A revised game plan for life
He lived to be active. John Ingribelli ran to feel healthy. Three times a week, some five kilometres each time around his St. Catharines neighbourhood.
His daughter, Mary, was often his running partner. Some days she’d be in the lead. Other days, it would be John. It really didn’t matter; the important part was running together.
He’d often take Mary to the gym to box for a cardio workout.
And then there is basketball. He coaches two girls travel teams in Niagara Falls — Grade 5 and Grade 8- 9 teams through the Red Raiders. He is coaching a high school girls team. And in the summer, he offers skills training to girls at no cost simply because he wants to share his passion for the game. In her early years, he coached Mary, now 23 and part of the Niagara College team.
He is modest about all this.
In fact, John has needed the game, too.
John is an amputee. His left leg was crushed in a workplace accident and he made the choice three years ago to have it amputated because the pain of living with a reconstructed leg was too much.
When the pain was so great that he could barely walk or sleep, he longed to be active again.
It was a drive so innate, that with the support of his family — wife Barbara, Mary and son Michael, 25 — he found his old life again.
“He just doesn’t stop,” says Mary. She was in Grade 11 at the time of his accident. Tears well in her eyes when she’s asked to explain the impact her father has had on her life.
“I don’t think I’ve ever said he’s my role model in life,” she says.
Enough said.
John had just finished lunch at a construction site in Milton. It was Oct. 25, 2010. A Monday.
He was standing on top of a flatbed trailer loaded with hollow- core concrete slabs. The slabs, stacked one on top of the other, were being used in the construction of a multi- floored building. Each slab was to be attached to a choker sling, in simple terms, a steel chain that wrapped around each end of the block and then came together where it attached to the end line of a crane. The crane would lift each slab up to the appropriate floor of the building, then return for another. Again and again.
The crane had just pulled off a half slab when John’s world changed forever.
The other half of the slab shifted above him and slid towards John. It’s 4,700 pounds of mass pushed him over and landed on his left leg, a few inches below his knee.
He was facing away from the truck and did not see it coming.
By the time an ambulance arrived, John had been freed from the slab. “I tried to stay calm and breathe,” he says. Other than that, he doesn’t remember much. He was airlifted to Hamilton General Hospital.
Barbara, who works as a flight attendant, had just landed at Pearson International and was driving home. She backtracked to Hamilton. Fast. “I was expecting the worse,” she said.
John was alive. His leg, crushed. The fibula, the smaller leg bone, had broken and had punctured the skin. His leg had no pulse. And yet, the one saving grace, the factor that made saving his leg remotely possible was the fact that the main artery that coursed blood into his leg was still intact.
There were scary moments. One night, when he had spiked a fever and his situation looked especially grim, he called home. He was worried he’d never walk his daughter down the aisle. Everyone cried together and John pulled through.
Indeed, multiple surgeries saved his leg. He came home with his leg encased in a metal frame, held in place by pins. His sister, a nurse, stayed with John and meticulously tended to his wounds to keep them clean and free of infection.
There was lots of special equipment. One machine fed oxygen into an open hole in his leg that left bone exposed, to help it heal. Another machine stimulated his bone to make it stronger.
Recovery was not easy. The metal frame came off, he started walking again and new therapies began but the bone broke again, in the same place. A titanium rod was inserted to hold his leg together. He resorted to wheelchairs, walkers and crutches.
“I had to start all over again,” said John.
And through it all, there was pain. A lot of pain. For three years, he barely slept. He would wake up in bed consistently at 3 a. m. and not be able to get back to sleep.
When his son had a high school football game and John wasn’t mobile enough to get close to the football field to watch, he sat in the passenger seat and watched from the parking lot.
“He never missed any of our high school games,” says Mary.
His leg healed eventually but the pain never left.
Many different strategies were tried. His ankle was fused. He wore special orthotics. He was patient. Open to suggestions.
And always in pain.
Somewhere along the way, he had a thought that would seem radical: Amputate it.
“I said enough’s, enough. This is not working,” he says.
He did his homework. He reached out to amputee organizations and spoke to people who were living with a prosthetic leg. He spoke with experts and a surgeon who supported his choice. He had heartfelt conversations with his family.
Then he made his decision: amputate the leg.
He had a final appointment with his surgeon. “He came out of there with the biggest smile on his face,” says Barbara.
“But it was also like jumping off a cliff. You really don’t know and you can’t go back.”
John had the surgery that would take his leg and eventually free him from pain, on Sept. 9, 2014 — almost four years after the accident.
“Compared to what I’d been through, this was minor,” says John. “The pain wasn’t there.”
His first prosthetic leg arrived in time for Christmas. Through it all, there was always basketball.
When he was in a wheelchair, parents of the girls he coached would wheel him into the gym. He’d joked with the girls that they could run away with his leg and he’d never be able to catch them.
His latest prosthetic leg is emblazoned with the world basketball in capital letters, a basketball front and centre, and the logo of his favourite team. While he can no longer meet the physical demands of construction work, he has forged ahead and found new employment. His latest job is at a car dealership, cleaning vehicles to prep them for sale.
While he can’t run with Mary anymore, he pushes himself to walk around the neighbourhood — five kilometres every morning.
He leads by example. Anyone whose life path he has crossed, has learned something about compassion, patience and persistence.
“It’s a lesson that life is not perfect. It’s not straight, nor should it be. It has ups and downs,” says Barbara.
“Life is life. And it should be like that. It shouldn’t be a straight line. We need to embrace all of it.”
Her parents died before she turned 18, an experience that gives her perspective on life.
“It was horrible,” she says. “So, I knew as long as my husband is alive, it was going to be OK.”
She reminded her kids: “You still have your dad.
“Whatever you go through in life, you just have to roll with it,” says Barbara. “There’s no turning back.
“You have to make tomorrow better and there’s no turning back.”
John knows he could have died. But didn’t. Everything else, is just part of life’s game plan.
“I live for today. I don’t worry about tomorrow,” he says.
“I’m lucky to be alive.”