When retired Marine Sergeant John Peck awoke from a medically induced coma in July 2010, two months after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan and losing all four of his limbs, his skin “was so hypersensitive that I would scream if someone touched me,” he says. But once his physical pain subsided, Peck, then 24, faced a much more daunting obstacle: adjusting to everyday life in a new body. The challenges at his Walter Reed housing complex were immediately clear. He couldn’t enter rooms with nonautomatic doors, because he didn’t have hands to grab them. He’d wanted to be a chef since he was 12, and now he couldn’t reach the food cabinets–let alone prepare meals. “It was incredibly frustrating,” he says.
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Today, however, Peck lives in a house built by the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation that was designed to serve his individual needs. Now 28, he has a bathroom with a bidet, so he can use it solo, and can adjust lighting, sound and even the height of his kitchen cabinets by tapping a tablet. To be sure, there are plenty of issues his home won’t solve. “I can’t put shampoo into my hair or put shorts on by myself,” he says. And unloading the dishwasher is nearly impossible, even when he’s wearing prosthetics. But Peck draws hope from a potential double-arm transplant–and his November wedding to fiancée Stacy Elwood. For now, he says, “my house makes the little things easier.”
NOTE: This story was originally published in our July 7 “Smarter Home” issue. Since then, Peck and his fiancée have separated.