Mike Conner Vs. the Pain

In 2013, a fire-sprinkler engineer fell five stories from the rafters of a California church, shattered 108 bones, and almost died. Then began his battle to walk and live again.

- By Joshua St. Clair

Mike Conner sits in his truck atop a hill in boring, Oregon, where he can feel the summer breeze through the window and see the sun at its meridian over the fields and the snowcapped tip of a distant Mount Hood poking into a cloud-dotted sky. He sits here and thinks about cutting off his feet.

His legs are barely his anymore-just fused cadaver bone and metal. Nearly half of six-foot-four, 225-pound Mike is steel and titanium: the majority of his legs from his knees down, his shoulder, his elbow, his wrist, his back, and his spine.

The Pain comes from his feet.

It starts in his soles and his mangled toes, which are missing knuckles. It surges up his ankles, which he can barely flex-they're just bone on bone, no joints, no cushion-up his atrophied legs, where the bones still have holes in them and where one is shaped like an S. It climbs his rebuilt spinal cord, up past a small stimulator fitted near the vertebrae and designed to reduce pain signals that find his brain. They shoot up his legs and spine and, when the battery gets low, find his brain anyway. The Pain: a five-hundred-pound sack of sand on his back, his feet in a bear trap.

"AGHHH!" He stretches his metal feet beside the gas pedal.

Every day, it's just Mike and the Pain. When he goes to sleep, when he wakes, when he sits up in bed, when he goes to piss, it's just the two of them: Mike and the Pain. He keeps slippers by the bed, because walking barefoot is like walking on shards of glass.

"AGHHH!" He arches his half-locked ankle.