The 7 Longest Yards
Chris Norton
October 16th, 2010, I’m sprinting down the sidelines of the football field covering the kick. I see an opening and crash into the ball carrier at full speed. After the play, instead of hopping up and celebrating with my teammates, I lay there motionless from the neck down. As an 18-year-old freshman at Luther College, I was playing more than the rest of my class. I was known for my hard-hitting ability, but now I couldn’t even push off the ground to get up. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had suffered a severe spinal cord injury and would only be given a three percent chance to ever move again from the neck down. My faith and grit would be tested as I endured the toughest road of my life. Thankfully, on the fourth night after my accident, I experienced a life-changing encounter in my hospital bed.
Whenever the lights went out, I felt like a prisoner trapped in my bed. All the doubts, all the fears that I pushed away during the day with work and distractions came flooding back. Alone with my thoughts, my optimism evaporated. My mind raced through every worst-case scenario while dark questions haunted me: Will I be stuck like this forever? Will I have to quit school and live with my parents for the rest of my life? Will I always need nursing care? How can I be happy like this? How am I ever going to meet a girl? How can anyone love me like I am right now?
The longer I lay there, the darker my fears became. I thought about how even if I got well enough to live on my own, my life would still suck. Everything I loved to do required a body that worked—playing sports, hiking, waterskiing, and tubing at the lake. How could I love a life in which everything I ever wanted to do was taken away?
One night in the ICU, the dark thoughts threw me into a panic. I thought I was about to lose it when a doctor walked briskly through the door to check my vitals. That wasn’t unusual—someone stopped by every two hours to roll me on my side, adjust my pillows, and check for pressure sores. Normally they finished the job and left without saying too much. But tonight was different.
After checking my vitals, the doctor stooped down on one knee next to my bed so she could look me in the eyes. “Chris, look at me,” she said. She didn’t use that half-whisper everyone else did in the middle of the night. Her voice was tough and authoritative. I looked at her, taking in her short reddish hair and glasses. She was probably in her sixties and spoke with a cowboy twang, as if she had walked straight out of a Western movie. I wondered what she could possibly want.
We locked eyes. “My name is Georgia,” she said. “I’m from Wyoming. Do you know anyone from Wyoming?” I stuttered. “No.” Where in the world is this going? I thought. I just wanted to get back to feeling sorry for myself. Georgia kept going. “Well, people from Wyoming don’t tell lies. And I want you to know that you will beat this. You will beat this.”
Instantly, the waterworks started. I sobbed uncontrollably as I stared at her in disbelief. I’d been lying there questioning whether all my effort and all my time was worth it. No one else on the medical team had given me much assurance. Georgia didn’t have to say a word to me that night, but the fact that she took an opportunity to encourage me when I was struggling completely changed my life. I took the hope that Dr. Georgia gave me and poured it into my workouts. Day by day I got a little bit stronger.
Five weeks into my recovery, I felt slight sensations throughout my body and even had some movement in my arms. All this time and effort, and still nothing in my legs. By now I’d talked to several people who’d been through injuries similar to mine. Anyone who regained use of their legs had some kind of movement by no later than five or six weeks. Now, at my five-week mark, I heard a ticking clock in my head. If I was ever going to walk again, I had to move my legs now! Every night my prayer was the same. “God, please let me move something in my legs. I just need that first glimpse into walking. I need you. Please.”
Then one morning, the week before Thanksgiving 2010, I woke up and realized I felt a sensation in my left big toe. It almost felt as if my toe were tingling or exposed, like a blanket had fallen off at night and you feel that brisk air on your toes. I still couldn’t move my toe, but when I told my family about the new feeling, everyone was excited. I thought the doctor would be too, but when I explained this sensation to him, he didn’t look up from the charts in his hands.
“I’m serious, doctor,” I said. “If you’d just take off my shoe and look at my toe, maybe . . .” The doctor sighed. “Chris, you’re experiencing what we call a phantom feeling,” he said. “You want to believe you can feel something in your left big toe. You tricked yourself into thinking it’s real, but it’s not. I’m sorry.” I frowned, trying to keep my jaw from dropping. “I’m telling you, I haven’t felt anything like this until today. I know something is different,” I insisted.
“This happens all the time with people who have spinal cord injuries,” the doctor said. “But at the end of the day, the fact is, you’re not going to be able to move anything in your legs ever again.” And with those lovely parting words, he nonchalantly walked out of the room.
To say I was crushed would be putting it mildly. He had cast aside everything I had been working toward and praying for as if it were all for nothing. I’d never worked harder for anything in my life, and this doctor just shut the door on my hope of moving anything soon. My dad, who was with me during that pleasant exchange, grabbed my hand. Tears welled in his eyes as his voice broke, “Chris, do not let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do.”
That was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. I teared up too as I promised him, “I never will.”
I now had a new goal: prove that doctor wrong. Over the next week, I worked up to three hours of therapy a day. That still wasn’t enough for me. I asked for a fourth hour, which, I was told, no one had ever asked for before. Eventually they gave it to me, but they drew the line at a fifth hour. Undeterred, I asked my physical and occupational therapists to write up workouts I could do on my own, outside of my scheduled therapy time.
After a week of nonstop work, I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and felt a new, even stronger sensation in my left big toe. My physical therapist, Megan Gill, had barely walked in my room for our therapy when I blurted out, “My big toe! I think I can move it!”
She pulled back the covers, and there it was: my big toe twitching on command. Seeing that toe jerk to life felt better than every Christmas morning and football win I’d ever experienced in my life, put together. I yelled for Katie and Alex to come see. “Look at this!” I yelled. My sisters screamed when they saw me wiggle my toe. “Chris!” Alex burst into tears. “It happened! You did it!”
I’d never been so thankful for a moving toe in my life. I was downright giddy. “Someone bring that doctor, Dr. Phantom, in here, and you tell him to phantom this,” I asked everyone who came into my room that day. It’s probably for the best that he was gone that day.
What started out as a toe wiggle became much more as I began to regain some movement back throughout my legs. It led to me walking the stage of my college graduation four-and-a-half years later with the help of my then-fiancée Emily. Three years after that, Emily and I walked seven yards down the aisle of our wedding. We have fostered eighteen kids and adopted five daughters, authored two books, and filmed a documentary about my life story titled “7 Yards.” I launched a motivational speaking career and formed a nonprofit, Chris Norton Foundation, to help others with physical disabilities.
So when people ask, “If you could go back and change that play, would you?” My answer is always “No.” Through this loss I have discovered a purpose worth living for, which isn’t to play football. It’s to inspire others through my life experiences. Just like Dr. Georgia, we are all capable of impacting people’s lives, and sometimes it only takes a few words.