‘Beautiful heartbreak’: 9 months after ski accident, Max Togisala reclaims life paralysis sought to take
-
- Max Togisala hits a golf ball at the driving range at Schneiter’s Riverside Golf Course in Riverdale on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022.
-
- Max Togisala rolls his wheelchair down a concrete path after class at Weber State University on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022.
-
- Max Togisala disassembles his wheelchair and loads it into his car after getting out of class at Weber State University on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022.
RIVERDALE — Among the many things 18-year-old Max Togisala has going on in his busy life, he also works at The Tee Box, an indoor golf training facility in Uintah near the Interstate 84-Highway 89 interchange.
There, Togisala helps teach the basics of golf so he can be around the game he loves. Golf has always been his thing. Togisala had the dream of playing college golf upon graduating from Bonneville High in 2022.
His senior year on the Bonneville High School boys golf team, Togisala finished tied for fifth place at the Region 5 tournament by shooting a 1-over-par 72. He had a college golf spot waiting for him the following year at Central Wyoming College in Riverton, Wyoming, which he intended to take.
Togisala never got the chance to live out that dream. His life completely changed when he fractured his spine in a February 2022 skiing accident in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Togisala is paralyzed from the waist down and needs a wheelchair to move around. But since coming home from the hospital in April, Togisala has slowly reclaimed the life that paralysis could have easily taken away.
“He’s still an 18-year-old kid, but at the same time, he’s grown so much because of his accident. He really appreciates even just having half his body that works,” said Max Togisala Sr., Max’s father. “He’s happy to have his hands, he’s happy to have his upper-body movement.”
Those who know Max know he was never one to stay at home and idle. He was always out doing something, whether it was playing golf, pickleball or hanging out with friends. Things are still that way.
Max still plays golf, lacrosse and pickleball. In his 70-day hospital stay, he picked up ping pong and plans to start adaptive skiing later this fall.
He’s attending Weber State University and knows all the shortcuts on the hilly campus, but can also slowly traverse down a staircase, too. There have been plenty of bad days, good days and OK days since the accident, and plenty of hurdles remain in his life.
But so far, Max is moving past the accident in about any way possible as he nears the one-year anniversary of fracturing his spine.
“I’ve accepted it. I can’t go back and I can’t change anything,” Max said. “If I had the chance to, I probably wouldn’t because of how amazing I’m doing right now and how much closer I am to a lot of these people that I’ve met and that weren’t in my life before.”
***
On the morning of Feb. 18, 2022, Max and a few of his friends started skiing down a mountain in Sun Valley. It was the first run of the day for Max, who had been skiing since he was 5 years old.
Not long after he started down the mountain, he hit some ice and moguls, lost control, fell headfirst, hit the snow in somewhat of a scorpion pose and tumbled down about 100 yards.
Max instantly lost feeling in his legs. His skis fell off, but he doesn’t remember that. One of his friends came over to ask if he was OK, and then called ski patrol.
“Then the ski patrol kept asking me, ‘Can you feel this, can you feel this, can you move your toes up and down?’ And I just couldn’t really do that,” Max said. “Definitely heartbroken at first for a little bit, I was really just scared too — I wasn’t, like, around home, it was a new mountain too, so I didn’t really know what was going on and stuff.”
Ski patrol sledded him down the mountain into a waiting ambulance, which took him to a nearby clinic. There, X-rays showed he had a severed spine along with a separated shoulder. Max told his parents over the phone.
“Very sad, I was just crying to (my mom), but I was just telling her that I was OK and stuff, and that everything will be fine,” he said.
After figuring out where to fly Max next, he had surgery in Salt Lake City 7 hours after fracturing his T12 vertebrae, and his spine is now fused from vertebrae T9 to L3.
Max stayed in University of Utah medical facilities for 70 days to recover. He had physical therapy, occupational therapy and educational therapy every day, Monday through Friday.
Max’s older sister, Isabel — she goes by “Izzy” — started staying at the hospital with him in between being a full-time student at Weber State University and working at McKay-Dee Hospital.
The two were somewhat close growing up, then their older sister Sariah left for a mission with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaving Izzy and Max as the last siblings at home together. So as Izzy put it, they had “to start liking each other now.”
Izzy came back from her mission — split between New Zealand and Spokane, Washington, due to COVID-19 — in June 2021, then she and Max started to become closer.
“She and I were just like siblings and not really that close and stuff but now we’re really close. We go to school together and we just hang out all the time,” Max said. “She was there for me at the hospital every night.”
Once hospital staff let Izzy stay the night, she’d help Max in the mornings, then leave Salt Lake in the morning when her parents got there, go to work at McKay-Dee, then drive back down to Salt Lake after work.
Izzy basically changed her WSU school schedule to do more classwork and homework online instead of in person so she could stay at the hospital more.
“When something happens to someone that you love, especially in your family, you know, you kind of just step up. And I know that it was a lot for my mom and my dad in that situation, so I was just trying to be a rock for the whole family. But Max is my best friend so I would do anything for him,” Izzy said.
Not that he wasn’t close with family before, but Max has become much closer to them — something his mother, Amber Togisala, calls a “beautiful heartbreak.”
***
On a pleasant morning in October, Max hit some golf balls at the Riverside Golf Course driving range, mostly with his driver.
The first time Max went golfing after the accident was at Riverside, the course he grew up playing. While in the hospital, Max asked his parents to bring his golf clubs so he could chip and putt, just to see if he still could. Indeed, he could.
He can’t hit the ball as far anymore and it’s harder for him to play more than a few holes if he’s rolling his own wheelchair, unless he holds on to a golf cart that someone else is driving. But he was happy to just be on the course.
