Champion Heart
of a
After losing his hands and feet four years ago, 12-year-old quadruple amputee Mikey Stolzenberg continues to defy odds on the lacrosse fi eld
By Walter Villa P
A team-fi rst approach helped Maddy Acton earn a spot on the U.S. U19 training team
erched atop two prosthetic legs and missing both his hands, Mikey Stolzenberg uses the crook of his left arm to secure his stick, pushing and controlling it with his right arm. “It’s not as hard as you think,” he says.
Except, of course, that it’s ridiculously hard.
Mikey, 12, just makes it look easy. He doesn’t wear prosthetics for his hands because he can do more without them, and other than needing help to snap on his lacrosse helmet, he is completely independent on the fi eld and in the classroom.
All Mikey asks is that you treat him like who he is — just one of the guys, which helps explain why he loves lacrosse. “It’s a weird answer,” Mikey says, “but I like getting
hit. It’s like a shot of adrenaline. It just makes me try harder.”
‘All I Want is All You Got’ It started with a bug bite. Playing football in
the mud in July 2008, Mikey felt an itch on his abdomen. He scratched it, allowing soil into his bloodstream through the open wound. After he started to feel sick a couple days later, Mikey went to a doctor, who prescribed antibiotics. When he didn’t feel any better the next day, his mother Laura took him to a hospital.
36 LACROSSE MAGAZINE May 2012>> “Within an hour of arriving, he was on a respirator
fi ghting for his life,” Laura Stolzenberg says. “We found out that Michael has a rare immune defi ciency [called Chronic Granulomatous Disease], and there are certain bacteria his body can’t fi ght off. We didn’t even know if he would survive the night.” Mikey went into septic shock, spent two weeks in a medically induced coma and 51 days in the intensive care unit. He was on a ventilator and received continuous dialysis. Even as her then 8-year-old son lay in a coma, Laura implored him to survive. “All I want is all you’ve got,” she said repeatedly. After a few weeks, Mikey’s limbs turned purplish black due to a lack of oxygen. Doctors had no choice but to amputate his hands and feet. But he survived the episode.
“I was grateful that I still had my Michael,” Laura says. “We had him, now we just had to rebuild him.” Three months after receiving prosthetic legs, Mikey was skiing.
“Michael embraces his difference,” Laura says.
“We told him, ‘Your hands and feet do not defi ne who you are.’”
A Publication of US Lacrosse
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