MONTREAL — Warren Macdonald says it’s all about perception, and he would know.
The 44-year-old native Australian adventurer lost both legs above the knee in April of 1997 after a one-ton boulder came crumbling off a cliff and crushed them on an island in the Great Barrier Reef.
Warren Macdonald, right, chats with Grade 8 Bialik student Allon Cohen. Cohen severed a tendon in his left leg and broke his left wrist in an accident at the school.
But except for a few tears when doctors told him they’d have to amputate, Macdonald has never looked back.
When not wearing one of several prosthetic leg sets (which he actually does not wear often), Macdonald is a blur scooting about in a light, customized wheelchair fuelled by powerful arms and a muscular torso.
A resident for the last eight years of Vancouver, B.C., he swims “faster than anyone” (due to his legless weight), ice climbs, rock-climbs, cycles (pedalling with his hands), drives, and lives life as if nothing ever happened to him.
He never even thinks about his “disability.”
“Perception is not about what you see, it’s about how you see things,” he told an audience of 800 completely rapt students – the entire school – recently at Bialik High School.
How Macdonald saw things at Bialik was from his perch on stage, accompanied by video clips and slides of his climbs since the accident. Those have included Africa’s tallest peak, 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, in 2003, and Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, which he did mostly by dragging his rear end all the way up, less than a year after his accident.
Macdonald has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, written a book about his life – A Test of Will – been the focus of an episode on the Discovery Channel series, I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and built a career on the motivational speaker circuit.
His main message to Bialik students was: “Always look forward, not backward. Focus on what you can do – don’t get freaked out about what you can’t.
“I only feel disabled when I’m looking for a parking space.”
That’s the type of message that fit in perfectly with Bialik’s sensitization program, created 28 years ago by the school’s Lainie Smajovits.
Macdonald painted a vivid picture of what it took to get where he is today, the audience almost groaning in unison as he went into the fine, sometimes gruesome, detail about his accident and then recovery. Macdonald had been with another person when the accident happened and then waited two days by himself, in what he said was unimaginable pain, to be rescued.
Even then, it took 2-1/2 hours to keep him alive once the massive boulder was off him.
“They almost lost me twice,” he said.
The process of recovery was painful and slow, and was accomplished by learning “one little thing at a time,” Macdonald recounted: to swim, to use a wheelchair, to use prosthetic legs to walk and to climb mountains again, through sheer will and perseverance. It took Macdonald three years to train for Mount Kilimanjaro.
“It was a matter of breaking it down into manageable steps,” he said. “Before this, I probably would not have tried ice climbing,” he said. “All this has taught me is that we can all do way more than we think we can.”
In a question and answer session, Macdonald said he has never had a “flashback” about his accident and generally ignored other people “deciding what I can and cannot do.”
Asked what the hardest part of having his disability has been, and Macdonald had to think hard.
“The hardest thing was to ask people for help,” he finally said. “It’s still the hardest thing.”
