wounded
PALO ALTO, Calif. - It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk. At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates.
Even so, those who know Corporal Poole say his personality - gregarious, kind and funny - has remained intact. Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he considers himself lucky to be alive. So do his doctors. "Basically I want to get my life back," he said. "I'm really trying."
"He was extremely motivated, and he pushed himself to the limit, being a marine," Ms. Pitsch said. He was so driven, in fact, that at first his therapists had to strap him into a wheelchair to keep him from trying to get up and walk without help.
By the last week of September, he was beginning to climb stairs. He graduated from a walker to a cane to walking on his own. By January he was running and lifting weights.
"It's not his physical recovery that's amazing," his father said. "It's not his mental recovery. It's his attitude. He's always positive. He very rarely gets low. If it was me I'd fall apart. We think of how he was and what he's had taken from him."
當我們常常埋怨我們面對的環境充滿困難,變得灰心的時候...可有想過世界上有許多比我們不幸的人, 能夠勇敢面對,並克服那我們以為攀不過的高山