Her ankle by no means correctly healed, however Coury saved snowboarding. “I turned 18 and moved to the mountains. I used to be on a hill over 100 days a yr with an ankle that was fairly mangled,” she says. “By the point I used to be 21, my foot was so swollen, I might not bodily get it in my snowboard boot.” She noticed a physician and had one preliminary surgical procedure, earlier than they really helpful fusing her ankle—a surgical procedure that binds two or extra bones along with plates and/or screws to cut back ache and swelling within the joint. However it could actually additionally make high-impact actions like snowboarding not possible. “I used to be like, no manner,” Coury says. “That is a demise sentence.”
Coury saved using via the ache. She finally needed to have a boot-fitter minimize the liner out of her boot in order that she might get her enlarged foot into it. “I acquired 110 days on snow that season, I taught myself to get out of the halfpipe, I used to be hitting 40 to 60 foot jumps each single day,” she says. However it price her. By now, she was 22, her ankle was the dimensions of a softball, her cartilage destroyed, and she or he had bone fragments in her joint. Fusion was nonetheless off the desk in Coury’s thoughts. As a substitute, she had eight ankle surgical procedures over the following three years in an try to get again out on snow. It didn’t work.
“I had spent the final three years of my life on crutches and I simply wished to be again out on the earth, leaping off stuff,” Coury says. Determined, she did extra analysis on ankle fusion and discovered the process, which might doubtless create diminished mobility in her ankle, would imply giving up her lively life-style. Hitting a 40-foot soar could be a recipe for blowing out her knee, or her hip, or her again. “Individuals have blown out their knees leaping off of curbs,” she says. “I wasn’t able to be performed being lively.”
So she began researching another: below-the-knee amputation. “I noticed a man on a downhill mountain bike with a prosthetic,” Coury says. “I used to be like, that is what I wish to do. I wish to be lively.” Individuals had a tough time understanding her resolution, she says. “They made me really feel like I used to be going to be much less of an individual as a result of I used to be lacking part of me.”
Coury was not about to just accept that. She had the surgical procedure and has by no means seemed again.
“After amputation, I do not contemplate myself disabled—I contemplate myself re-abled,” she says. “I used to be disabled once I was on crutches for 3 years. I used to be disabled having surgical procedure each three months attempting to repair my foot. Now I am re-able to do something I wish to do, whether or not that is 12 and a half hours on the nursing flooring, or racing snowboard cross.”
Supply: Glamour