LEWISTON, Me. — When Christina Lynn Gardner was a scholarship athlete at C.W. Post not long ago, a goalie in both field hockey and lacrosse, she was strong and self-reliant and never could’ve fathomed having, or needing, a friend like Moxie.
Then everything changed. She joined the Army. Got deployed. Got badly hurt. Now she looks across the living room of her modest taupe-colored colonial, looks at Moxie asleep on the floor, and wonders:
Where could I ever find a more loyal companion? How do I begin to say thank you for saving my life (probably more than once)? How do I express my gratitude for what happened at the Quinnipiac ice rink a few years ago?
That was where Moxie sensed that Christy was about to have a grand mal seizure — and did what she was trained to do . . . putting Christy’s wrist in her jaws and gently, but insistently, tugging her to the ground, then putting her paws on her to make sure Christy stayed down until the spell passed.
“Moxie is amazing,” Christy Gardner says. “She’s by my side, every step, every day. I certainly wouldn’t be able to be as independent without the service and safety she provides.”
Christy Gardner is a 31-year-old disabled Army veteran who split her time growing up between the Five Towns of Long Island and this small, hardscrabble city, a place still known principally for being the improbable site of the second Clay-Liston fight almost a half-century ago. Moxie is a 5-year-old golden retriever, an assistance dog with a weakness for peanut butter and an astonishing set of skills, all of them cultivated to keep Gardner safe. Moxie, happily, did not have to do much of anything but watch nine days ago, when Gardner was honored as USA Hockey’s Disabled Athlete of the Year — a distinction earned not so much by her dazzling skills as a sled-hockey player as by her voracious appetite for improvement — getting after her latest athletic passion the way Moxie gets after a chew toy.
Shawna Davidson, a former member of the U.S. women’s national hockey team, is the coach of the U.S. Women’s Sled Hockey team.
“It’s the extra level of effort that Christy puts in to be an elite-level athlete (that sets her apart),” Davidson says. “I feel very fortunate to be the one who gets to work with her.”
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Two weeks after graduating from C.W. Post in 2005, Christy Gardner was in boot camp in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., the latest in her family’s military lineage. Her grandfather had been a Marine, as were two uncles who fought in the first Gulf War. Gardner grew up around guns — her father was a licensed firearms dealer — and both the challenges and collective goal-setting of Army life appealed to the athlete in her. Gardner wound up training in a military police unit before being deployed to the demilitarized zone in Korea, and wasn’t there long before she suffered a compound break of her forearm after vaulting through a window and landing on a sharp piece of metal.
A few months later, Gardner suffered a far worse fate. Most of the details of the day are gone from her memory, and the things she does remember she prefers not to discuss. What is beyond dispute is that she sustained a direct and massive hit to the forehead, fracturing her skull, seriously damaging her frontal and temporal lobes and ultimately puncturing her spinal cord.
Her speech was almost completely gone, her mental dexterity history. She had no feeling in her legs below her knees, and had to relearn so much it was as if a virus had wiped out a lifetime of education from her hard drive.
“I had to start with addition and subtraction,” Gardner says.
She has been through 19 surgeries, and isn’t finished yet. She is deaf in her left ear and has lost the last two fingers on her left hand from complications stemming from the forearm injury. She developed a seizure disorder that brought on as many as four episodes a month, and full-blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, too. As if that were not enough, her memory is a scrambled, discomfiting patchwork; she went to a college reunion last fall and remembered few classmates, or teammates.
“I didn’t know what to say or what to do,” Gardner says.
The lowest point of all, though, came at meeting with doctors in her local V.A. hospital in which Gardner was handed a two-page list of all the things she would never be able to do.
Gardner says she was told, with complete assurance, that she wouldn’t be able to live alone, bathe alone, drive a car, or probably hold a job. She was devastated, envisioning a lifetime of helplessness, until she met a fellow Mainer named Neal Williams, a 63-year-old, wheelchair-bound veteran who was injured in combat in Vietnam.
“You can believe that horse----, or you can get out and do things,” Williams told her. “Maybe you won’t be able to do things the way you used to, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.”
Gardner was resistant at first, but with the support of her family, finally bought in. She went through two years of physical therapy, and three years of speech therapy. At Williams’ urging, she decided to attend the New England Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic, where she snowboarded down a mountain and got introduced to sled hockey, a version of the sport in which players have shortened, two-headed sticks in both hands, one end equipped with a traditional hockey-stick blade and the other with metal teeth that bite into the ice and allow competitors to propel themselves.
