Tyson Gentry
August 22, 2015 ·
10 years ago today, God sent me one of the most important signs of my life. This sign not only allowed me to find peace with my injury, but it also helped me with my faith in God. Too often, people receive subtle signs from God, only to resolve them to be coincidences and meaningless. In some ways, I can't blame them for reaching these conclusions. Is it really possible to comprehend God's awesomeness?
My sign played out like something you would see a movie. It was the summer of 2005 and I was going into my sophomore year of college at Ohio State. At that time, I was a walk on punter for the Buckeyes and we were halfway through summer camp. Everyone eager for the season to arrive. Mostly because we were tired of beating up on each other and ready to hit someone on another team. A lot of upperclassmen decided to put the NFL on hold and stick around to do something great. We were favored to win the Big Ten and we felt we had a good chance at a national championship.
Throughout camp, Coach Tressel liked to bring in motivational speakers to share their messages and give the team some perspective on life beyond football. After practice, meetings, and dinner, we would all get together in the Fawcett Center auditorium for one final team meeting to talk, reflect, and listen to the speaker. The guest speaker on that Monday night was Rosemarie Rosetti. As we all sat in our seats, waiting for her to come out, guys were cracking jokes and going over the day's events. Most of us were ready for the day to be over so we could go back to the hotel to unwind and get some rest.
As Coach Tress introduced Rosemarie and she rolled out onto the stage. Everyone quieted down to hear her talk. She shared that seven years ago, she was on a bike ride with her husband, riding on a path through the woods, when an 80' tree fell and landed on her. Immediately, it crushed her back and she could not feel or move anything below her chest. Doctors told her she would never walk again. While Rosemarie shared her story, the silence in the auditorium was palpable. As football players, we are well aware of the risks involved and know that a career ending injury is always one play away. This woman was on a bike ride in the woods. A bike ride she had taken numerous times. No risk of getting hit by an unaware driver. No busy streets full of distractions. I think the reality of a life-changing injury was on the minds of a lot of the guys in that room.
As Rosemarie wrapped up her story and message, someone brought out two canes and handed them to her. She set her feet on the floor in front of her wheelchair and put the canes on either side of her feet. If all eyes in the auditorium weren't on her before, they were now. She steadied herself and slowly stood up out of her wheelchair. It was awesome seeing her standing there, defying the odds and overcoming many obstacles. She ended by handing out pieces of construction paper and asking everyone on the team to write a motivational message to the patients at Dodd Hall, OSU's spinal cord injury unit. The messages would be hung in the hallways and therapy rooms to let all the patients know that the Ohio State Buckeyes were cheering for them.
I remember getting that blue piece of construction paper and staring at it for a while, trying to figure out what I could possibly say to motivate someone who might spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair. I tried to put myself in their situation and asked myself what I would want to hear. Honestly, nothing sounded good enough. After a while, I wrote something down and handed it in. Rosemarie's story stuck with me after that, but I honestly don't think I thought of that blue piece of construction paper again. Camp ended, the season started, and despite an early season loss to Texas, we ended up winning the Big Ten and getting a big victory over Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.
Routine went on as normal with off-season workouts and conditioning. As the winter came to an end and spring ball was around the corner, we had a team meeting at
The Horshoe to discuss our strategy for perfection in the upcoming season. The coaches laid out their plan of attack and upperclassman briefly said some words to the team and assumed their roles of leadership. At the end of this meeting, my position coach said he wanted to talk to me. He told me the coaches talked about it and decided they wanted me to focus on being a receiver instead of punting. It was probably halfway through the season my freshman year that I started taking scout team reps at receiver on a regular basis. Although I was recruited and walked on as a punter, my passion and main position in high school was receiver. I loved the position. There is just something about making an incredible catch when the defender is in your face and the ball isn't thrown perfectly. Plus, it was nice to give me something else to do at practice. As you can imagine, you can only punt a football so many times before your leg is worn out and there isn't much else to do while the rest of the team is practicing. My initial reaction was disappointment because the previous season I had been in a position battle for second string punter. Second string gets to travel to away games and stay at the Blackwell Hotel for home games. I felt I had the ability to one day start, but I admit I had not shown enough consistency to contend for the top spot. Despite my initial disappointment, I decided to embrace the challenge and do whatever it took to help the team. Like I said, playing receiver was my true passion.
Even though I had done scout team receiver the previous two seasons, I never really had to learn the offense. Our job was to mimic our upcoming opponent and give the first and second team defense the best look at what they would be facing with our upcoming opponent. I immediately dove into the playbook and started connecting the dots with some of the other things I had learned in the last two years. Halfway through spring training and practices, I felt pretty comfortable with being thrown in to run the offense and read the defense.
