A Motivational Doer

How the one-armed archer took control of his future

by Courtney Stringfellow

April Fools’ Day fell on a Tuesday in 2008. It was the year of the Great Recession, the month Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States, and the day that changed the course of a Navy corpsman’s life.

Gabriel “Gabe” George had recently returned to Jacksonville from an enlightening six-month deployment in Cuba, was approaching his reenlistment date, and was preparing to sign up for Fleet Marine Force School when fate intervened.

He was making the most of his days; if he wasn’t at work, he was at church or riding his motorcycle. “Life was a little nice and mysterious at the time,” George remembers.

That Tuesday was progressing as smoothly as each one before it: George went to work, he met his friend’s mom to give her some CD’s, and he drove to church. But he never made it to the movie theatre that evening.

George grew up in a small town outside of Houston, Texas. As he approached his high school graduation, George knew he wanted to get away from his neighborhood, but he didn’t quite know what path he would take to achieve that. His older brother had already joined the Air Force, so he considered that route. And then a Navy recruiter reached out to him.

“They approached me and said you can come and play basketball for us, and you don’t have to do nothing, that’s it. And I was young and naive at the time, and I believed that recruiter, and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s go do it,’” George said. “So about a month or two after high school, that’s when I set off and joined the Navy, not knowing anything about boats, and the ocean, and I couldn’t even swim at the time.”

He began his Navy career as an undesignated seaman at Naval Station Mayport in 2004, hoping he would figure out what he wanted to do along the way. Soon after he arrived at his first duty station, he decided to strike for corpsman. After attending corpsman school, he was stationed at Naval Air Station Jacksonville.

During the course of the next few years, he became an anesthesia technician working in operating rooms, witnessed the role of the U.S. military in the Caribbean, and made plans for the future. Then came April 1, 2008, when everything changed.

A 21-year-old George pulled out of his church’s parking lot before his friend did that evening. They planned to meet at the movies, but she turned around and went home when she came upon heavy traffic. Later, when she saw George’s story on the news, she realized the traffic was from a near-fatal accident he had been involved in. George suffered amnesia as a result, and doesn’t remember any of the events from that evening. Months later, during the court hearing, he learned from the other driver what occurred.

“[The driver] told me he was going through a light, and he thought another car hit him, and he got out and he saw me laid out. He thought I was gone, and he fell on his knees and grabbed my ankles and started praying for me,” George said. “I remember asking him, ‘Dude, what church do you go to?’ And he said, ‘I don’t even go to church. I was just, oh my God…you were young, and I saw your body, and…’ I told him, ‘Man, I appreciate that, because you could’ve saved my life that night.’”

George had been approaching an intersection when the driver of the SUV made a u-turn in front of him. The reason George said the driver could’ve saved his life that night is because he was pronounced dead at the scene. They were preparing to put George in a body bag when he rose up. The EMTs rushed him to the ICU, and he was in a medically-induced coma for three weeks.

He had suffered a spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and a brachial plexus injury, which paralyzed his right arm. George remembers being optimistic at the beginning of his recovery and realizing how close to death he had been. Then, bit by bit, life started crashing down around him.

“I was away from work for 60 to 90 days. And then they tried to have me come back for a couple of weeks, and then they realized, ‘Well your arm is paralyzed. You can’t do what you do,’” George recalled. “They tried to have me on payroll for a while, but then they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want you driving with all these pain pills that you’re taking.’ And then they told me to stop coming into work. And then one day it was, okay, you’re no longer in the Navy.”

After the Navy medically retired him, George moved to Atlanta, Georgia, with his younger brother. He lived there for nearly five years, volunteering for a local church and focusing on healing. But his experiences of essentially being alone in another city after being surrounded by a family of Sailors proved to be disheartening and discouraging.

“It was the civilian mindset versus the military mindset that was eating me alive,” George said. “I was just me, going to new places thinking I could help everybody and save the world and, yeah, it was challenging, to say the least.”

Despite the hard lessons he learned through being taken advantage of, George persevered, promising himself things would get better. His daughter was born the same year as his accident. As she got older, she wanted her dad to bring her to school and spend more time with her near her mom in Jacksonville.

So he moved back to Jacksonville. After relocating, he was invited to Wounded Warrior Project’s Project Odyssey, where he was introduced to Brooks Rehabilitation’s adaptive sports program. His outlook on life and human relationships shifted. He went cycling with Brooks’ adaptive sports group and soon after was invited to the National Veterans Summer Sports Clinic in California.

“At the time, I was like, you know what? I’m up to it. I’ll try something new. I’ll go ahead. And so I went to that event in San Diego, and the way they set it up, it was just one thing after another, and there were sparks flying and light bulbs going off. And finally, I was like, ‘Yes, I can live,’” George said. “It made me feel good to move and do things again.”

During that week-long clinic, he participated in several sports, such as surfing, sailing, and cycling, among others. Of course, the one that hit the target was archery. The organizers took the participants to the olympic training facility in Chula Vista, California.

From the moment he entered, George had a good feeling about the place, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to learn archery with the rest of the group. That’s when Olympic assistant coach Joe Bailey created a spool around the string and told George to bite down to draw.

