had two legs.
She asked what she was supposed to do with the other leg.
He looked a bit sheepish.
"I forgot," he said.
"I was like, 'Jimi, how do you forget about the leg?'" she said, laughing.
With a month to go until the Paralympic trials in April, they scheduled a meet in Denver. He had high hopes. She did, too. This was a chance, in front of a lot of family and friends, to show what she had done. She tanked, barely finishing her race.
It was the first time he saw her cry.
A tense month passed. She didn't sleep the night before the trials, trying to remind herself that even if she failed, it had been worth it. In the preliminary swim for the 400 fly, she knocked seven seconds off her best time. Before the final, Flowers pulled her aside.
The race began. Stockwell took off "like a bat out of hell," he remembers. A friend in the stands turned to see Jimi worried to pieces. This was too fast. He'd been watching Melissa swim for months and she could never keep this pace. He felt sick; she'd worked too hard to collapse coming home. But something happened, something that gives him goosebumps even today.
"She went out and did not die," he says. "Crushed the field. And set an American record."
He learned something about Melissa Stockwell that day. Maybe she was born with this ability to see the sunshine through the clouds. Maybe the United States Army taught it to her. Maybe losing the leg did it. But whatever the reason, something powerful lived inside of her.
He learned that nothing is impossible.
In one day, she'd knocked 17 seconds off her best time. She'd qualified to swim four events. Four years after losing her leg but not herself, Melissa Stockwell was going to Beijing.
Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He can be reached at wrightespn@gmail.com.
