Grace was born by the time Greene got orders to deploy to Afghanistan, but that didn’t change the equation. Lepore had known from the get-go this was his dream. “Even if I wasn’t okay with it, I would never keep him from going.” Besides, his job was to help Afghanistan rebuild—how dangerous could that be? “He always seems—what’s the right word—invincible,” says Lepore. “Just everything seems to go well for him, so I never expected that anything would happen.”
Greene knew better. To help the villages, you must get to the villages. During one such convoy their LAV III, a Canadian-made light-armoured troop carrier, bogged down in a river, stranding them under a full moon, a fat target for anyone with a rocket-propelled grenade. They were lucky that time. Not so in February 2006 when a roadside improvised explosive device rocked the LAV that Greene was riding in. Most of the injuries to the 10 inside were cuts and bruises, but Greene was removed to Kandahar airfield hospital with a concussion. It was the first time military personnel delivered bad news to Lepore. The second time, a 6 a.m. knock on the door a month later, was worse.
Before Greene left for Afghanistan, he taped a number of videos for Grace, his dear little “wabbit.” There were pictures of him drying her from the bath; pushing her in the stroller; singing the ABC song. “My life expanded,” he says of her birth. “It was like a new chapter of a new book.” Of the videos, he says with an infantryman’s clear-eyed practicality: “I thought if I died they would be the only thing she’d have to remember me by.” He also wrote and sealed a last letter to Lepore, “in case I got killed, in case something happened to me.” After the axe attack, with his life hanging by a thread, she ripped open the letter and read its contents.
Greene spent much of his time in the intensive care unit. He fought off two near-fatal bouts of pneumonia, and a failed initial attempt to rebuild his skull that nearly killed him. “Fortunately I wasn’t cognizant at that time,” he says, “or I would have freaked out.” Lepore communicated with him initially through a code of eye blinks. She was spelled off by her family, and Greene’s parents, Elizabeth and Richard Greene, a retired RCMP officer, who shuttled back and forth from their home in Nova Scotia.
Lepore, frustrated by “an extreme amount of doubt” from the medical establishment about Greene’s prognosis, turned to alternative medicine. She’s always believed in “the power of intention,” that visualizing a result can often make it happen. She told a friend: “We’ve got to do something; we don’t have a hope in hell here.” The friend told her about a Vancouver-area distance healer, a young man who guards his real surname but calls himself Adam Dreamhealer. They went to his website, which includes advertisements for his books and workshops, and testimonials, including that of rocker Ronnie Hawkins, who credits Adam with helping him beat a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2003. Lepore wrote Adam an email, the subject line: “Canadian soldier injured in axe attack needs your help.”
Adam, during an initial visit, saw in an unresponsive Greene “a white light. I don’t know, I guess I could describe it as your connection to source, or God,” says Lepore. “He could see that connections were there, there was still brain activity.” His sessions, mostly done from afar, involve directing his energy. As he claims on his website, “with a focused intention to heal, and the power of energy, we all have the ability to heal ourselves.”
Adam conducted a series of “distant energy” treatments, he told Maclean’s. Lepore, who was with Greene in the intensive care unit, says “things seemed to be going on at the exact time of Adam’s treatments, like eyes opening and closing, body movements, eyes moving.” He performed a second treatment after doctors warned they might have to remove one of Greene’s lungs. “The following day doctors then decided they didn’t have to remove a lung,” Adam says. “I continued with occasional treatments and told Debbie that improvements would continue, but slowly.” Lepore credits Adam with a role in Greene’s early path to recovery.
The couple has since employed many alternative therapies to complement medical care and established rehabilitation techniques. Among them: acupuncture, and reducing stress by manipulating the body’s energy through reiki and craniosacral therapy. “The philosophy is when you go through a trauma like that it gets trapped in your body,” she explains. “They have training to work with the fascia of the body to release those energy blockages.”
Such techniques, she knows, don’t sit well with the medical establishment. She kept doctors on “a need-to-know basis,” she says. “What’s the expression—act now, ask for forgiveness later?” Adds Greene: “Forgiveness is easier to get than permission.”
The medical establishment itself has gone through a major rethink about the brain, and its powers of adaptability and recovery. Dr. Shaun Gray, department chief of the rehabilitation centre in Ponoka where Greene spent 14 months, puts it this way: “We used to think of the brain as an organ that didn’t really heal. The presumption was always if part of the brain was damaged that those neurons didn’t regrow. It was like plucking a chip out of your computer—the functions of that chip were now gone and that was all there was to it,” he says. While he wouldn’t comment on Greene’s specific case, he says the evidence now shows that with proper rehabilitation, and especially with a motivated, high-functioning individual, the brain can regenerate and rewire itself. “So, when a part that is responsible for a particular function is damaged, that capacity can be shifted to other parts of the brain.”
