Hotes Foundation Proud to Announce Another Track Chair Delivery to Deserving Veteran
To boldly go where no wheelchair has gone before. The Hotes Foundation is proud to announce it delivers another Track Chair to a deserving veteran.
SPC Perry Young, USArmy, attached to Fort Stewart 3rd Infantry Division was injured while on foot patrol in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, when a suicide bomber blew up a car where his unit was patrolling, killing four of them. Perry, who was facing away from the blast, was hit by shrapnel and suffered a severe spinal cord injury.
“I never really lost consciousness. I knew everything,” Perry told the Rome News-Tribune in Georgia, near his hometown of Adairsville. “It was slow motion in my mind…. I was falling and I could remember myself trying to turn, trying to look at what was going on, but I couldn’t.”
When he hit the ground, Perry recalls being confused because he couldn’t move and imaged he was dismembered.
Since the accident, Perry has spent nearly a year in a Veterans’ Administration rehabilitation hospital in Tampa, Florida. He is able to manipulate objects with his hands but has no grip, and is slowly learning to move his legs and bend at the waist. Confined to a conventional or electric wheelchair, getting anywhere outside that’s not smooth and paved has been impossible, until now.
Thanks to his new Track Chair from the Hotes Foundation, Perry can now go places he couldn’t before (he mentioned the beach right away, getting off the boardwalk and onto the sand and right down to the water).
Even better, Perry and his wife, Samantha, have a new home in Adairsville, and with his Track Chair he won’t be stuck inside but can get out on the rural property with his 2-year-old daughter. He’ll be able to go hunting and fishing again too, activities he loves.
Until then, Perry is still on active duty in Tampa, awaiting his discharge. Like so many veterans, he isn’t thinking just about himself. “Once something happens to you like this, you see all the help you get,” he says. “You want to give it back. Whatever I can do to help, I want to do.”
SPC Perry Young, good luck, enjoy your new Track Chair, and we thank you for your service!