Gardner could barely stay on the sled at first, but her athleticism helped her pick up the sport quickly. She started incorporating sled time into her workouts, training for hours at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee, the same arena where Clay and Liston fought (it was the Central Maine Youth Center then).
“It was a chance to be good at something again,” says Gardner, who has played for the the U.S. sled-hockey team since 2011.
Perhaps the only more life-changing moment for Christy Gardner came on the day she got Moxie three years ago. Moxie cost $18,000, and was not covered by the Army. But you do not put a price on independence.
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For all the progress Gardner had made through therapy and surgery, her seizures were terrifying, and all too frequent. At a hospital where she was being treated in Texas, she had a seizure that sent her crashing into a flight of stairs, breaking her jaw and skull. She had to wear a helmet at all times to guard against further injury. Concerned about the repercussions of the seizures, doctors told her that there were assistance dogs trained to respond to seizures, and even to alert their owners to a seizure before it happens, in some cases. Gardner and her family decided to go for it, finding an assistance-dog trainer in Pennsylvania. The trainer, it turned out, had a golden retriever puppy that seemed a good candidate, having apparently done well in the temperament-screening tests that are used. At just nine weeks, Moxie moved in with Gardner and stayed for almost six months, before returning to the trainer for about 18 months.
When Moxie graduated — minus cap and gown — Gardner traveled to Pennsylvania to commemorate the occasion.
Technically, Moxie was trained only to help respond to a seizure. So if Gardner were stricken, Moxie would go get the telephone and bring it to her. She could open the door, and run over to a neighbor’s house and ring the doorbell. She could even climb a ladder or activate an elevator in order to stay close to Gardner.
But because of the close bond that Gardner and Moxie forged at the beginning of the puppy’s life, Moxie grew so in tune with her owner that she could detect a seizure moments before it would happen. Much as diabetes-assistance dogs can pick up on the secretion of a hormone before a low blood-sugar attack — dogs have a sense of smell 100 times more acute than humans do — seizure-assistance dogs often can detect an almost imperceptible twitch, a toe tap or finger snap, that occurs before a full seizure.
“Because of the dog’s acute keenness, they become aware of this kind of stimuli that we as humans can’t or don’t pay attention to,” says Deb Davis, a public-relations executive for Paws With A Cause, an organization that has trained assistance dogs for people with disabilities for 33 years. “This allows the client to get to a safe environment.”
In Gardner’s case, Moxie will rub her leg with her snout if she detects a seizure coming on. If Gardner doesn’t take the cue, Moxie will do what she did in Quinnipiac, taking her wrist in her mouth and tugging her to the safety of the ground.
“She’s only been wrong twice,” Gardner says. In one of the instances, Gardner was in the clothing aisle at a Walmart when Moxie got her down on the floor, though no seizure followed.
Gardner’s seizures have become far less frequent over the last year — she hasn’t had one since November — and that is an immense relief. Still, Moxie goes everywhere with her. She is on the bench for every game the U.S. Women’s Sled Hockey team plays, keeping her eyes trained on Gardner. It’s no different when Gardner plays for the USA Warriors, the only female on a team of Veteran sled-hockey players. Almost all of the men on the team are double amputees, making for an awkward locker-room moment when Gardner first joined.
“Guys, what color socks are we wearing tonight?” Gardner asked.
“You can wear socks if you want, but we don’t have legs,” a teammate replied.
“There’s an aura about Christy when she walks into the room,” says Mike Vaccaro, coach of the USA Warriors. “She’s an inspiration, but I don’t think she even realizes it. Nothing stops her.”
Indeed, Gardner is returning to college full-time in the fall to get a second undergraduate degree, this one in recreational therapy. She coaches a local lacrosse team, as well as a youth sled-hockey team. She built a rock wall on the side of her yard, a slap shot from where the U.S. Army flag hangs over the front porch.
Gardner trains five times a week, and has the broad athlete’s shoulders to prove it.
In September, the U.S. women’s sled hockey team will travel to Oslo, Norway to compete against Team Europe. Christy Gardner, a defensive-minded forward, will be wearing her usual No. 19 sweater. Moxie will be wearing her usual sweater, too, with K9 beneath her name, Christy Gardner’s golden-hued security blanket, a companion for life.
“I don’t know where I’d be without her,” Christy Gardner says.