Dr. David Hausmann: When control disappeared, healing became an act of trust.
By Rick Bontkowski
Dr. David Hausmann understood control.
A successful medical professional and finely tuned athlete, David had spent years building a life around discipline. He understood the body. He trained his own relentlessly. Career, health, fitness, purpose – these were things he pursued with intention.
Life was good. And then, almost without warning, control disappeared.
A devastating flesh-eating bacterial infection turned David’s life into a race against time. The man accustomed to helping others heal suddenly became the patient. The athlete who trusted his body was now fighting to save it. He would survive an unimaginable medical crisis, die three times, and ultimately lose a limb.
But during my conversation with David on the AMP’D UP211 Podcast, I realized his story wasn’t really about what happened to his body. It was about what happened to his identity.
We spend much of our lives chasing control. We pursue careers. We set goals. We train our bodies. We build families, reputations, and plans for the future. Somewhere along the way, we begin believing that if we work hard enough, prepare well enough, and remain disciplined enough, we can master all of it.
But who do you become when the things you used to define yourself are suddenly stripped away? That question sits at the heart of David’s story, and perhaps at the heart of every life dramatically altered by limb loss.
During our conversation, David said something I haven’t been able to shake:
“The universe meets you at the depth of your surrender and not at the height of your struggle.”
There is enormous wisdom in those words. Surrender does not mean giving up. Sometimes surrender means accepting that the old version of you is gone, and trusting that another version is waiting to be discovered.
David eventually had to trust his body again. Trust it to stand. Trust it to move. Trust himself to live inside a body that was now different. For a new amputee, perhaps that is one of the hardest lessons of all. Recovery isn’t always about fighting harder. Sometimes, healing begins when we finally stop trying to control what happened and start trusting who we might still become.
Rick Bontkowski, a Chicago native and amputee, is the host creator of The AMP’D UP211 Podcast. A drummer, cyclist, and advocate, Rick shares the stories of people with limb differences to inspire, inform, and challenge perceptions worldwide. Contact info: Ampup211@gmail.com, ampup211.com, youtube.com/@theampdup211podcast6, instagram.com/rick_bontkowski.
{Discover additional stories from Rick’s podcast on our website at thespringsmagazine.com/category/health-wellness/ampd-up211/.}
