‘I came in dead last!’: Pa. man disproves critical prognosis to participate in summer races
What would you say if you woke up in a hospital bed, unsure of how you got there, with a doctor telling you that you would never walk again?
When northwest Pennsylvania resident Earl Corp found himself in a Pittsburgh hospital room after an on-the-job injury nearly took his life in 2010, he heard the doctor’s comment and didn’t have to think about what to say. In fact, before he knew it, he had already responded.
“Wanna bet?” he asked.
It’s a bet Corp would have won.
Not only is Corp walking again, he has already completed a 5K and a one-mile race this year and plans to complete in as many as he can enter over the rest of the summer.
“I plan to enter every race in the region that I can,” Corp, a Meadville, Pennsylvania native who currently lives in Atlantic, Pennsylvania. “I set the goal when I found out that I could walk again.”
His journey to those finish lines started nearly six years ago.
Corp, a longtime reporter in good health, was sent to an area high school to cover a story on veterans returning from Iraq.
Corp, who had spent 12 years as an infantryman himself, was in the school’s cafeteria when he leaned against one of the tables to rest. Unfortunately, it was a table that folded in the middle and as he placed his weight on it, that’s exactly what it did. Corp lost his balance and landed squarely on his tailbone. It didn’t hurt much at first, he said.
“I was more embarrassed than anything,” Corp said. “The next day is when it really took effect.”
That day, Corp headed to the emergency room with severe pain in his lower back. Doctors there discovered a ruptured disk in his spine and scheduled him to return a week later for outpatient surgery to repair it.
Before that week had passed, however, things took a turn for the worse. Anna Poole, Corp’s wife of 20 years, remembered her father insisting that the situation was more than just a back problem. “My dad told us something isn’t right. He said, ‘Earl’s talking to people that aren’t there,'” Poole said.
With the pain in his back compounded by incoherence and confusion, Corp returned to the emergency room. The last thing he remembers is entering the bathroom there and falling.
It became clear that he was dealing with more than simply a ruptured disk in his back. Doctors later explained that he had experienced a spinal abscess.
“By the time we got him to Pittsburgh,” Poole said, “another hour could have been fatal.”
The injury to his back had caused dormant bacteria from a recent infection to spread rapidly through his spinal cord all the way to his brain.
“I woke up three days later in a hospital room in Pittsburgh,” Corp said. “I didn’t know who I was or who my wife was and I couldn’t walk.”
Poole still recalls the time vividly. “That first week after he woke up, he couldn’t feel his feet. He couldn’t feel below his knees,” she said. “That first therapy session was really horrible when it hit him that he couldn’t feel his legs. I’ll never forget when he came back to the room — how upset he was.”
Poole’s first glimmer of hope came when she and Corp received what many would have considered the worst possible news. “The doctor told him he’d be in a wheelchair the rest of his life,” she said. “I saw my husband again when he said, ‘You wanna bet?’ I knew things were going to be all right. Those were fighting words to him.”
Corp ended up spending more than two months in the hospital after his initial injury was compounded by an allergic reaction to his medication.
“I lost about 75 or 80 pounds by the time I got out of the hospital,” he said. “I weighed five pounds more than when I got out of the Army. I was a lean, mean, fighting machine — except I couldn’t fight, couldn’t walk, couldn’t even stand up straight.”
Corp found his strength soon after in physical therapy in Greenville, Pennsylvania. Not only did the therapy sessions three times a week help him gradually regain the use of his legs and leave his wheelchair, Corp said, but for the 22 months he was unable to drive, those sessions provided his primary social activity as well.
Tammy Geibel, a physical therapist, has seen Corp for years now. “When he first started coming to therapy, Earl was in a wheelchair,” Geibel recalled, “and he could not sit up more than 10 minutes at time.”
She continued: “His recovery has been extremely amazing, and it just shows what a hard worker he has been. A lot of people would have given up. Earl has persevered and really worked amazingly hard to get where he is. Several doctors told him he wouldn’t walk, and he just wouldn’t take that as an answer.”
As Corp moved from wheelchair to walker and eventually to forearm crutches, his determination was not the only constant, according to those who know him. At every step along the way, he was also accompanied by pain that seemed like it would never go away.
“We had to stretch Earl quite a bit throughout his therapy,” Geibel said. “He was in excruciating pain throughout much of it.”
Corp’s doctors did not give up either. Late in 2014, four years after his initial injury, they recommended he have both of his hips replaced. The effect, according to Corp, has been nothing short of miraculous. Almost immediately, the pain he had been in for nearly five years disappeared and his recovery continued — almost literally — in leaps and bounds.
“Each week after I had my hips done, I felt stronger on Friday than I did on Monday,” Corp said. “I could feel it each week. I’m actually in better shape now than I was before this started.” Corp moved from crutches to a cane before eventually walking unassisted.
Years later, Corp is still fighting in his recovery, but that’s not to say it’s been easy. “There were times I didn’t think I was going to make it,” he said. “It was tough.”
Corp is doing so well physically that he is well on his way to fulfilling the promise he made to himself. His first 5K this summer was the Memorial Day Human Race 5K in Meadville.
“I came in dead last!” Corp said with a laugh. “It took me an hour and seven minutes, but it was kind of funny. At the end everyone was still there waiting for the awards, and they were all cheering and clapping for me like I won.”
“When I first started out and started falling back, I was getting really frustrated,” Corp continued. “Then, I stopped and thought a year ago I couldn’t have even done this.”
Crowley writes for the Meadville, Pennsylvania Tribune.