Bruce “BJ” Miller Jr., a 19-year-old Princeton (N.J.) University sophomore, was horsing around with friends near a train track in 1990 when they spotted a parked commuter train. They decided to climb over the train, and Mr. Miller was first up the ladder.
Courtesy BJ Miller
Friends visit BJ Miller in the hospital shortly after he was electrocuted.
An explosion ripped through the air, and Mr. Miller was thrown on top of the train, his body smoking. His petrified friends called for an ambulance.
Clinging to life, Mr. Miller was airlifted to the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J..
Physicians saved Mr. Miller’s life, but they had to amputate both of his legs below the knees and his left arm below the elbow.
“With electricity, you burn from the inside out,” said Mr. Miller, now 50. “The voltage enters your body – in my case, the wrist – and runs around internally until it finds a way out. That is often the lower extremities as the ground tends to ground the current, but not always. In my case, the current tried to come through my chest – which is also burned and required skin grafting – but not enough to spare my legs. I think I had a half-dozen or so surgeries over the first month or 2 at the hospital.”
Waking up to a new body
Mr. Miller doesn’t remember much about the accident, but he recalls waking up a few days later in the ICU and feeling the need to use the bathroom. Disoriented, Mr. Miller pulled off his ventilator, climbed out of bed, and tried to walk forward, unaware of his injuries. His feet and legs had not yet been amputated. When the catheter line ran out of slack, he collapsed.
“Eventually, a nurse came rushing in, responding to the ventilator alarm bells going off,” Mr. Miller said. “My dad wasn’t far behind. It became clear to me then that this was not a dream and [I realized] what had happened and why I was in the hospital.”
For months, Mr. Miller lived in the burn unit, undergoing countless skin grafts and surgeries. Because viable and nonviable tissue take time to be revealed after burns, surgeons take the minimum amount of tissue during each operation to give damaged tissue a chance to heal, he explained. In Mr. Miller’s case, his feet were amputated first, and later, his legs.
“In those early days from the hospital bed, my mind turned to issues related to identity,” he said. “What do I do with myself?
Mr. Miller eventually moved to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now called The Shirley Ryan AbilityLab), where he started the grueling process of rebuilding his strength and learning to walk on prosthetic legs.
“Any one day was filled with a mix of optimism and good fight and 5 minutes later, exasperation, frustration, tons of pain, and insecurity about my body,” he said. “My family and friends held the gate for me in a way, but a lot of the work was up to me. I had to believe that I deserved this love, that I wanted to be alive, and that there was still something here for me.”
Courtesy BJ Miller
BJ Miller lifts weights in the gym during physical therapy.
Mr. Miller didn’t have to look far for inspiration. His mom had lived with polio for most of her life and acquired post-polio syndrome as she grew older, he said. When he was a child, his mom walked with crutches, and she became wheelchair-dependent by the time he was a teenager.
After the first surgery to amputate his feet, Mr. Miller and his mom shared a deep discussion about his joining the ranks of “the disabled,” and how their connection was now even stronger.
“In this way, the injuries unlocked even more experiences to share between us, and more love to feel, and therefore some early sense of gain to complement all the losses happening,” he said. “She had taught me so much about living with disability and had given me all the tools I needed to refashion my sense of self.”