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"Angelillo Strong": Conquering New Obstacles after Brain Injury

TBI adaptive athlete dj angelillo

I’ve been riding dirt bikes my whole life. I got my first one when I was a little kid. I’ve always been a gearhead. Building things, fixing things, riding, it's what I’ve always done. But on June 5, 2021, something happened that would change my life forever.

That day, I decided to take a quick ride through the woods behind my house with a few friends. It wasn’t planned. We just said, “Let’s go for a spin.” I walked right past my helmet. I don’t know why. Ninety percent of the time, I wore it. But not that day.

That ride changed everything in an instant. One moment I was doing something I loved, and the next my whole life had shifted. It made me realize how fragile life is.

I don’t remember the accident. I don’t remember the week before or even a couple of months after. But I learned that I crashed my dirt bike in the woods, and that a friend on a quad found me shortly after. I was rushed to the hospital in a coma. I had a trach, a feeding tube, you name it.

I was paralyzed on my entire right side. Couldn’t talk. They didn’t even know if I’d be able to see properly or walk again.

Eventually, I was transferred to Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford, CT for intensive rehabilitation. I don’t remember that at first either, but I do have flashes of memory of being in physical therapy. It was at Gaylord that I had to relearn how to do almost everything that was once second nature to me.

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Using the right words was difficult. My speech therapist told my mom to think of my brain as a filing cabinet. She said my diffuse axonal brain injury caused everything I knew to fly out of the cabinet and now I had to figure out where to put everything back. The words were there, but for a long time, I just couldn’t get them out.

At the same time, I was working hard on my mobility.

Five days after getting to Gaylord, I moved my right foot. That was huge progress. Not long after, I stood up. Two months after my accident, I walked out of Gaylord Hospital with a cane on discharge day.

My mom has videos of me in therapy on her phone. I don’t want to watch them, but she keeps them because she says it’s a reminder of how much progress I’ve made. She tells me all the time: you don’t even realize what you’ve overcome.

And even though I still have a ways to go, I know she’s right.

Over the last four years, I’ve pushed myself … a lot. Some days were harder than others, but I’ve learned that no matter what, I had to push through.

Since the accident, I’ve returned to the gym six days a week. I drive, I work full-time, I got married, and I chase after my 1.5-year-old daughter, Ava Jane.

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On the outside, people don’t always realize that I am still living with the effects of my brain injury. Just because it’s not visible doesn’t mean it’s not there. I still deal with insecurities and mental hurdles. But I try my best each day to work through them.

Ava Jane was waiting at the finish line when I took on something I had in my sights for a long time: conquering the Gaylord Gauntlet 5K Trail and Obstacle Run on the campus of the very hospital that gave me my mobility back.

That race wasn’t just mud and obstacles. It was symbolic as a test of everything I’ve been rebuilding since that day almost exactly four years earlier.

Throughout the course, I had a whole team of my biggest supporters by my side: family, friends, my former Gaylord Hospital care team, and even my current Gaylord outpatient physical therapist, Nicole. We called ourselves Team Angelillo Strong. Because that’s what this has taken: strength, stubbornness, and a mindset that anything is possible if you put in the work.

I’m not going to lie. It was difficult. But I did it. And I was proud of myself.

When I crossed the finish line exhausted and full of mud, it wasn’t just about running a race. It was about showing my daughter that her dad got back up.

And that he never stopped fighting.

 - DJ Angelillo, as told to Joy Savulak  

Watch DJ tackle the Gauntlet in the video below!

Learn more about opportunities for adaptive athletes through the Gaylord Sports Association. 

Read more patient stories.