Actor who lost arms in fire reaches a new stage in life
Prince Amponsah thought that he would never act again
A return to acting seemed impossible for Prince Amponsah after he was disfigured in an apartment fire.
Before the accident cost him his forearms, he had started to make a name for himself with small roles in the Shaw Festival. In the weeks leading up to the fire that gutted his walk-up apartment, on Queen St. W. near the Cameron House bar in November 2012, he had re-signed with his agent, hoping to land roles in TV and movies.
More than two years after the fateful blaze, an opportunity to return to the stage finally arose last summer after a friend, director Harrison Thomas, invited Amponsah to play an angel in a theatrical adaptation of the biblical story of Lot, an indie production at a downtown café.
Amponsah was all nerves before his first rehearsal. “What are people going to think about me? Am I ready?” he asked himself. “What if I blow? I haven’t acted in a while.” By opening night, his doubts had given way to excitement.
This month, the Ghana-born, Mississauga-raised 30-year-old is due to star in The Changeling at the Box Theatre, a Jacobean tragedy and his fourth play since his real-life tragedy. He portrays the villain, a “servant who’s pretty ruthless and ends up murdering for lust,” he said. His prosthetic is being outfitted with a10-inch steel blade for the performance. “It’s pretty crazy. I definitely wouldn’t wear it around the street,” he said, laughing.
His road to recovery was long, including 40 skin grafts and other reconstructive surgeries and more than a year-and-a-half of rehabilitation.
For weeks after the fire, he lay in the burn unit of Sunnybrook Hospital in a medically induced coma, unaware of the seriousness of his injuries — burns to 68 per cent of his body.
Friends, family and an endless procession of nurses and doctors shuffled in and out of his private room, wearing the mandatory gown, gloves and mask to avoid infection.
When he came to and shook off the fog of medication, he tried to speak, but a tracheotomy made him too weak to talk. He asked visitors for a pen and paper. “You don’t need them,” they would say.
One day, when he had the strength to lift his aching head and look down at his bandaged body, he realized his forearms were gone.
They had been amputated — his right above the elbow, and the left below — to save his life. “I just remember a shiver going down my body,” he said. “I didn’t cry or anything . . . I accepted it. I had to.”
Amponsah’s loved ones and health providers filled in the gaps in his memory little by little.
Hospital staff nursed him back to physical health, and helped him accept his new condition.
Such trauma is often enough to shut someone down, said Anne Hayward, a social worker who treated him at Sunnybrook, but Amponsah was resilient. “The burns and the amputations became part of him, but did not define him,” she said.
After three months, he was transferred to St. John’s Rehab, home to Ontario’s only burn rehabilitation centre. During his hospital stay, friends dropped in to watch South Park or Quentin Tarantino movies. They raised nearly $30,000 with a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his prosthetics.
Amponsah moved into an assisted-living one-bedroom apartment unit, near Gladstone Ave. and Queen St., in August 2014. Living independently, even brush- ing his teeth is complicated. He has to hold a tube of toothpaste between his knees and squeeze it out onto the brush, held between his residual limbs. He’s made it easier to dress himself by wearing suspenders and replacing his shirt buttons with magnets or Velcro.
His friend Pawel Tosiek, who helped start the fundraiser and rescued Amponsah from the burning apartment, says the fire hasn’t really changed him. “It’s still the same old Prince. If anything at all, this has made him stronger,” he said. “He doesn’t complain. I feel like an idiot ever complaining to him about my problems.” Amponsah’s ambitions go beyond showbiz. His experience in hospital, and the help he got from social workers like Hayward, led him to apply to Ryerson’s social work program.
He returned to Sunnybrook just before Mother’s Day to thank Hayward and share some good news: he had been accepted to university, and starts this fall.
“In social work, he’s going to be pretty powerful in terms of what he gives to other clients and families who might be struggling,” she said. “He walks the walk and talks the talk, for sure.”
Before he graduates, she’d like to see him act. Amponsah says there’ll be tickets waiting for her at the box office.