Chris Murray

cmurray@rgj.com

Exactly one year ago Monday, Christy Wise was capping one of the most idyllic days of her life.

She was in Destin, Fla., on a vacation from her job as a rescue pilot in the Air Force. That afternoon, she had gone scuba diving, wakeboarding and jet skiing. She loved being outdoors. Wise worked on her tan and her paddleboard handstands. As the sun set, she and about 30 friends commenced a crab boil.

Wise had just started dating a fellow Air Force rescue pilot, a man named Tim Wiser. Their romance was just a week old and he had accompanied her to Destin. As Wise sat back and thought about her life, the Reno native and Wooster High School graduate couldn’t have envisioned things being more perfect.

She was 28. She loved her job. She had a great family: supportive parents, a twin sister, Jessica, who was her best friend, and a brother, David, who had recently won an Olympic gold medal. Things were great.

At 9:30 p.m. that night, Christy and Tim decided to go paddleboarding in the nearby cove, something she had done 100 times before in that exact location. She lay on her board and gazed at the stars.

“Honestly, I was just really relaxed and just loving my life,” Wise said. “I felt really blessed. Great friends. Good job. I loved the Air Force. I had this awesome family. I couldn’t have pictured anything better.”

A few minutes later, Wise was clinging to her life.

A fishing boat, traveling around 20 mph, had just run Wise over, the propeller ripping through her right knee, tearing up her bone and severing muscles, tendons, nerves and a key artery. She was bleeding profusely, a pool of red surrounding her in the darkened water.

Unaided, Wise would have died within five minutes, her body bleeding out.

That’s when Tim sprang to action, his military rescue background and something the Wises call “The Miracle List” combining to save Christy’s life.

On the one-year anniversary of her accident, which occurred April 11, 2015, Wise's right leg is gone, but she's determined as ever to live a life of meaning.

Wise, now 29, has had plenty of tough times since the accident – “I’ve had a lot of ice cream and a lot of cookie dough in the last year,” she joked, her trademark humor unaltered – but Wise has not only survived but thrived.

She is homing in on becoming just the fifth military pilot, and first female, to return to flying following an above-knee amputation. She’s a Wounded Warrior medalist with the goal of being a Paralympian. She co-founded a nonprofit and last week traveled to Haiti to give life-altering prostheses to kids who otherwise would not have received them.

She’s an inspiration to thousands. Despite losing a limb, her future is bright. The name of her organization – the One Leg Up On Life Foundation – declares her optimism.

“There are no boundaries for her,” said David Zotter, Wise’s ski coach at Wooster. “None whatsoever. This was a setback, but there’s no doubt she’ll fight through it and do what she has to do to get to where she wants to go. There’s not one fiber in my body that says she can’t do whatever she sets her mind to.”

The first warning sign came in the form of three green lights and one red one.

Wise and Wiser, outfitted with headlamps, decided to paddleboard to the bridge in a cove, which typically had little boat traffic. After gazing at the stars, they had drifted toward the edge of the cove but were still protected. That’s when Wise saw the green and red lights of a boat 150 feet away.

Still wearing her headlamp, Wise hesitated for a moment to see if the boat would turn left or right. It did neither. Instead, it was barreling directly at her, picking up speed. Reacting as quickly as possible, Wise dove into the water to swim away. She remembers the sensation of her sweatshirt getting wet. The front of the boat hit her shoulder. Wise pushed further down, then she surfaced.

“Tim was about 20 feet away and looked really worried,” Wise said. “He said, ‘Are you OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I think I’m OK.’ I was so calm. It didn’t hurt at all. I remembered a weird sound, but I didn’t have any pain. Then I saw my bone sticking out of my leg. Tim saw all of the blood around me.”

David Wise, Reno's humble hero

Reno's Wise surprised even himself with world record

The propeller had torn through Wise’s right leg. Had she not pushed down after being struck by the front of the boat, the propeller would have ripped through her body, killing her.

Wiser, who flies helicopters in military rescue missions, swam to Wise to assess the damage. It was extensive.

