The CFI’s mission is to help wounded service members return to function, either in active duty or with a civilian lifestyle in medical retirement. (Matthew Busch for The Washington Post) Recovering side by side Manrique, was medically retired as an airborne infantryman but is trying to return. Returning to his duties appeared to be unfeasible.īut that changed in early 2019, shortly after he met Smith. Like Smith, he had lost dorsiflexion, or the ability to fully lift up his right foot, because of trauma to the nerves in his leg. He was medically retired in 2013 because he could no longer run. White didn’t have the option of returning to active duty after his injury. It’s time to get over yourself.’ Honestly, from that day on, I really just took a completely different mind-set toward everything.” And I just thought to myself: ‘It could be so much worse than where you’re really at. “But I rolled myself in, and I saw all these guys, and the music was really loud, and everybody’s just smiling and having a good time. “You go from being this very physical airborne infantry guy to being completely helpless, so you kind of carry that mentality … where you just can’t do anything for yourself,” he said. But when he arrived at the CFI to begin rehab alongside triple- and quadruple-amputees, he was still using a wheelchair and uncertain whether he would ever run again. White, like Smith, was considered a limb-salvage patient. After his initial month-long hospital stay in 2011, he went through nearly two years of physical therapy and treatment at the CFI, which opened in 2007 primarily to treat veterans who suffered burns and limb-salvage injuries while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. White underwent nine surgeries on his right leg, the last of which was in March 2019. White wore a metal external fixator for months. And to truly become good friends after it is pretty remarkable. “For someone to have to live through the same journey, you get a very unique appreciation for it. They don’t understand the journey,” White said. “People don’t appreciate the journey most of the time. Together they rehabbed from nearly identical injuries suffered in very different circumstances, and together they set out to achieve their own improbable comebacks, inspiring each other along the way and building a friendship that neither imagined. Over the past two years, the two men’s lives converged at the Center for the Intrepid (CFI), a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility for wounded veterans in San Antonio, where White lives. If anyone could truly understand his physical pain, his arduous recovery, his dark days and his moments of hope - in addition to his desire to return to a job that nearly killed him and his push for a remarkable recovery - it’s White, a former airborne infantryman who has spent years doing all of the same. White, 38, didn’t know Smith before the injury, but he now knows him better than most ever could. 18, 2018, the day Smith suffered a compound right leg fracture that would become infected and threaten Smith’s life and limb, setting up two years of surgeries and rehab that led to an NFL comeback few thought possible. But unbeknown to him, his life changed Nov. It wasn’t that long ago when Sundays were simply an escape for White, a longtime New England Patriots fan and a married father of two. “I know you know who Alex Smith is,” White said, “but this is truly the person that he is.” It’s the type of response White has gotten used to receiving from the quarterback.
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