Tim Niles never saw it coming.
One minute he was riding his motorcycle on a back road in Gorham after visiting his sister. The next he was lying in a ditch, frantically tying his belt around his right leg.
Additional Images
“I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to lose my leg,'” Niles says. “‘I do not want to lose my leg.’ My legs have been my life.”
Niles, 28, a track and field star when he was a student at Old Town High School and an avid soccer player and runner, was hit by a driver who was backing up and didn’t see him. He remembers being in the ambulance, feeling the shock setting in, and asking the paramedic one question. “‘Can you just tell me, truthfully, if I’m gonna lose my leg?’ And he looked at me, and he’s like, ‘Yes, you’re gonna lose your leg.’ I think after that I was done. I just passed out.”
Five months later, on a warm September afternoon, Niles walks down a wide, brightly lit hallway at the New England Rehabilitation Hospital, tossing a basketball back and forth with physical therapist Lindsay Dunstan.
“Allow yourself to really land on it,” Dunstan says, pointing to his prosthetic leg. “Allow that knee flexion to happen first.”
Just about every week, Niles travels from his parents’ home in Old Town to the hospital in Portland for outpatient physical therapy. He’s made remarkable progress.
“He’s pretty much had his mind set since day one that he was just going to do it,” Dunstan says.
And he’s done it, despite a lot of setbacks.
Niles had nine surgeries to stem the tide of an infection – each time surgeons had to take more and more tissue – and spent 42 days at Maine Medical Center. His parents and his sister rarely left his bedside.
“Never once in the time he was in the hospital,” says his father, Larry, “did he say, ‘Woe is me. Why did this happen to me?’ I never heard that out of him.”
Neither has Lindsay Dunstan.
“I work with another therapist,” Dunstan says, “and I said (to her), ‘Sometimes I forget that he just lost his leg,’ ’cause he comes in smiling and he does everything.”
Everything – one day at a time.
“I don’t think I ever let my mind wander off further down the road,” Niles says. “I just kind of took it, ‘Hopefully tomorrow I’m a little bit better, hopefully tomorrow I’m a little bit better.'”
But there were days when the loss overwhelmed him.
“I definitely had some down time where I was just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t understand how my life is gonna be like without my leg.'”
And sometimes still, he says, it’s hard to be around even his closest friends.
“In a way I kind of feel out of place. I don’t let it show sometimes, but I have my hard days when they want me to come out and I’m like, ‘I don’t think today is a good day to do that.'”
Those are the days when he calls upon the “never say never” attitude he learned on the soccer field and in the long-jump pit.
“Being a competitive athlete my entire life, it’s made me have that attitude, ‘I’m going to get this prosthetic leg. I’m going to get back to life. Nothing is going to stop me or slow me down.'”
And when he needs some inspiration, he goes online.
“I met a lot of people on YouTube that had the same injury as me, and just seeing how they cope with it it’s like, OK, if they’re doing this and they’re happy with their life, then eventually I’m going to get there.”
Anyone who knows Tim Niles has no doubt about that.
“He’s always been very competitive,” says his mother, Susan. “If you tell him he can’t do something, he’s going to prove you wrong.”
Niles says he’s looking forward to getting back to his job – he works overnights at the Hannaford store in Scarborough – and to getting back on the playing field.
“I’m not the same athlete I was then, but my mindset is the same. I still want to push my body to its limit. I still want to see what I’m capable of doing.”
And he wants to share his story with others who lose limbs.
His message to them? The same thing he tells himself every day: “You can do this.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