“I bit down, and I pulled back, and I let go. When that arrow hit the target, I was like, woah. I just felt like it was something I could do,” George said.

When the clinic ended, he had a purpose. “I went home and I went straight to the bow shop and bought my first bow. I was like, ‘Look, I need something,’ and the guy was just looking at me like, ‘Okay, how are you going to do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t even know, but I’m going to figure this thing out.’”

And he did. He started practicing, learned what worked for him, and met some amazing people along the way, including Paralympic gold medalist Andre Shelby. He was the first person who George felt really understood his journey. Shelby was medically retired from the Navy after a 2004 motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He discovered archery in 2008, the year of George’s motorcycle accident, through an adaptive sports program.

“I call him my coach/mentor, but he said coaches get paid, so he told me don’t call him coach,” George said with a laugh. “But he’s been helping me, and really taught me everything I know. And he’s inspired me, but also I know he has that title, so, okay he wants to pass it down to somebody too, but I gotta earn it. I gotta really put the work in.”

Becoming a Paralympian is a goal that’s kept George motivated to stick with archery, especially on the bad days. When George discovered the sport, he still had his right arm. From the beginning, he was determined he would regain use of it in time, despite advice from his Navy doctor to amputate it. But after a decade and several surgeries, it became clear he wouldn’t.

As George became more active, his arm became a liability. He shattered his humerus snowboarding in 2020, had broken his wrist the year before, and would accidentally burn his arm while cooking. When he would scuba dive at wreckage sites, he had to continuously monitor his right arm to ensure it wasn’t touching or being damaged by debris.

And although his arm was paralyzed, it was still hypersensitive to changes in the weather. In older interviews, you can see him with a blanket draped over his right shoulder. Finally, he met with Dr. B. Hudson “Hud” Berrey at Jacksonville Orthopaedic Institute and had him amputate it in February of 2020. But he still experiences pain at the site.

“I have nerve pain and muscle spasms constantly. So some days, especially when it rains, my body wants to curl up on itself, I feel like a pretzel, the hulk is squishing me, and I’m being electrocuted,” George said. “So it makes it challenging to flex out and stretch out and really do what I need to do.”

After the accident, George was released from the hospital with “a bag full of pills.” He was still in pain, even with the medicine, but his mind was essentially numb. When he had his nerve transfer surgery in Houston, Texas, years later, George told his surgeon, Dr. Rahul Nath, pain was one of his main concerns.

Dr. Nath discussed the dorsal root injury zone (DREZ) procedure, which very few doctors had ever successfully executed. It involves creating an opening in the spine and burning nerve endings, and the risks outweighed the potential rewards for George. The only other remedy Dr. Nath’s patients reported having positive results and an increased quality of life from: cannabis.

George initially rejected the idea, concerned he would lose both his VA benefits and respect from his family and church community. He also couldn’t risk the criminal aspect, and he didn’t even know where to get cannabis from if he wanted to. He was still living in Georgia when he reached a turning point.

“I remember [my daughter and I] were in the apartment one day, and I was hurting pretty bad, and she would say, ‘Daddy, daddy, can we go outside? Daddy, can we go outside?’ And I snapped and screamed, ‘Stop!’ That’s all I said. And for me responding that way to her, it scared her, and she looked like she had seen a ghost,” George said. The experience frightened him, too. “I grabbed her and gave her a big hug and told her I was sorry. Then I was like, alright, I have to do something about this pain.”

The next day, he called one of his surgeons and got a referral for another surgeon to perform the DREZ procedure. It was the last resort, and it didn’t work. His pain got worse.

Finally, he made the decision to pursue the benefits of medical marijuana. To do what was best for him, he had to cut ties with some people in his life.

He took the time to find out how using it could impact his VA benefits and discovered he wouldn’t lose them, he just couldn’t be prescribed narcotics. After advocating for legalization and waiting on government officials, he finally got his medical marijuana card. He paid $1,200 for his first recommendation.

His next challenge, since discovering adaptive sports, was obtaining a therapeutic use exemption. Without it, athletes can be banned from competing in the Paralympics for four years. He was approved last year.

Today, George is the vice president of the North Florida chapter of the Weed for Warriors project (Facebook.com/WFWPNorthFL) and volunteers with Team Rubicon, which helps communities rebuild following disasters. He consistently shares resources and information with the community on his Instagram so that others may have a simpler path to wellbeing.

With regards to his athletic career, he’s spending the next few months training and participating in trials for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games, which were pushed to August 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s also a contestant on the Go Big Show, which was filmed last year, and which readers can find at TBS.com/Shows/Go-Big-Show. When he’s not improving his archery skills, he’s golfing, scuba diving, playing pickleball (which he plans to start competing in this year), and checking things off his bucket list.

“I still can barely swim, but I’m jumping in the ocean, swimming with sharks, loving these things. I went snowboarding. And I used to call people crazy for snowboarding. I still do it, everytime I get up there. But when I get down the mountain, I’m like, this is the most insane, fun thing in the world that I can imagine,” George said. “There’s still so much I want to do. I still want everybody to experience everything. I still want to share it.”

You can follow Gabe’s journey on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok @TheOneArmedArcher and at TheOneArmedArcher.com.