Even without legs, Nick keeps up a frantic pace
By Bill Wundram
WHEN I suggested to Nick Ackerman that we might go walking together on the track of the new Bettendorf Family Y, he sheepishly grinned: “Maybe I’ll make the rounds as fast as you.” That wasn’t saying much, considering my slow pace, but then again Ackerman is an amazing young man.
Nick Ackerman has no legs. They were amputated below the knees when he was 18 months old to halt the spread of bacterial meningitis through his young body.
So, as he strolls around on prosthetic limbs, he shrugs, “I’ve never known what it was like to have real legs.”
He has had a lot of attention and is humbly modest about that. He became a champion wrestler, winning the 2001 NCAA championship in his weight class. The national media has scrambled after him. He was on the “Today” show and was a big feature in the USA Today newspaper. Radio icon Paul Harvey did a piece on him. Once, Dan Gable, the most noted name in collegiate wrestling, asked for his autograph. There is even an official Nick Ackerman Day, proclaimed by the Iowa legislature.
After all this, Nick is in Davenport. He is a handsome 25-year-old with the whiskery stubble face that is so popular with young guys today. He plays football and baseball. He dates, he dances, and gets along with a sunny positivity.
“When I’m out with a girl, and she is having a bad day, I tell her to quit looking on the bad side. Life is wonderful.”
Nick, whose home is Colfax, Iowa, is in Davenport as a prosthetist with American Prosthetics and Orthotics. It’s a perfect fit, because he is so upbeat about living a normal life without limbs. While we visit, a woman who has just had a leg amputation is waiting for his expertise in fitting a limb and handling life. It is a consciousness in which he is a specialist.
“I don’t tell a patient that I know what they’re going through. I tell them it’s going to be fine and that they’re going to be OK.” he says.
He graduated from Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, with a major in environmental biology. He is a hiker and an outdoorsman, big-time. His intention was to go into forestry service and he had a job waiting for him with the State of Iowa as a park ranger.
Then, one day he had a call from a depressed 19-year-old Texan who had lost a leg in an auto accident. Ackerman told him he had two options: go on or quit. The amputee wanted to know if he could wear normal underwear, ski, drive.
“He thought his world was upside down. We talked for two hours, and after that conversation it was clear what I was going to do. I called Gary Cheney, who had fitted me with prosthetic legs all my life. He was with American, and I told him, ‘Hire me.’ He did. I felt that ” without legs ” I had something to offer those without limbs.”
Since joining American Prosthetics, Ackerman has gone through a lot of schooling, and there is more to come.
I find it difficult to believe that he has no legs. I josh that he is kidding me. “See,” he says, hiking a trouser leg to show artificial limbs. “I’ve had it all, everything that life has to give.” In wrestling, he used to get a rush when he had success. Now, he gets that same elation when helping someone walk.
He says, “Maybe I was chosen not to have legs.”
Then he jokes, “The only thing I can’t do is wiggle my toes.”
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or [email protected]
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