7 gunshots, waist-down paralysis, and he's still moving
Under our "Inspiring People" column, we highlight the incredible journey of one person who has overcome tremendous odds to achieve personal success. This column celebrates the triumph of the human spirit and we hope it will inspire you to reach for your dreams, too. This month, we bring you a man who was shot seven times, ended up paralysed but found the will to help others.
Try to imagine this: you wake up one morning, and the first thing you notice is your inability to speak, because there is a large tube that fills your mouth. You glance down. You see at least six others plugged into various parts of your body, including two metal ones stuck into your ribs.
You then discover that you are lying in an isolated hospital bed. A stranger dressed in scrubs and a surgical mask walks in with an apologetic expression on his face, approaches your bed and says, "Sorry for the bad news, but you’re never going to walk again."
And that's when you realise you have lost all feeling in your legs – you are paralysed from the waist down. And a rush of memories from the night before floods back into your mind — flashing lights, wailing of sirens, and above all, the shock of getting shot at point-blank not one or two times, but seven.
Singaporean Foo Fung Liang, then working as a restaurant consultant in Louisiana about eight and a half years ago, had been shot by an armed robber.
"I'm glad he (the neurosurgeon) said it on day one rather than drag on and give me false hope," the 43-year-old product designer told Yahoo! Singapore in a nearly three-hour interview. "I don't think I cried, but I was sad, I didn't know what to do. I was totally lost."
One can say with certainty that the Foo you would meet today is a man with renewed purpose and vision. He founded an organisation that helps disabled people look and move forward, and is himself working toward Paralympic participation in a special sport.
In search of independence
His inspiring story started when he was just 21 years old. In 1992, he went to the U.S. for various reasons — he was aching for independence, the ability to drive a car for cheap and to play tennis. But, primarily, he went to the U.S. to gain a graphic design degree after completing a diploma course at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.
While there, he majored in product design and artistry, and made it to his university's first-choice tennis competition team by his second year there.
Back then, Foo said, he was always an athlete. He played football in primary and secondary school before switching to tennis, and while he initially "sucked" at it, he discovered a great love for the sport and developed it further during his time in America. Today, though, he said the thing he misses doing most is standing up — a 180-degree perspective switch if there ever was any.
"I miss simply doing things with my legs, rather than with my arms all the time,” he shared.
Recounting the events that occurred that fateful night when he lost mobility in his lower limbs, Foo said they unfolded in the exact manner he imagined an action movie sequence to be.
It happened some time after his college graduation, when he had stayed on doing consulting work at restaurants in Louisiana where he was based. With two others, Foo was closing the restaurant he was at for the night when a man wearing a ski mask charged in, demanding money.
Foo told him to calm down and was leading him to the restaurant's cash register when the robber opened fire — not once or twice, but nine times, with seven of the pistol's bullets hitting the Singaporean.
"When I turned around, the guy was still shooting and one of the rounds hit my chest," said Foo. "My surgeons were amazed and thought I was not supposed to be alive and talking to them because the trajectory of the round was actually going through the heart, but it just stopped about two inches away. That could have killed me that night, but it didn't."
Because the shooting took place in a small town called Ferriday in Louisiana, which had not seen any kind of homicide in more than a decade, the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics, a specialised U.S. army corp) team was deployed to search for the perpetrator. Until today, no suspect has been arrested, though, despite Foo previously picking one out from a police line-up.
Blood gushing out of his left arm, Foo said he didn’t feel much pain immediately after being shot except in his wrist, which, alongside his watch, was shattered. This left his hand in an odd half-clenched position.
After a horrifying ordeal involving a paramedic’s attempts to dig a bullet out of his body without using anaesthesia, Foo was sent on a one-and-a-half hour ride to a hospital in the next town. He lost consciousness, and the next thing he knew he was in the intensive care unit.
"Honestly, I didn't want to live. I saw that my legs had shrunk after a couple of weeks and I couldn't feel anything.
"You don't feel anything, even if you had constipation, and suddenly words like incontinence, catheter start to mean something to you… you can’t control your bowels anymore and that's very demoralising," he continued candidly. "I couldn't maintain my balance, I couldn't even sit up for awhile.”
Foo shared that the first five weeks he spent in hospital were the hardest because he could not speak or move, and the only thing he looked forward to were morphine shots that he received every two hours, which put him in a two-hour interval sleep cycle.
On the road to recovery
Foo was then put on physical rehabilitation, and it was there that he was first encouraged to pick up a disabled sport.
"I thought that was all nonsense because I couldn't even wipe my own bum; what sports?" he said. "But I didn't realise how important it was until I came back to Singapore."
