12 years ago I shattered both my feet after falling 10 metres while making a photograph in Italy. I was lucky to be alive when I hit the concrete below. I was evacuated back to Canada where, after 40 days in hospital and surgeries to fix the damage, I was sent home to mend and eventually learn to walk again. A few months later I was back to traveling, photographing in rice paddies in Laos and Cambodia, though my walking cane kept getting sucked into the mud, and I fell over a lot. I went to Antarctica that winter, waddling around with all the grace of the penguins around me. I fell over then too, but at least I was in good company and the landings were soft.

 

Over the years my mobility became worse, not better. I'd always known the damage to my right foot was bad. I was told that the night I had my accident. "You have broken both feet very badly," the ER doctor told me. "You'll always walk with a limp, though you'll limp with both feet so it won't look like a limp." I've never stopped laughing about that, though his meaning was clear: I had really screwed up this time.

 

6 years later my mobility was much worse, the operations hadn't helped, and I asked my surgeon for options. Dishearteningly, her reply was, "this is as good as it gets for now." 5 or 6 more years passed and not only was "as good as it gets" not good enough, it only got worse. I'm only 52 years old. I hope to have many more years of adventure ahead of me, and I've never been good at going down without a fight. So after long conversations with surgeons and prosthetist and being told that a below the knee amputation and a good prosthesis was probably my best chance at less pain and more function I asked my surgeon to make it happen. Tellingly, I think, I wasn't afraid she would agree to it, but that she would say no. That nothing would change. In the months leading up to the surgery there was plenty of fear, but also, for the first time, there was hope. Hope that I could hike again, be more active, even just walk around the house without pain and the weird lurching that I've done for the last dozen years when I'm not wearing shoes and putting on a brave face.

 

As I get older less and less is certain to me, but I am very sure none of us is getting the damage deposit back when we turn our bodies in at the end. I know that a lifetime is such a short interval and that we most regret what we did not do, and the risks we never found the courage to take, rather than the ones we did. I know that change is hard but is always fertile ground for growth, and sometimes not changing is even harder. I know that the human spirit is creative and resilient, and that risk and reward are intertwined. And I know that the best light often comes after the heaviest storms.

 

Thank you for being part of my journey. If you've chosen to download the monographs and wallpapers, you'll be taken to a page with the necessary links. Also on that page is a link to my blog and I would love to hear from you in the comments. Please drop by and say hello. You know where to find me and I'm not going anywhere for a little while.

 

Thank you. I am so grateful.

 

For the Love of the Photograph,

David duChemin

 

PS - I wrote this in the days before my surgery. Never one to struggle for words, I don't know that I got this one right. Making plans to walk into hospital to have my foot removed is just about the scariest thing I've done. I've never second-guessed myself so much as I have over the last 6 months. I hope you'll forgive me if I didn't get the tone or the timing perfect on this. Making the monographs I'm offering here helped distract me in the weeks and months before the operation, but they were also a reminder of why I'm doing this: so I can continue to do the things that bring me joy, like traveling the world with my camera and making more photographs, books, and training resources with you and for you. Thank you for the joy.