00:00 I'm Gabriel. I lost my arm in the pursuit of an ideal physique.
00:03 I trained like a madman for no purpose,
00:07 except that I wanted to look a certain way.
00:09 I heard a loud snapping sound,
00:11 screamed in the middle of the gym.
00:13 I was more likely to die than to pull through.
00:20 I remember going into public
00:22 and being completely devastated by the fact
00:24 that everyone was looking at me.
00:26 You can lose an arm, something bad can happen to you,
00:28 but if you keep going, you can achieve amazing things.
00:31 My name is Gabriel and I'm 30 years old.
00:36 I spend a lot of my time with my grandparents.
00:39 I have a six-month-old puppy
00:42 that also takes up a lot of my time.
00:45 The rest of my time I spend training
00:48 to try and make the Paralympics next year.
00:52 I lost my arm in pursuit of an ideal physique.
00:56 So I reckon I was 17 years old when I started going to the gym.
01:00 I initially joined the gym
01:02 because I wanted to be appealing to the opposite sex
01:05 and, you know, just wanted to be a big, strong young man.
01:09 My typical workout week would have looked like
01:13 probably three hours in the gym a day at least.
01:15 With a rest day maybe once a month.
01:20 I like training as hard as I could all the time.
01:26 That was how I identified.
01:27 I've always had this point of not feeling good enough.
01:33 Like, no matter how good I've looked,
01:35 there's always been striving to be better and better and better.
01:37 But I'm actually happy with the way that I look at the moment.
01:42 We all feel some pressure to look a certain way.
01:45 I suppose that's a social construct of the world we live in today.
01:49 I just wanted to be...
01:50 ..bigger than everyone else.
01:54 Mid-November in 2020,
01:57 I was at a gym, did a 50kg bicep curl
02:02 and at the bottom of the extension,
02:05 I heard a loud snapping sound.
02:07 Um...
02:09 Screamed in the middle of the gym, dropped the weight
02:12 and went to the hospital,
02:15 where they told me that having my bicep reattached
02:18 was an elective surgery and sent me home with some painkillers.
02:22 Two days following the initial injury,
02:25 I had, um...
02:27 ..standard surgery to have my bicep reattached.
02:30 And my arm was swelling.
02:35 I was in a lot of pain,
02:36 taking more painkillers than I should have needed for the procedure.
02:41 I have little to no memory of what happened
02:43 in between discharge then and going back into hospital.
02:47 But what I do know is that a locum came out
02:50 three days after the initial surgery and...
02:53 ..were very alarmed and said, "Straight to hospital."
02:57 They put me in an induced coma for 10 days,
03:00 where they did 11 major surgeries.
03:02 And, um...
03:06 ..and when I woke up,
03:08 I had no idea that I'd lost my arm.
03:10 The infection that caused the loss of my arm
03:17 was called necrotising fasciitis.
03:20 Basically, a bug that kills your flesh.
03:24 The infection was spreading.
03:26 They chopped my arm below the elbow,
03:28 then they chopped it above the elbow,
03:30 and they just had to keep removing flesh
03:33 'cause it was...it was spreading so rapidly.
03:36 And I was...
03:39 ..more likely to die than to pull through.
03:42 My dad was calling my friends, saying, "Gabe's gonna die."
03:45 It was very touch-and-go the whole time.
03:48 And when I woke up,
03:50 I didn't understand the conversation that I had with the surgeon.
03:53 It wasn't until three days after I woke up
03:55 that I looked in the mirror and my arm was missing.
03:58 It was...
04:02 ..confronting, to say the least.
04:04 The biggest challenge for me, initially,
04:09 was to accept that it was gone.
04:12 I had scar tissue all through my shoulder.
04:15 I, you know, the range of motion when I came out was about that.
04:19 I couldn't do anything. I couldn't walk a metre.
04:22 Like, I lost conditioning completely.
04:24 It took...
04:26 ..six weeks for me to be able to have a skin graft.
04:30 It took quite a long time for me to be able to have a routine
04:36 that didn't take me a million years,
04:38 'cause I was right-handed before.
04:40 So even just brushing my teeth with my left hand took a while
04:42 to be able to do comfortably without it kind of feeling weird.
04:45 You never think, "Oh, I've got two arms. How useful is this?"
04:48 It's only when you lose something you understand how important it is.
04:51 So I've always been quite a confident person.
04:54 I remember going into public
04:58 and being completely devastated by the fact that everyone was looking at me,
05:03 and I felt like I'd lost my confidence.
05:05 I felt like I couldn't speak to anyone.
05:07 And I went through this kind of painstaking process
05:11 of going out, breaking down, crying,
05:14 "Go sit in my car. Go get back out there and deal with it."
05:18 I'm still a little bit lost as to how I got into cycling,
05:24 but in terms of para sports,
05:27 cycling and rowing are sort of the two big ones in Adelaide.
05:32 I went to meet a guy who had a paralysed right arm
05:37 and he was a phenomenal cyclist.
05:40 That had a big role to play in me being pushed into that
05:43 because I still don't really know anyone that has the use of only one arm.
05:49 I think that being in that environment around some other para athletes
05:53 is kind of what drove me into it.
05:55 Initially, I was riding my bike just by holding it with one hand,
05:59 which was extremely scary.
06:02 So the point when I got a prosthetic where I could ride it was amazing.
06:09 But the prosthetic that I got, it works,
06:12 but it's not quite legal for competition at the moment,
06:14 so I'm in the process of getting a new prosthetic.
06:17 For the moment, this arm is actually very functional for what I need.
06:22 And it gives me stability to do basically everything I need.
06:27 And I imagine that when my prosthetic arm changes,
06:30 that I will have to relearn a whole lot of things,
06:33 but I'm hoping that it's not going to be too hard.
06:36 The first step of my prosthetic is the liner.
06:41 And this is just to create a good contact between my skin and the prosthetic.
06:47 This little ribbed pin slots into the bottom of my prosthetic.
06:54 So it's got a tight fit.
06:58 And the silicon sleeve means that it pulls,
07:02 distributes the weight the whole way around my residual limb.
07:05 So when I'm throwing, I can pull on it really, really hard.
07:09 And as long as I'm not too sweaty, it stays in the right spot.
07:12 So now I'm about jumping the rollers.
07:18 Rollers are primarily used to warm up before races at the velodrome.
07:22 They're really good to give you an even pedal stroke.
07:25 They basically just highlight all of the little fundamentals
07:30 that are really important when you're riding a bike to be a good cyclist.
07:33 I trained like a madman for no purpose,
07:41 except that I wanted to look a certain way.
07:43 You could meet a guy and you could add him on Instagram,
07:45 and they only see the best looking parts of their lives.
07:50 And it's not representative of anything real, ever.
07:54 Beauty comes in many forms.
07:56 Regardless of how you look,
07:57 it's still important to be a beautiful person on the inside.
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