Despite his cynicism, the generosity and kindness that the people of Ferriday and St Frances Cabrini Hospital in Alexandria played a large part in helping Foo overcome his grief and anger at his situation. The town of Ferriday dipped into its emergency Mayor's fund to contribute US$20,000 to Foo's hospital expenses, while the remaining, where not covered by his insurance, was waived by the hospital — this amounted to about US$150,000, excluding a power wheelchair that Foo returned to Singapore sitting in. After three months, the nurses and other medical staff there became his family.
"(It showed me that) there's still a lot of kindness around the world," he said. "I felt like I could move on."
Foo returned home to Singapore after more than a decade in America.
Living in pain
Ever since returning in 2005, though, where he spent another half year in Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) undergoing further surgery, Foo says he has been in constant pain.
"I've been living in pain for eight years; I have nerve pain all the time," he said. "I wake up in the morning and my body aches, and if I sit too long my back hurts."
Because he still has three .22 calibre rounds lodged in his spine and one more near his heart — all of which are too risky to remove — he feels additional pain from them shifting around in cooler weather, and has to go for a scan every year to track their movement.
He also discovered in the years that followed a source of great inconvenience for victims of spinal cord injuries — pressure sores.
Because he is wheelchair-bound, Foo said his skin is particularly vulnerable to tearing and developing ulcers, and in turn infections, which can become extremely severe and possibly, lethal.
It was because of Foo's failure to notice sores that developed on his own that resulted in two lengthy and painful hospital stays — one in 2007 and the other in 2011, where parts of his skin had to be grafted onto the areas where sores developed.
Emotional damage
These were just the physical handicaps, though — Foo also shared how he spent the past few years battling depression, bouts of anger and frustration at not being able to do the things he used to.
Gradually though, he reinvented himself. He learned to like himself and to take care of his appearance.
These things, he said, can be simple — shaving, for instance; minor wardrobe improvements; even buying the best-looking wheelchair one can afford — but ultimately, Foo thinks it is important to go out frequently and move on, one step at a time.
Discovering handcycling
But it was his discovery of the handcycle that really turned the tide.
A handcycle is a unique bicycle that employs the use of arm strength to propel its rider forward. It has three wheels that are about the same size as a regular bicycle, and a handcyclist sits with his legs stretched out in front of him, and steers the handcycle by controlling its front wheel.
"I first saw a handcycle about five or six years ago," he said, recounting his first encounter with it.
"I had just gotten out of hospital for the second time and I was in rehab at the time, and the first time I saw it, touched it, sat on it and biked around the track, I knew this was what I wanted to do.”
Foo said sports has helped him stop taking as much medication as he used to — painkillers and anti-depressants, for instance — and sometimes, he even goes without his regular sets of medication for his nerve aches because, he says, the aerobic activity helps eliminate the pain.
"I found that handcycling or paracycling is probably the most liberating sport, because when I'm on my bike, I don't feel disabled anymore and I'm able to propel myself a lot quicker than I can in my wheelchair," he said.
"I think that's the message I'm trying to advocate to a lot of newly-injured people. They could be suffering from spinal cord injuries or a stroke or whatever, but it's important that they stay healthy and fit," he added. "They don't have to be competitively fit, just do well enough."
Helping others
Handcycling remains a relatively lesser-known sport in Singapore, and when Foo started, it was just he and a friend. Alongside several other friends, Foo founded and registered the Handcycling Association of Singapore (HAS) as a society in 2009. Today, he is its president, with a respectable working management committee, and a team of six senior and 19 junior handcyclists.
"We founded this association with the mission of getting people to do the sport, overcome big barriers and create more awareness of the importance of doing disabled sports,” Foo shared.
With the association, Foo has gone to secondary schools to give motivational talks to students, and also taken handcycling to hospital rehabilitation clinics like the one at TTSH.
Beyond this, Foo also hopes to make handcycling a co-curricular activity for disabled children in public schools.
[INFOGRAPHIC: WHAT THE HANDCYCLING ASSOCIATION OF SINGAPORE HAS ACHIEVED THUS FAR]
Meanwhile, ever the competitive athlete, Foo juggles his time between work and twice or thrice-weekly handcycling training sessions. He also races in regional and international competitions.
"It's challenging, considering that the top 30 disabled athletes in the world are full-time athletes; most of them are pros while I train part-time," admitted Foo.
Still, Foo aims high. He wants to compete in the Paralympics and is working towards the next one in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
"It's like the grand slam of all events… and I hope to get there with my sponsors, my volunteers and my team," he said. "Just to be there is a dream come true."
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