Leaping over hurdles to get back outdoors

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, February 26, 2008 8:40 PM MST

"Hey, I went skiing yesterday," I told Bruce Lamberson, who lives on Casper Mountain and is always up for a conversation about the snow.

"So did I," he said.

It was just after New Year's, and what he said so casually nearly knocked me over.

Bruce is skiing again.

That must be the best news of the new year. Bruce has been through a painful and uncertain 22-month journey from surviving a bomb blast in Egypt to that ski trip on Casper Mountain.

He takes off on five-mile skate skiing tours now, nearly two years after a terrorist bomb blast took off part of his leg.

On April 24, 2006, Bruce and his wife Cindy Parrish were visiting his daughter Betsy and her husband Tom South at Dahab, a resort in Egypt, when three bombs exploded very close to them.

Twenty people were killed, and many more were dangerously injured, including Bruce and Tom.

Strangers loaded Bruce into the back of a pickup truck for a four-hour trip to a hospital that could treat the results of the explosion that left a large hole in his leg and his foot askew.

Lying in the bed of that truck, a shirt wrapped around the gap in his leg, he looked at the stars, and stayed calm by telling himself that he would some day again look at the stars in Wyoming.

Hard path

In the 19 months between that day and his last surgery four months ago, Bruce's ability to picture where he was going kept him on an unusually difficult path to recovery.

He was determined to keep his foot, if possible. He and Cindy heard about a limb preservation team at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center, and choose the Denver Clinic for Extremities at Risk.

The physical story is hard enough to believe. Doctors used a process known as bone transfer to force bone to grow into the damaged area.

They also took part of Bruce's shoulder blade "to stick down there to cover some of the missing part," he explained.

The result, after nine surgeries that only finished last October, is a "goofy shaped" leg, according Bruce, that it's hard to fit into a shoe.

But it works.

He skied five miles one day over the weekend, and ran five miles on the other.

Skiing and running are certainly not pain-free. But a key to this remarkable recovery is the kind of physical and mental shape Bruce was in after a lifetime of challenging sports.

Running a 100-mile race through the Big Horn Mountains, biking through the roughest terrain and skiing Wyoming's mountains are ways that Bruce trained himself.

The training came in handy going through the surgeries with a very uncertain outcome.

He credits his wife, Cindy, for what she brought to this struggle. She, too, runs 100-mile races. After the long trip back through hospitals to the United States, she decided to get on with her life, Bruce said, which helped him get up out of bed and a wheelchair.

He said if she had given up and decided to stay home, he might have too.

I think about what it must be like to put all your weight on a "goofy shaped" leg that has been pieced back together, and know how small my challenges are.

I also see what someone can live through to get back to our beautiful, snow-covered mountain. And while I'm being thankful for Bruce's success in his struggle, I also hang on to some motivation for myself from this whole story.

It's a pretty obvious conclusion. If he can ski five miles through that pain and on that leg, I think I can muster the strength to overcome the daily hurdles of life.

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