Even without legs, Nick keeps up a frantic pace
By Bill Wundram <\/p>\n
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.”\u009d That wasn’t saying much, considering my slow pace, but then again Ackerman is an amazing young man.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, as he strolls around on prosthetic limbs, he shrugs, “I’ve never known what it was like to have real legs.”\u009d<\/p>\n
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”\u009d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”\u009d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”\u009d he says.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”\u009d<\/p>\n
Since joining American Prosthetics, Ackerman has gone through a lot of schooling, and there is more to come.<\/p>\n
I find it difficult to believe that he has no legs. I josh that he is kidding me. “See,”\u009d he says, hiking a trouser leg to show artificial limbs. “I’ve had it all, everything that life has to give.”\u009d In wrestling, he used to get a rush when he had success. Now, he gets that same elation when helping someone walk.<\/p>\n
He says, “Maybe I was chosen not to have legs.”\u009d<\/p>\n
Then he jokes, “The only thing I can’t do is wiggle my toes.”\u009d<\/p>\n
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even without legs, Nick keeps up a frantic paceBy 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.”\u009d That wasn’t saying much, considering my slow pace, but then again […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wrestling"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2B7Di-ff","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}