An elite test in restraint for soldiers
Adam Jones has had to learn how not to push himself too hard since his brain injury
In the three years since his traumatic brain injury in 2014, Adam Jones regained the ability to walk and speak, enrolled in university, learned some ancient Greek, took up ballet and is well on his way to mastering the cello, all as part of his recovery.
But for the injured soldier competing in the 2017 Invictus Games, this daunting — and partial — list of activities in his recovery process was not about getting better.
“It was about me pushing myself,” he said.
The impulse to be hard on yourself is often seen as the mark of a good soldier, Jones said, adding that in a profession that requires maximum commitment, there’s a certain level of self-validation that can come from fully exerting yourself.
“A lot of us had to really battle that impulse in our training leading up to the Games,” Jones explains, an experience shared with other members on Canada’s Invictus team.
Jones’ road to Invictus began in May 2014 after a stroke of what he puts simply as bad luck; a 25-foot plunge from a rappelling tower while training at a Meaford military base.
The 26-year-old Scarborough native had a seizure, and felt other symptoms of traumatic brain injury almost instantly. The spectrum of his symptoms went from vomiting and loss of sleep, to an inability to walk or speak.
“There’s that saying, sweat in training so you don’t bleed in battle and the reality of the situation is that sometimes you bleed in training,” he said.
Not being able to find his words stripped him of a core part of his identity as an avid chatterbox whose elementary schoolmates had called “Encyclopedia Jones.”
Due to a lack of awareness of his kind of injury, Jones’ former colleagues also sometimes mistook his condition for an intellectual impairment, speaking to him in slow and deliberate pacing. “For me that was really hurtful,” he said. “It’s tough in ways that aren’t necessarily anyone’s fault. The public perception for brain injury . . . makes it really hard to get support.”
But the medical support he was able to get through a team of speech pathologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and fitness coaches was instrumental in both his physical and mental recovery. Jones’ physiotherapist, Deb Cardinal of Canadian Forces Health Services, played a large role on his path to Invictus.
“Often her job wasn’t to push me, it was to hold me back,” he said. “The qualities that make you a good soldier don’t always make you a good patient.”
Cardinal could tell when her patient had been exercising six hours a day instead of three, if he hadn’t taken time to stretch his muscles, or if he’d pushed them too hard by lifting more weights in training.
But the exertion didn’t end there. Jones took up cello, training with three separate music teachers for several hours a day in order to learn a new activity.
Jones said taking up new disciplines was a way for him to feel continued progress in his recovery because the sense of plateauing can lend itself to feelings of malaise or depression in recovering soldiers.
He also wanted to try something that he had never done before to overcome the frustration of relearn-
“The public perception for brain injury . . . makes it really hard to get support.” ADAM JONES SOLDIER
ing tasks or memories that were lost in 2014.
“It took a lot of counselling for me to be OK with my recovery,” he said.
Jones is also learning ballet, but has taken a more leisurely approach to it as his relationship with recovery improves. He competed in track and rowing at this year’s Games.
The Invictus Games wrap up on Saturday with the closing ceremonies at the Air Canada Centre.