“I could hear fear in his voice for a second when he said, ‘Stay with me,’” Wise said. “Then he just locked it up, pushed all of that aside and went into EMT mode. If Tim wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be here today.”

If not for “The Miracle List,” Wise would have died in that cove.

Just prior to climbing on his paddleboard, Wiser had put on a long-sleeve shirt, which he ended up using as a makeshift tourniquet. Using their headlamps, they signaled another nearby fishing boat, this one idle. They lifted Wise into the boat, used a fishing net for a second tourniquet, and motored back to the shore, which was a good distance away.

If a trained rescue agent like Wiser not been there, if he hadn't grabbed his long-sleeve shirt before departing, if another boat had not been nearby (the young couple on the boat almost didn’t go out that night), if they didn't have their headlights to signal the boat — Wise would have died.

Christy’s sister, Jessica, a doctor, estimated she would have bled out in 3-5 minutes. Instead, her life, but not her leg, was saved.

“It’s mind-boggling her life was saved,” Christy’s mom, Kathy, said. “She probably should have died in that lake.”

Because of low-lying clouds, a helicopter couldn’t be sent to Destin, but a volunteer fire station was just down the road. Wise was loaded into an emergency vehicle for a 45-minute drive to Pensacola’s trauma center, where her leg was amputated above the knee.

The person in the boat who hit Wise, a suspected drunk driver, was never found after a prolonged military investigation.

Wise didn’t care.

“I never cared about the investigation because no matter what my leg wasn’t growing back,” she said.

Wise’s leg was gone, but she was determined not to lose something else: her ability to fly. After surgery, Christy called her dad, Tom, who had learned about the accident from Jessica. Tom had prayed for the next three hours. He was awoken at 2 a.m. the next morning by Christy’s voice.

“I was in shock it was her who called me,” Tom Wise said. “She said, ‘Dad, I wanted to call you and tell you I’m OK.’ She said, ‘Dad, I’m going to get through this and I’m going to fly again.’ I was thinking, ‘This is crazy. She just lost her leg and that’s what she’s thinking about.’ That just shows you her mentality.”

Zotter, the former Wooster ski coach, has worked with hundreds of pupils over the years, none as competitive as the Wise kids. One of his favorite memories of Christy came during her senior year.

“During our dry-land training we do a lot of wall sits for core strength,” Zotter said. “Normally, we do it for a minute or 1½ minutes and take a minute break and go back at it. Somehow Christy and David got in a competition. It was five minutes and 45 seconds later and neither one of them would budge. We finally called it off because we had others things to do, but neither one of them would give an inch.”

That’s Christy is a nutshell. She and Jessica were four years older than David, but they did everything together.

“Epic foam sword battles on the trampoline,” as David put it, skydiving, cliff jumping – daredevils Christy and David would leap first and Jessica would wait until they came out clean before taking the plunge – playing with dolls, digging in the dirt to build bike jumps and, most of all, skiing, where all three kids excelled.

David won an Olympic gold medal in the ski halfpipe in the 2014 Sochi Games and last week set his first world record, but Christy was the family’s first state champion in skiing, winning the slalom and overall titles in 2005.

“She was a fantastic skier,” Zotter said. “Extremely competitive. Serious skills. Package all of that up with a lot of fun. She was always messing around and laughing.”

Skiing greased Christy’s path into a cockpit. Each member of the Wise family has a little different story on how and why Christy enlisted in the Air Force. She had nominations to the Navy, Army and Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. After visiting the mountainous campus, Wise was sold.

“I always wanted to ski in college,” Wise said. “That was my only goal. My junior year of high school, Jess and I had a reality check that we were pretty good at racing, but probably not good enough for Division-I schools. I looked at all of the schools that had ski teams, softball teams and an ROTC program or military academy. I always tell people that I went to the Air Force Academy just to be on the ski team.”

It only made sense the daredevil child would turn to flying when she got to the Air Force, where she also was captain of the ski and softball teams. Wise took prop plane pilot lessons as a high school junior, but the challenge of flying in the Air Force was the greatest of her life to that point.

A perfectionist, Wise struggled at times in the academy but powered through and never lost her smile.

