So here is what happened…I GOT SHOT

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UPDATE – As of December 6, 2021, Sedarius Dennis plead guilty and was sentenced to 20 years, 12 of which will be in Jackson State Prison for the shooting of myself, my wife and another friend. It was a really hard morning but the sound of handcuffs going on has never sounded better.

Yes…you read that correctly. I got shot and that is why I haven’t been able to ride and why I will not be able to ride a conventional mountain bike anymore.

I don’t want to give out too many details about what happened because there are other people involved and the court case against the man who shot us is still pending. A year and half later, we still do not have justice and he isn’t even disputing the facts or wanting a trial. Let’s just say you don’t want have to deal with the downtown Atlanta judicial system as a victim at all.

It happened on December 9th of 2018 and all we were trying to do was help someone we know not lose his job or ruin his marriage at a Christmas party at the Omni in downtown Atlanta. He was serving himself too much to drink…so much that his wife packed up and left. He went to his room willingly and we were even talking about career advice and other positive subjects before he decided to shoot 7 shots through the closed door of his own hotel room hitting myself, a friend of both of ours and missing my wife. We have since come to find out that he has a violent past that we did not know about and has been covered for since no charges have ever been filed. If we would have known that ahead of time…we wouldn’t have been anywhere near that room that night.

The first shot that came through the door hit me in the hip severing my femoral artery and femoral vein. I put my hand on my hip and it came up red. Everything felt warm and we knew what happened instantly. The second shot hit the other friend of ours. I don’t want to go into the details of his injuries for privacy reasons but he is recovering and he got really lucky considering where the bullet entered.

I only made it about half way down the hallway as I was bleeding out too quickly. My wife saved my life by tying her sweater around my leg and doing chest compression’s until the police and EMT’s could get there. I got a total of 11 units of blood transfusion that night and the only way I am still here today is because my wife did what she did. The EMT’s cut me open in the ambulance to try to stop the bleeding and clamped everything off. The last thing I remember was my wife telling me she loved me before going into a several hour surgery.

Several hours into the surgery, the police called homicide off the scene. I was going to make it by the slimmest margin possible. My wife and the doctors at Grady saved my life. They said any more than 60 seconds more and they wouldn’t have been able to bring me back at all.

So what does this mean for my body?

My body is forever changed as you might imagine. During my stay at the hospital, the doctors would come in every hour to check the pulse in my left foot. A that time we were still not sure if I was going to get enough blood flow in my leg to keep it. Luckily I kept my leg but there was a lot of damage that was just not going to repair. Through my over year long physical therapy…we found some more issues waiting in the wind as we started to try to get back to normal.

Blood Flow Issues

The femoral artery was repaired but the femoral vein ended up clotting off. Over time your body will start to find and create new pathways to try to overcome this but it will never fully get back to 100% normal. To add to that…because I lost so much blood the valves that pump your blood back up to your heart are damaged. If I don’t wear a compression sock every day my foot swells from the pooling blood. My wife has actually made this a personal goal of hers to get the craziest compression socks she can find. She thinks it is hilarious when I am wearing the ones that are blue and pink with heartbeats on them.

Your blood should flow at a rate of 500ms or better through your hip and thigh. My 5 main ones are flowing at over 4,000ms. There are studies that show that strengthening your calf muscles can help up to 20 percent or so…so I am starting there at least. This creates an issue where I not only get the swelling but my leg also runs out of energy very quickly. It simply isn’t getting enough fuel under load to match my right leg.

Hamstring Muscles

So we figured out why my leg would get tired so easily but then we started running into a different issue. Whenever I would try to do a hamstring curl, my hamstring would completely cramp. So then it was off to get an MRI done to see what was going on at my hip that was causing the issue. Lucky for me…I had to have a special medical protocol MRI because they were worried about bullet fragments so I got to stay in the machine for an hour instead of the usual 20 minutes.

As it turns out, the bullet exited at my hip severing two of the three hamstring muscles at the attachment point and it also fractured my hip bone. My hamstring was cramping because only one of the muscles is actually attached and the site of attachment is damaged.

Where do I go from here?

I have some of the best surgeons in Atlanta looking over the entire process. From the vascular team at Grady (top trauma center) to the team that works on the Hawks and Falcons, everyone has been incredible and willing to try anything to get me back to normal. Surgery at this point isn’t an option. With the type of injury it is…they are worried about going in and causing more damage than doing good. We ended up doing a PRP injection a couple of months ago that seems to have helped at least some with the pain at the hamstring site. As for the rest of it…it looks like I am just going to have to deal with it as best as I can with the looming possibility of a hip replacement in the future.

All things considered, we pushed really hard to get to this point and I am extremely thankful to the team at Grady, my doctors/surgeons at Emory and my family and friends that have been…and continue to be…so supportive during this entire process. While it is easy to get frustrated with the situation, I am alive for my wife and son and the result could have been much worse.

What did this mean for mountain biking?

One of the things that was really pissing me off is that I could not ride with my son. Right before all of this happened he was really starting to get into riding and I was insanely excited about that. I was going to be able to share my passion for mountain biking with my son…every mountain biking dad’s dream.

The damage that the gun shot wound caused was keeping me off of a regular mountain bike. That was obvious. If I can barely jog up a hill…there was zero chance I was going to risk anything much harder than that. My wife started pushing the idea that an e-bike might make riding possible again. Honestly…I put off the idea for quite sometime. It was easier for me to not know if it was going to work than have to know for certain that it wasn’t. I just wasn’t ready for that door to be full closed yet. As you guys know from the article I wrote last week…it did and I’m able to ride again with the aide of an e-bike.

There will be some things I can’t do. My favorite track in Pisgah Forest, NC is going to be off limits. Pilot Rock has a hard hike-a-bike at the top that I would not be able to get up and over. I will also have to be careful of falling so going to the limit is out.

Yes there will be limitations but at the end of the day I am riding again. The evolution of mountain bike technology has allowed us to do a lot of things over time. We can now riding in more places on more aggressive terrain. Thanks to the evolution of the e-bike, people like me can ride again.