To swing a club from his wheelchair — he golfs left-handed — he holds on to his left wheel with his left hand and swings the club with his right arm, sort of like a one-handed tennis backhand shot.
“It’s funny, wherever we go and people see him doing sports, people just stop and are amazed. They’re like ‘wow.’ His accident has definitely not stopped him from living,” Amber Togisala said.
In golf, some options for partially paralyzed players to continue with the sport include the SoloRider golf cart and the Paramobile.
The SoloRider is a single-seat golf cart with a seat that swivels to the side so golfers can hit a shot from a seated position.
Golfers have to drive the cart onto the green to putt, which may ruffle some feathers until people learn the PSI from the cart’s tires is about the same as a human footprint, according to Golf Digest.
Max has a SoloRider, donated to him by Dennis Walters, a man who was paralyzed from the waist down in the 1970s and has since become a renowned paraplegic golfer who travels the world sharing life lessons and inspiring disabled golfers through golf clinics and special performances, with the latter including a lot of trick golf shots, according to Walters’ website.
The Paramobile is essentially a large power chair with a stand-up device that helps golfers stand up and swing from the closest position to “normal” that they can.
There’s one such Paramobile at the Mick Riley Golf Course in Murray that Max used one day, “and it was normal for him,” Max Togisala Sr. said.
Max still plays pickleball — wheelchair-bound players get two bounces instead of one — and he joined an adaptive lacrosse league in Salt Lake County earlier this year that meets about once a month. He’d never played lacrosse before, and then went to Colorado in August for a lacrosse tournament.
Colorado was Max’s first big trip since the accident, and it went somewhat well. A snafu with his wheelchair-accessible hotel room was another thing in his adjustment to living with a wheelchair, and accessibility is one of the first things on his mind when figuring out if he can go somewhere or do something.
“The world’s still trying to catch up on wheelchair accessibility,” Max said.
***
At a certain point in his rehabilitation, medical staff told Max and his family he’d be cleared to go home on April 7. Once they told him that, Max was itching to get out.
In the early part of the hospital stay, though, an issue arose with the Togisalas’ house.
“Everything about our house has some sort of steps to get around,” said Max Sr., who works at Hill Air Force Base.
Initially, one therapist told Max Sr. and Amber they’d have to move because their house was inaccessible to anyone with a wheelchair.
“We wanted to stay in this community. There are people, I mean, they’re the ones that have been so supportive to us and we wanted to stay in this area,” said Amber, who runs her own photography business.
On the main floor with the kitchen and living room, contractors added a bedroom and a bathroom, as well as a ramp so Max could get in the house. They also unexpectedly renovated the kitchen, Amber said.
All the work was donated, save for about $800 for the floor and a little bit more for marked-down cabinets. The family was especially grateful for the donated work, and a quick permit process through South Ogden City, in light of the expensive medical bills.
“We’ve had a lot of support,” Max Sr. said.
A few days after the accident, the Bonneville High boys basketball team and student section wore T-shirts with “M4M, #MiracleForMax” written on them during a home playoff game. The team wore those shirts throughout the playoffs.
When Max arrived back home in South Ogden on April 7, dozens of friends, family, neighbors and well-wishers lined the streets to welcome him home.
“It’s amazing and sort of speechless just to see how community can come together just to help out,” he said. “I would’ve never thought any of this would happen to me. I would’ve never thought that many people would’ve came together and done that for me; so kind, and I just feel so loved after seeing all that.”
He and his family, who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said their faith has grown throughout this ordeal.
“I’ve had to rely on that faith throughout this, this whole trial in my life. Being tested every day, and just to choose to wake up and put a smile on my face, and to just not sit around at the house and be upset and angry about this whole thing, just to get up and go out and do stuff,” Max said.
***
At the Riverside driving range, Max asked Izzy to start dropping a golf ball in front of him so he could try hitting it in midair with a quasi-baseball swing.
After wildly slicing the first few shots and laughing throughout, he started to get his rhythm and send golf balls down the middle.
Max has a dry sense of humor, one that hasn’t changed with the accident. He’s made his paralysis the subject of humor multiple times on his Instagram account.
On May 7, he posted a video of him playing golf in his wheelchair at Riverside Golf Course with the caption, “Can you guess my handicap?”
On June 29, he posted a video showing how he gets in his car by himself, lifting himself from his wheelchair to the driver’s seat, then breaking down the wheelchair and putting it in the passenger seat.
The caption to that video reads: “Sorry ladies when (you’re) gonna have to sit in the back when we go on dates.”
On Oct. 19, he posted a photo of him on Weber State’s campus in front of the Stewart Bell Tower. In the photo, he’s smiling and leaning back in his wheelchair so far that he’s bracing himself off the ground with his left arm.
The caption reads: “8 months ago I was paralyzed. Today I am still paralyzed.”
After getting out of class Tuesday from Weber State’s Lind Lecture Hall, Max slowly rolled his wheelchair down the walkway to where his car was parked in the handicapped spots just south of the building.
He was the only one on the path at that particular time.
“Normally, I’m flying down this, like weaving through people,” he said.
Later this fall, Max plans to start adaptive skiing through the TRAILS program at the University of Utah. He also wants to go back to Sun Valley in February and ski at the place where his life changed forever.
“I almost feel like it’s a sense of closure for him, or it will be a sense of closure, a sense of healing for him to be able to be in that same spot that same day and — ” Amber said, while watching Max and Izzy do trick shots on the Riverside driving range.
Max, between trick shots, interjected: “I want to see the mountain, at least.”
Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.