“She has that smile that’s almost always there,” her father said. “It was kind of hard to find in the days right after the amputation. But she has that positive attitude and that smile. It got her in a lot of trouble, even in the military. When she was in survival school carrying a 40-pound pack on her back up a snowy mountain smiling at her leaders, they took offense to that and tried to beat her up a little more.”

Christy, now a captain in the Air Force who flies C-130s, served one tour of duty in Afghanistan and was scheduled to go on another tour last December before her accident. While sitting in the ambulance on that 45-minute drive to Pensacola with no feeling in her leg, Wise couldn’t help but think about work.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh, dang it, this is going to take me off the schedule for a while,’” she said with a laugh.

After her surgery, Wise was transferred to the Center for the Intrepid, a rehab facility in San Antonio, Texas, that treats military amputees and burn victims. There, she was given the following quote from a fellow amputee: “Don’t for one second long for what you were, but recklessly pursue what you can become.”

That is a daily battle for Wise, whose recovery has become an inspiration to people across the world. But she makes it clear she’s no superwoman. She keeps a smile in public for everybody, a symbol of strength for those who need it. But there are “super highs and super lows every day,” Wise said.

“I feel like a lot of people try and put me on a pedestal and say, ‘Oh, she’s amazing,’ and the same thing with my family,” Wise said. “What I try and tell people is, ‘I’m not amazing. Just for me, this is how I keep from being depressed.’ I just keep going through the bad times. I keep moving, keep surviving.”

Once a thrill-seeker, an adrenaline junky who pushed things to the edge, Wise couldn’t even climb the stairs without help following her accident. She had to learn how to live with one leg.

“When she first got fitted for her prosthetic, she told me, ‘Dad, I’d really like to have my leg back and be with my unit in Afghanistan; I’d really like to have my leg back and change this chapter,’” her father said.

In Christy’s down moments, she could count on her family, especially sister Jessica and boyfriend Tim.

Jessica, who was living in Las Vegas at the time of the accident, flew to Florida and was at the hospital the moment Christy got out of surgery. Jessica was finishing her rotations in Nevada, the final hurdle to becoming a doctor, but wanted to spend the first couple of post-accident weeks with her sister.

It got to the point Jessica was going to be failed if she didn’t return to Vegas, so she took a shot in the dark. She sought a transfer to the location where Christy would do her rehab; however, it was a military hospital and didn’t accept civilians. A transfer to San Antonio didn’t seem like a long shot. It seemed like an impossibility. But, it was worth an attempt, so Jessica sought out anybody who could help.

“I figured that there’s nobody else who could stay with Christy full time in our family,” Jessica said. “It’d be really convenient if I could do my rotations there, but there was no way because I didn't work in the military. I ended up running into the head colonel of the whole hospital and I didn’t know he was the head colonel at the time but I asked him, ‘Could you help us out?’ and he basically got it done for us.”

The Wise sisters got a house next to the hospital. Christy continued her rehab. She got her first prosthetic in seven weeks and was running within five months, both incredibly quick. But not quick enough for Christy, who was told by a surgeon she’d never fly again. That potential reality, combined with months of excruciating pain and countless sleepless nights caused by her pain medication, was tough to swallow.

“It was five months of little sleep and constant pain,” Jessica said. “Christy is a strong, energetic, happy person. She’s very independent. She doesn’t like help. I was there and I saw her at home. She’d cry a lot. Everybody else was telling her, ‘You’re doing so good,’ but I got to see how she was really doing.”

Jessica rallied Christy when she was down, made sure her doctors were giving her cutting-edge treatments and positive encouragement and was her sister’s rock when the low moments hit. They hit often, but Christy battled forward.

The military offers a number of cool trips – hunting, skiing, skydiving – for those recovering from major injuries. It’s mental and physical therapy. Many take as many of those trips as possible. Wise turned down most of them. She was fully focused on getting back into the cockpit.

Although discouraged when she was told she’d never fly again, Wise knew she could. When she was training to become a pilot, a friend, Brian, was training again after losing his leg. He is one of four to fly again in the military after an above-knee amputation. Wise could become the first woman to do it.

