Don Lange was serving in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan in 2004 when he sustained a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to communicate or feed himself.
He was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for rehabilitation. He needed help completing simple everyday tasks he had forgotten how to do.
Brain injuries can result in a problems like memory loss, inattention, depression, distorted judgment and slow thinking. Lange suffered from them all. After a year at Walter Reed, doctors told Lange’s wife that he would never live independently again and she should consider hiring an in-home caregiver.
“That was too much for her, and she left,” Lange, now 53, recalled recently.
By the end of 2005, Lange had been moved to a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center. He had come a long way in his recovery, but he still couldn’t live independently. Lange then hit a plateau, and his doctors no longer saw improvement in his condition.
“It made it difficult to stay motivated,” he said. “That, coupled with the frustration of everything that had been so easy in the past becoming very difficult because it couldn’t be done the old way or had just been forgotten.”
That was when a volunteer from Team River Runner, a nonprofit organization that uses kayaking as an outlet for injured veterans, came to the VA looking for vets to sign up.
At first, Lange was skeptical.
“I heard about it and I said, ‘I can’t follow instructions and I can’t learn anything. I’m weak on my left side and I can’t keep my balance. You want to put me in water on a boat that comes to its natural state of rest when it turns upside down?’ ” Lange said.
But the volunteer was persistent, and Lange agreed to watch a TRR practice session.
“Nothing I saw changed my mind that it was a crazy thing to do, but it looked like a hell of a lot of fun,” Lange said.
After that, he was on board. Lange began going to lessons in the VA’s Olympic-size swimming pool. But because learning new things was nearly impossible for him, he had difficulties picking up the sport at first.
“What I learned in my first lesson was lost by the second week,” Lange said. “By the third session, I had retained some stuff from the second lesson. By the fourth or fifth, I was stunned that I was learning how to [kayak] and retaining it.”
Lange believes he was successful in learning to kayak because it’s a sensory activity that involves all of the brain’s modules for learning. He also said the sport allowed him to combat the inattention caused by his brain injury, as the fear of drowning forced him to focus.
Kayak therapy taught Lange how to learn again, which he said then enabled him to learn other tasks.
Today, Lange does not appear as if he has suffered a brain injury. He walks and speaks normally; he lives and travels on his own.
“Kayak therapy has made a huge impact on my recovery,” Lange said. “It’s only one piece of my recovery, but without it I’m not sure I would be independent today.”
