PVCC Puma Press: October 2003

Tall, with dirty blonde hair and a likeableness that's hard to pinpoint, he smiles as he talks and is friendly without meaning to be. He's slender but strong, like most track and field athletes, and there is a confidence interlacing his demeanor that's hard to miss.

The Zach Morris inside him is evenly balanced with a humble heart. At first glance, he seems as ordinary as they come; an average college student you might say. But the story behind 19-year-old Alex Cassuto is anything but ordinary, and the experiences he's encountered as a result make him anything but average.

It was a day that will rent space in Cassuto's memory forever, though at its start it seemed no different than most. Along with his twin brother and their friends, Cassuto headed out to Lake Roosevelt, located just outside Globe, Arizona, for a day of water sports and fun. With an innertube attached to the back of their boat, the group began pulling each other around the lake.

Soon, it was Cassuto's turn. As he bumped speedily along the crest of the lake, his friends watched from the boat. Soon, like most riders do, Cassuto lost his grip and went tumbling into the cool lake water. His friends circled back around to retrieve him, but passed him up by mistake; Cassuto was floating in his life-jacket directly behind the boat. The driver went to put the boat in neutral, but shifted into reverse by mistake and the boat came speeding toward 15-year-old Cassuto. Within seconds his feet became entangled in the motor.

At the moment he was struck, Cassuto recalls how his world turned to slow motion. "I remember each blade," he says. "It hit my right foot first." In his right foot, every tendon but his Achilies was severed, along with his joints and most of his bone. His foot was literally hanging by skin from his leg. His left foot was less severely injured, though many tendons were severed there as well.

In shock and a state of complete disbelief, Cassuto reached down to feel his feet, and after doing so, recalls that he would have drowned, had it not been for his life jacket that kept him afloat. It was at that point that Cassuto decided that he would not look down.

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In his right foot, every tendon but his Achilies was severed, along with his joints and most of his bone. His foot was literally hanging from his leg.
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"I never looked at my feet because I knew it would scare me," he recalls.

From the lake Cassuto was taken to Tonto Basin, a small town without a hospital, where he waited calmly for a helicopter, which flew him to Scottsdale Healthcare-Osborn to be treated.

Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors were grim.

"They first thought I was going to die," Cassuto recalls.

Doctors were concerned that the bacteria from the lake water might cause infection. If there was any chance of infection, Cassuto's feet would have to be amputated immediately. Cassuto underwent four major surgeries in his first six days at the hospital, and was moved to the intensive care unit. The last surgery placed a muscle flap around his right ankle. This involved removing one of his lateral muscles from his back and wrapping it around the tendons in the foot. Cassuto received 95 stables in his right foot, 25 in his left foot and 35 in his back. During the first week of his surgeries Cassuto did not eat at all.

"All I did the first week was vomit and sleep," he says. Cassuto spent a total of fifteen days in the hospital, and upon his release doctor's expectations for recovery were not very hopeful.

"They said, ‘You have no chance of walking ever again,'" Cassuto recalls.

For Cassuto, a high school basketball and track athlete, those words were devastating. "I did not want to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair," he recalls.

Not a month later, Cassuto was set to enter his sophomore year of high school. He returned only to find his classmates to be rejecting and cruel.

"They were letting doors slam in my face," recalls Cassuto. So instead of school, Cassuto began physical therapy. For six months he swam for two hours a day in a Holiday Inn pool, strengthening his legs and ankles.

"The doctor said, ‘Do as much as pain will allow you to do,'" Cassuto recalls. So, he did and the results followed. Soon Cassuto became stronger and was able to walk with the aid of a walker and medical boots.

The doctors were in awe as they saw Cassuto walking. He had proven every one wrong. Still, they were hesitant about his resuming his involvement in athletics.

"They said, ‘Your not going to be able to run; don't push it,'" Cassuto recalls. Cassuto continued to get stronger and to push himself.

Four months into his sophomore year, Cassuto returned to school and brought his grades from all F's to all A's in a month. For his academic achievement, he was named Student of the Month.

The next year in his junior year of high school, Cassuto proved the doctors wrong again as he played on his varsity basketball team and was named the Field Event Athlete of the Year for track and field for his pole vaulting. Cassuto says that the accident only made him a more determined person.

"It was a huge motivation," he says. "I wanted to prove everybody wrong." He certainly did.

Today, Cassuto is a college freshman and pole vaulter on PVCC's track and field team. A few physical scars are all that remain as reminders of his terrible accident. Cassuto says that although a missing lateral muscle restricts his weightlifting and he occasionally experiences trouble with stability on uneven ground, he does not consider himself at a physical disadvantage.

In retrospect the advantage may very well be his own, as the accident that could have taken his life and was supposed to confine him to a wheelchair, ended up supplying him with a will that is unshakable and the type of determination that makes champions.