Big Optimism: 'Everything is possible’

"If I had to do it over, I would keep my disability."

Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash

Today’s story is about a man named Philippe Croizon.

He was born in France in 1968, and by his own admission there was very little in the first 26 years of his life that would have led anyone to think he would one day be the kind of person other people in other countries would write about.

Raised mostly by his grandmother, he grew up in Oyré, a small town northeast of Châtellerault, which is itself maybe three hours southwest of Paris. He did rather poorly in school, and later said he left without really knowing how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

He wasn’t a bad kid, but he was mischievous, by his way of telling. Actually as he put it in his autobiography years later: he grew up “dans la bêtise,” or “in foolishness.”

“Dès qu’il y a une connerie à faire, je ne suis pas loin.” (”Whenever there’s foolishness to be done, I’m not far away.”)

So, he took night classes as an adult, and did his military service in the French army, and worked as a butcher and in a factory. He got married and had a child, and eventually got a steadier, better job, working as a metalworker or metallurgist.

His wife was pregnant with their second child in 1994, and they planned to move to a bigger house. As part of the packing, he climbed a ladder so he could fix the rooftop television antenna he’d installed.

Then, his whole life changed.

Philippe somehow came in contact with a high-voltage power line. What happened next was gruesome: The current grounded through him, and Philippe was literally fused to the ladder.

The utility company apparently assumed a branch had fallen across the high-voltage line, and turned the power back on three times. Philippe was engulfed in flames, while people watched in horror.

Finally, a neighbor put on rubber boots, grabbed a fire extinguisher, climbed the ladder himself and dragged Philippe off. When he woke up in the hospital, he found that doctors had been forced to amputate both of his arms and one of his legs.

“The doctors tried to save my left leg,” he later recalled. “Psychologically, I clung to that leg, a symbol of the little life I had left. But, we had to face the facts. My last limb could not be saved. Amputated below the knee. I sank into despair.”

Two things saved him, Philippe explained.

The first was an uncle by marriage who told Philippe that he had lost his father when he was about Philippe’s son’s age. It had been the defining experience of his life.

“Your children need you,” he said.

The second was a documentary he watched while still in the hospital about a woman swimmer who had just crossed the English Channel.

Philippe had never been much of a swimmer, but something about the idea spoke to him — heck, mesmerized him.

And sixteen years later, he in fact became the first quadruple amputee to swim the English Channel.

Obviously, there were intermediate steps. He tried skydiving first as a way to test his post-traumatic ability to handle extreme excitement.

And of course, he started swimming constantly. He experimented with prosthetic limbs for swimming, including legs that end in fins and cost €12,000, and ratcheted his preparation up to five hours a day for the two years leading up to his attempt, with the Maritime Gendarmerie.

He made it across the Channel on September 18, 2010, making it in just under 14 hours — which is an average time for a 100% able-bodied swimmer.

I mentioned his autobiography: He wrote it using speech-to-text software (long before it was anywhere near as good as it is now), and it’s called “J’ai décidé de vivre” (”I Decided to Live”).

“If I had to do it over, I would keep my disability,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “Everything is possible.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 13: “I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’” — Paul McCartney, from the Beatles Anthology, on writing “Yesterday,” released as a single in the U.S. on this day in 1965. He tested the melody on friends and bandmates for weeks, convinced he must have unconsciously copied it from somewhere, before accepting it was his own.

• Monday, September 14: “It was not, in my opinion, very honorable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company.” — Lord Chesterfield, on why he championed the “calendar reform bill” through Parliament — which took effect on this day in 1752, when Britain and its colonies skipped straight from September 2 to September 14.

• Tuesday, September 15: “What other reserves have we?” — Winston Churchill on this day in 1940, at the height of the Luftwaffe’s largest daylight raid on London. Air Vice Marshal Keith Park’s answer was: “There are none” — and the RAF held anyway, a turning point that led Hitler to postpone the invasion of Britain.

• Wednesday, September 16: “I merely combined a set of facts in a new way.” — Chester Carlson, the inventor behind the process Xerox built into the 914, the first successful plain-paper office copier, introduced on this day in 1959.

• Thursday, September 17: “I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.” — Harriet Tubman, recalling the moment she crossed into free territory on this day in 1849. She would return to the South roughly 13 times to lead about 70 more people to freedom.

• Friday, September 18: “The Oslo negotiations gave the world a treaty … remarkably free of loopholes and exceptions.” — Jody Williams, on the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines text adopted in Oslo on this day in 1997.

• Saturday, September 19: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.” — Scott Fahlman, in a Carnegie Mellon bulletin-board post at 11:44 a.m. on this day in 1982. It’s the first documented use of the emoticon, born out of a campus message board where jokes kept being mistaken for serious posts.