Everybody has a Story...

A Glove of a Difference

Mike Adams; A Profile

Mike leaned back in the chair, stretched his six-foot-one frame, ran his hand through his strawberry red hair and put his baseball cap back on before he explained why he wore a glove on his right hand.

* * *

At 13 years old Mike Adams, a native of Crane, Ore., and the youngest of seven, had his happy, funny family life interrupted when he got his arm cut off in the wheel align of an irrigation system on a neighbor’s farm.

The jacket he’d been wearing got caught in the gears and 30 seconds later his arm had been pinched off just above the elbow. Two miles and two crashed four-wheelers later, Mike and his severed arm were at a neighbor’s house where he could get help.

After 13 surgeries, a mountain of medical bills and years of physical therapy, he had a metal plate and a screw in his wrist as well as 80 percent of his movement back.

In the almost quarter century that Mike has been alive he hasn’t been treated any differently by the people he comes in contact with. Shortly after it happened, Mike went to New York to be interviewed by Maury Povich, a reality talk show host, about his arm.

“My arm was reattached. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it’s better than nothing,” he said shrugging his shoulders. “I wear a glove now to help me grip and hold things.”

Mike doesn’t see this as a limitation, however. Sure it was a scary experience and at times frustrating, his athletic and career plans drastically changed, but he is a lot more careful around machines now than he used to be. He had to relearn how to write and play sports using his left hand and his plans of being a pilot in the military disappeared. Despite these challenges Mike has remained cheerfully optimistic and happy.

A year or so after it happened, a friend and he went to Florida on Spring Break to visit Mike’s sister. While there they swam with the dolphins and watched as they “smacked fish out of the water.”

In high school, one of the events Mike ran was the open 400 in track and he played basketball and football. It was during this “regulated fight” that he broke his arm when he got hit on top of the screw that was holding his wrist together.

After high school, Mike served for two years in the Northern Brazil mission and learned that, “A highly educated person is hard to convince but once they are convinced they’ll maintain their belief, and that a poorly educated person is easily swayed by the change of opinion or doctrine.”

“Brazilians are pretty straight forward. They’ll ask you about anything and you tell them,” he said, “the kids didn’t, they were superstitious, but the adults did.”

After his mission, he sold alarm systems for Apex in Tennessee, Texas and Utah and saw both the worst and the best of the country and people in the process. Despite this he is firmly of the opinion that “The United States freakin’ rocks” and that everyone would benefit from spending some time abroad and finding out for themselves that “the US is one of the best countries in the world, if not the best.”

In college Mike got involved in soccer, Frisbee, snowboarding and dirt biking. “Being able to do stuff whenever I want and proximity to people is what I’ll miss most when I leave,” he said.

“Probably the most frustrating thing is not being able to use both hands when I wanted to,” he said with a wistful look in his eye. “If I could change one thing I wouldn’t have gotten in the accident.”

But it is because he did get in the accident that his outlook on life changed to being more sympathetic with people and their problems and disabilities.

“At 13 I couldn’t do stuff I normally could anymore. I had to wait and relearn,” he said, “It affected my psychological state more than it affected what I could actually do – if someone thinks you can do something it gives you a lot of faith in yourself, if they don’t think you can you have to fight through a lot more barriers.”