Meg Garrison and Sgt. Joey Jones enjoy a few minutes of downtime before Jones gets ready to go to his internship in Washington, D.C.
SILVER SPRING, Md. – Marine Sgt. Joey Jones begins his day like most everyone else, getting dressed for work. But before he picks out a shirt, tie, belt and pants combo, he must assemble the bottom half of his body.
In the living room of a 14th-floor apartment, he sits in his black, padded wheelchair, delicately placing cotton bandages over small sores on the stump of his right thigh. His fiancée, Meg Garrison, walks back and forth from the kitchen, rinsing, wiping and drying rubber sleeves that snug over what’s left of his legs, torn off above both knees on Aug. 6, 2010, when he stepped on an improvised explosive device while clearing bombs out of a civilian market in Afghanistan.
A neatly synchronized team, Jones and Garrison hand each other the morning tools, securing the rubber sleeves, tightening a nut on his prosthetics, attaching his robotic leg to his stump.
The routine has shortened from nearly three hours in the early stages of Jones’ recovery to about an hour, but Jones still gets frustrated with the time it takes him to do normal things.
“You look at what you have to do and think, ‘I can get that done in 10 minutes,'” he says. “An hour later, you’re struggling with the last thing.”