In 2004, Dani Burt was in a motorcycle accident. For 45 days, she languished in a coma in the hospital, clinging to life. She was an active person before the accident, chasing her dreams at full sprint. When she finally woke up, however, she thought her life as she knew it was over. Her right leg had been amputated just above the knee.
“When the doctors finally told her the full extent of her injuries,” reads the video description, “Burt, an active, hungry-for-life person, wasn’t sure if she could go on.”
Learning how to do those everyday tasks that come second nature was a long and arduous process. “In the hospital, I didn’t know any amputees,” she said. “So I imagined that my life was over. I spent a lot of time in my room. I had to placed on suicide watch. It finally got to a point where I knew that if I didn’t go talk to somebody, I was in a lot of trouble.”
Burt soon decided that life was not over, despite her injuries. It wasn’t easy, though. She hadn’t surfed before her accident, but she decided that it might help. “It’s really scary for an amputee to do something like that,” she said. “I’m not like the other people out there.” Learning to surf, like learning anything else after an amputation, was difficult. But Burt had a realization. “It’s not that it wasn’t possible,” she said. “I just had to make it possible.”
And did she ever.
In 2016, she was crowned the U.S. Adaptive Surfing Champion. The next year, she competed in an all women’s division for the first time in adaptive surfing’s history. In 2018, she competed on Team USA for the fourth consecutive year and took on the role of Co-Captain of Team USA, and earned the team their first Team Gold medal in history.
Above is her story.
