After horrible crash, kindness lifts man
Julio Rivera went to Puerto Rico to visit an aunt who, as the result of diabetes, was in a hospital having a leg amputated.
Julio himself has no legs. Instead, what he has are two formidable-looking prosthetics — rawly mechanical, but cool looking. Cyborg-chic. His nieces and nephews have nicknamed him RoboCop.
Julio prefers to wear shorts. They allow him to tweak his prosthetics when necessary. As he was walking up to the hospital to visit his aunt, Julio noticed a boy sitting on a bench with his parents.
“Poppy, poppy,” the boy said. “I want those for Christmas!”
The boy’s parents were mortified. But Julio laughs when he tells the story.
How you react to the way you’re perceived shapes the way you’re perceived. Julio’s all about keeping things positive.
Ten years ago this week, Julio was riding his motorcycle with a dozen or so friends. He was on a high-powered sports bike, one of those bikes that, when revved, sounds like a screaming insect.
Julio was stopped at a light in Greenfield. When the light turned, he popped his bike into a wheelie and took off.
The front wheel came down. Julio popped it up again. When it came down again, Julio lost control.
Police estimated that Julio was traveling nearly 90 mph. Julio slid across a median and hit a street sign, which sliced off his feet.
Julio woke up three days later in a hospital room crowded with family and friends. For some reason, he wasn’t expecting this. He was doing something stupid, but here they were: loyal, loving, encouraging.
When one surgery after another was finally done, he was released from the hospital, Julio discovered that people he barely knew had built a wheelchair ramp to his front door.
It seemed like no matter where he turned, there was someone ready to help. It felt, he said, as if he was in a race and that every few feet there was someone handing him a cup of water, patting him on the back, urging him on.
“I really didn’t expect people to be as kind as they are,” he said.
Their kindness, he said, was transformative. Ask Julio what in his life has changed the most since his accident: “I have to say gratitude.”
“I think that is what really motivated me to keep going, to not give up. There is always somebody there that is going to extend a hand.”
This week, a decade after his accident, Julio completed a specialized machining degree at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
There were days when school, plus his part-time job, required Julio to stand in his prosthetics for hours at a time. Even now, he’s nursing an abrasion caused by his prosthetics.
He shouldn’t be standing at all, “but I’m brutal,” he says.
Not everyone is brutal. His aunt, for example, can’t bear to wear her prosthetic. It hurts.
Maybe, Julio says, this may be his calling: To design and build comfortable prosthetics, improved devices that people wouldn’t mind wearing.
That would be a kindness, he says, a kindness to himself and to others like him.