Quadruple amputee Marine threw first pitch?

Marine vet with arm transplant throws ceremonial first pitch at NY baseball game
American Military News
Cheryl Hinneburg
August 10, 2018

On June 30, Marine veteran John Peck, who lost both legs and arms in Afghanistan, was able to throw the ceremonial first pitch at the Rockland Boulders game, thanks to a double arm transplant.

Peck received the double arm transplant just two years ago after losing all of his limbs in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device, Lohud News reported.

32-year-old Peck said: “Throwing the first pitch is kind of cool for me, I’ve never done that before.”

Prior to the transplant, Peck relied upon prosthetic limbs, but he went on a waiting list to receive the transplant.

Two years ago this month, he was the second wounded veteran to receive an arm transplant.
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After Losing Limbs, Veteran Got Life Back

After he lost his limbs, Dave Riley found a new purpose for his life

AL.com
Michelle Matthews
November 23, 2017 

"It was my missing ingredient," he says. The DAV "exposed me to adrenaline again," and gave him his life back.

Dave Riley

Dave Riley works on a stack of walnut boxes in the 

workshop behind his house in Semmes, Ala. 

(Facebook photo) 

Every morning, Yvonne Riley helps Dave, her husband of 30 years, get himself together. Literally.

Before they leave the bedroom of their home in Semmes, Yvonne helps him brush his teeth, she shaves his face and she helps him put on his prosthetic arms and legs and get dressed. By now, she has the process down pat. She's been doing this for the past 20 years.

In 1997, Dave and Yvonne had taken their family - they have two daughters and a son - on a rare vacation to Dauphin Island. Dave remembers opening the door to their camper after they arrived. He felt the wind blowing on his face, and he felt something else, he says: "an impending feeling of doom."

By the time he woke up the next morning, his body was going into septic shock. A tall, strong Coast Guard rescue swimmer and emergency medical technician, Dave had contracted a bacterial infection that was trying to kill him. One of the doctors treating him told Yvonne he wasn't going to make it.

He spent the next 30 days in a medically induced coma, with Yvonne making all his medical decisions for him - including the amputation both of his arms below the elbows and his legs below the knee. He was hospitalized for two more months.

He sold his woodworking tools. He got rid of his boat and his trailer. "I didn't think I'd need them anymore," he says.
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Quadruple Amputee Veteran Has New Arms

If you are having a bad time, take a look at his face, then read all he's gone through. You want some inspiration? You want some hope that life can change if our outlook does? Here it is!


Afghan war veteran who lost all his limbs learns to live with new arms
THE FREE LANCE–STAR
By KRISTIN DAVIS
November 12, 2017

He was a quadruple amputee, one of five from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it wasn’t long before a team of doctors visited Walter Reed to talk to him about an arm transplant—attaching the arms of a dying person onto what remained of his.

Peter Cihelka The Free Lance Star

After the 16-hour surgery, after the nerve blockers dented pain so torturous he nearly asked the doctors to undo all that he’d pinned his hopes on, John Peck looked down at his hands and wondered about the man they’d come from.

A tiny white scar, narrow as a hair’s breadth, ran like a dash across his right wrist. He turned them over. No calluses on the palms or fingers. The man who’d given him what a bomb blast took away had not played guitar or gardened or labored with his hands.

Peck lay in a hospital bed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, 500 miles from his home in Spotsylvania County where the wait for a double-arm transplant had dragged on for more than two years.

In the weeks after he was approved for the surgery in 2014 and placed on a waiting list, Peck’s cellphone had become like a limb itself, never leaving his side. But weeks turned to months and soon a year had passed with no call. As a second year approached, he no longer clung to it in the same way.

Sometimes, he even wheeled himself outside without it.
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Staff Sergeant Travis Mills Opens Retreat for Other Wounded Veterans

Quadruple amputee soldier transforms an old Maine country estate into a vacation destination which will give 56 veterans and their families FREE holidays this summer
Daily Mail
By Darren Boyle for MailOnline
PUBLISHED: 12:16 EDT, 20 June 2017

Staff Sergeant Travis Mills was blown up on April 10, 2012 in Afghanistan While on patrol, Mills placed his backpack on the IED which exploded He is one of only five solders in Iraq or Afghanistan to survive losing four limbs. His retreat for wounded veterans in Maine will open on Sunday afternoon

According to Mills, the property will open this Sunday following its extensive makeover

Quadruple amputee soldier Travis Mills will open his transformed Maine estate this weekend which will allow 56 veteran families to have free holidays this summer.

Mills, who was a Staff Sergeant in the 82nd Airborne was critically wounded by an improvised explosive device while on patrol on his third tour of Afghanistan on April 10, 2012.

The 16-bedroom mansion in Readfield, Maine will be officially opened by the retired veteran this Sunday.