On Good Friday, April 14, 2006, we had an intrasquad scrimmage in the stadium. The team is divided in half and we play each other full speed. Towards the end of the scrimmage, I ran a dig route over the middle of the field and hit the ground awkwardly as I was tackled, instantly paralyzing me from the neck down. I remember laying there and on my side, only able to see my team's sideline. I remember hoping for the first couple seconds that it was just a stinger or something temporary and that I would get up and walk it off. I think it took me all of four seconds before I realized it was more serious. It took another 30 seconds before the training staff was by my side, even though it felt like an eternity had passed.
Can you move your legs? Can you feel this? Can you move your fingers? Can you feel when I do this? It didn't take me long to respond to their questions, because all that came out of my mouth was, "no." I think they all knew the seriousness of the situation after a couple seconds of assessing me, but they had to follow procedure. Finally, they brought out a backboard and rolled me onto my back. Aside from sheer panic, I remember thinking how strange it was to be looking up at the sky, yet my body "felt" like I was still on my side. The questions from the training staff had stopped, but the questions going through my mind were endless. Would I ever walk again? Would I ever play football again? Would I ever be the same again?
I was loaded into an ambulance and rushed off to OSU Medical Center. I remember telling them to drive slowly because I didn't want any of the bumps in the road to damage my neck any more than it already was. I knew enough about spinal cord injuries to know that I needed to hold still and try to prevent any further injury. At the hospital, I was quickly evaluated and rushed into emergency surgery to stabilize my neck in order to take any pressure off my spinal cord. When I woke up, I was dazed, but aware. I had a breathing tube down my throat so I couldn't talk. I couldn't move or feel anything below my neck, so gesturing to the nurses to take it out wasn't an option. All I could do was try to talk with my eyes. It turns out, they had to leave the breathing tube in because they went in through the front of my neck to stabilize it with a piece of cadaver bone. To make the surgery possible, they had to move my trachea to the side, thus increasing the chances of me not being able to breathe on my own afterwards.
Eventually, the breathing tube came out and I was able to ask what the prognosis was. It wasn't good. A broken C4 vertebra had damaged my spinal cord and was preventing any signal to get from my brain to my body. It was like somebody had bound my body so tightly I couldn't even wiggle my toes. This was a claustrophobic's nightmare. Despite this, I knew from the outset no one would let me stay down. I found out I would be having a second surgery as soon as the doctors felt I was stable enough to handle it. I was already miserable, what could one more surgery do? Two days later, the doctors fused my C3-C5 vertebrae with titanium rods and screws to stabilize my broken neck.
The ICU was the worst week of my life. My nervous system was going haywire. Lightning bolts of pain were shooting throughout my body. I was hypersensitive to any sound above a whisper. Having a conversation at a normal volume was out of the question, unless I wanted to be in excruciating pain. Even if I closed my eyes and someone moved from one spot in the room to another, I would get a jolt of pain when I would open my eyes again to realize they weren't standing where they were when I closed them. I was in so much pain I even turned away Lou Holtz, who had heard about my injury and came by to see how I was doing. To make matters worse, the OSU medical center was undergoing a massive renovation and a lot of loud banging was going on right outside my window. It's not like someone could talk to the foreman and ask them to postpone construction for a week until I was gone. That was the lowest of lows. I wanted to die. I even prayed for it. I was ready.
The reprieve never came, but I eventually made it through the day. Shortly after this, one of my new nurses who floated from building to building introduced herself and said she would be with me for the next day or so. After reviewing my charts and seeing my name, she put two and two together and remembered seeing all the football team's letters of motivation at Dodd Hall during one of her recent shifts there. She immediately remembered seeing mine hung amongst the others and knew what she had to do. The next day, she returned with my letter. I remember it being held over my face so I could read what I had written a little less than a year ago. My words hit me like a ton of bricks. I immediately understood how profound this was. This same blue piece of paper I stared at, trying to think of what to say to someone after they suffered a spinal cord injury, was staring right back at me. It was like I was telling myself, "don't you dare give someone else advice that you would not take yourself." In my mind, it was no less than a message from God.
I understand everyone's walk with God is different than the next person's. We all face our own trials and tribulations. Despite this diversity, we all have the same questions: Is there a God? What happens after we die? Is there meaning to all of this chaos? Another person can be faced with the exact same scenario as mine and still come up with completely different answers to those questions. None of us completely understand, but the questions still need answered. To this, I say: Don't dismiss something because you don't understand it. This disposition can be applied in multiple areas of life. There are many other things that have happened in my life, which I believe to be signs from God. Through prayer and reflection, God has helped me understand, at least in part, why this has happened to me. I don't think I will ever fully know why. At least not until I'm in heaven. But, I guess that's why they call it faith.