She’s passed the mandatory physical test, scoring a 94.5 out of 100, and has cleared the biggest hurdles before her. She’s been in the flight simulator with instructors throwing as many curveballs at her as possible. Now, she’s just waiting on the paperwork to be processed. Wise admits she’s not considering any alternative outside of flying again. Her drive to remain a pilot goes beyond her love of flying.

“Her main goal is to get back to normal life, to get back to living as if she doesn’t have a disability,” said David, who said he cried after he got a text notifying him of his sister’s accident. “For her, that means she’s flying again because that is her job, flying planes. Until she can get herself back to flying planes, she’s going to feel like she hasn’t gotten back to normal. Whether you say she can do it or not, she’s going to do it.”

Wise believes this experience has stripped her to the core of who she is while everybody watches.

“It’s almost like having a funeral while I’m still alive,” she said.

The outreach has been overwhelming. Friends from across the country have reached out. Her family has been more supportive than she could imagine. Wooster High has sent care packages to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, where she’s stationed.

The outreach has changed her. It's made her want to give back.

“Ever since the accident, I’ve been so blessed with the amount of support I’ve received,” Wise said. “Everybody I’ve ever known has reached out to me in this last year. It’s been crazy.”

With the advice of Tim and expertise of Jessica, who has been doing humanitarian missions for a decade, the trio started the One Leg Up On Life Foundation less than a month after Wise’s accident.

They were able to get a 501(c)3 set up in three weeks – add that to The Miracle List along with Jessica’s transfer to San Antonio – and did their first fundraiser, a paddleboarding event in August, at the site of Wise’s accident.

That event raised $10,000, and last Sunday the Wise sisters flew to Haiti to outfit three impoverished children with prostheses. Jessica first met the kids following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

“They haven’t had any updates on their prostheses,” Jessica said. “One of the kids that was an above-the-knee amputee hasn’t had any work done on his prosthetic leg for two years, and these are all growing kids. The arm amputees, their prostheses are so old and broken they’re not even using them, and the leg amputee is using his leg but it’s probably 4 or 5 inches too short. He’s a growing boy.”

The foundation also brought in a boy from the Dominican Republic who lost his leg in an accident a year ago. He had no means of getting a prosthetic leg and would have lived on crutches for the rest of his life.

“I’m most excited about and amazed by the foundation,” David said. “Jess has always been one to put others in front of herself and go out and do cool things like this. To have something we can all work on together as a family is amazing. It’s a unique foundation, and Christy has a unique reason for doing it.”

As if starting the foundation and nearing a return to flying isn’t enough, Wise also competed in last year’s Department of Defense Wounded Warrior Games in Quantico, Va. She earned 11 medals in all, including two silvers and a bronze, while competing just two months after her accident. In May, she’ll compete in the Invictus Games, an international Paralympic-style multi-sport event in Orlando. Wise will take part in the 100 meter, 200 meter, shot put and discus as well as swimming, rowing and cycling.

Wise has returned to skydiving and skiing. She keeps moving forward, one goal at a time. She tries not to look back. That keeps her from being depressed.

The Wise family is remarkable – an Olympian, a pilot, a doctor – and there’s a reason for that, but there’s “no magic potion our parents fed us,” David said.

Instead, the secret is this: They’ve always encouraged each other, they’ve always supported each other, they’ve always had faith and stayed strong in their relationship with God and they’ve never accepted the word “no.”

Never has that been more apparent than during Christy’s journey since her accident a year ago.

“She’s always been strong,” David said. “She’s always been tenacious. Every person who has met her along the way throughout this experience has sort of been amazed by how truly motivated she is, how good her attitude is. I know I would not have reacted as well and been so quick to jump back into all of these things if this happened to me. That’s been the most impressive thing for me. If it can be done, it’s going to be done by her. She will not take ‘no’ for an answer in anything. That’s just Christy.”

Columnist Chris Murray provides insight on Northern Nevada sports. Contact him at cmurray@rgj.com or follow him on Twitter @MurrayRGJ.