In 2014, he created the Travis Mills foundation to help fellow veterans and the project was made possible by an incredible fundraising drive. He told People magazine he managed to raise the $2.75 million to restore the historic 11,000 square-foot house.
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Quadruple Amputee Due For Double Army Transplant

Retired Marine Awaits Double Arm Transplant
The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.
by Kristin Davis
Mar 15, 2016

For more than two months after the blast, Peck lay in a medically induced coma at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He'd endured more than two dozen surgeries; three times, his heart had stopped. An infection had nearly killed him.

In the evenings, in the echoes of the expansive home built and equipped for him, retired Marine Sgt. John Peck imagines a new life.

He wills the phone to ring. Perhaps this is it, he thinks when it finally does. The call from the Boston hospital that will set it all into motion.

Peck was clearing the way for his fellow Marines while on patrol in Afghanistan in May 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. The blast claimed both of his legs and part of his right arm. Later, as he fought a virulent infection, doctors took his left arm to spare his life.

Peck, a hulking, 6-foot-tall, 200-pound Marine, had become a quadruple amputee at age 24.

It was like somebody hit the pause button on his life. Now he waits for a double arm transplant from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital in the hope that it will start again.

From the sun deck of his home at the Estates of Chancellorsville where he has learned to live in relative independence, he lists in order all he intends to accomplish when that day finally comes.

They are big dreams, he concedes, with an unlikely chance of total success.

He shrugs.

"I've had worse odds." read more here

Vietnam Veteran Fighting For Wife's Life

CentraCare, St. Cloud man clash on plan for wife's care 
St. Cloud Times
Kevin Allenspach
February 1, 2015

Charles Holmes communicates with his wife, Tahnee Hughes-Holmes, in their home Jan. 22 in St. Cloud. Hughes-Holmes was paralyzed in a car accident and then suffered a cardiac arrest just over a year ago.
(Photo: Dave Schwarz)

Charles Holmes has disagreed with CentraCare about a potential care plan that would deny life-saving measures for his wife, Tahnee Hughes-Holmes, who is a quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator.

For almost half her life, Tahnee Hughes-Holmes has lived as a quadriplegic in St. Cloud.

A victim of a drunken driver, she was able to maneuver in a motorized wheelchair, go garage-saling or to the movies for almost 20 years after becoming paralyzed. And she was known for speaking her mind.

That changed a little more than a year ago when she suffered a cardiac arrest while in St. Cloud Hospital, resulting in a brain injury that has made her dependent on a ventilator and robbed her of speech.

Since a monthlong hospitalization last fall, the 46-year-old has lived at home the south edge of St. Cloud. Her constant companion, other than a rotation of personal care attendants, is her husband, Charles Holmes, who has been by her side since 1991.

Holmes knows what it's like to suffer. He served in the Army in the late 1970s and said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 1997, years after he moved to Central Minnesota to get treatment through the St. Cloud VA Health Care System. Holmes went from job to job until going on disability in 2002. He said the PTSD is rooted in his service, but didn't want to elaborate.
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Quadruple Amputee Iraq Veteran Gets New Limbs at Walter Reed

With transplanted arms and Army grit, a quadruple amputee soldiers on
Washington Post
Michael E Ruane
June 30, 2014

Marrocco, at occupational therapy at the Military Advanced Training Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. At the time of his injury, he was the first service member from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to survive the loss of four limbs.
(Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

Brendan Marrocco sits at a table in the occupational therapy room and with the help of his teeth straps the exercise hooks to his wrists.

His new flesh-and-blood hands are not yet strong enough to grip the pull-up bar, so the hooks must do for now.

He slides out of his wheelchair, walks a few steps on the stumps of his legs and looks up at the bar.

“I have to prepare myself to do this,” he says. He reaches up, latches the wrist hooks to the bar and curses. “I’m so not ready right now.”

His occupational therapist, Joe Butkus, who is watching, says: “You got it. This is easy.”

Then the retired Army sergeant, who has no legs and has transplanted arms joined with plates and screws, begins.

One, two, three . . .
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Iraq War veteran Tomas Young decides to live for loving wife

Injured Veteran Keeps Up His Fight, Deciding To Live
NPR
by FRANK MORRIS
December 28, 2013

"If you're in life and you start to think things are a little too rough to handle," he says, "just think of me and what I go through, and you realize that hey, I don't have it so bad."

A spinal injury left Iraq War veteran Tomas Young paralyzed below the waist in 2004. Further medical complications a few years later made him quadriplegic.

Although Young had enlisted two days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he became an outspoken anti-war activist.

KCUR's Frank Morris spoke with him in April, after Young announced he would refuse medication and his feeding tube until he died.

"I decided that I was no longer going to watch myself deteriorate," Young said at the time.

"I just came to the conclusion that I wanted some more time with my wife," he tells NPR's Arun Rath.
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