Two years later, Virginia Tech survivors take steps forward

BLACKSBURG—It was three months after he nearly died in Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall when Kevin Sterne took his first unaided steps.

The doctors and physical therapists at NovaCare, in McMurray, Pa., watched his first few steps carefully, calling out a running commentary of how and when the athletic then-22-year-old needed to shift his weight and change his posture.

“I had to relearn how to walk,“ said Sterne, who is from the Pittsburgh area.

Two years ago, he was one of the dozens that Virginia Tech senior Seung-Hui Cho shot in a rampage that cost 32 people their lives. One of the two bullets that hit Sterne in his right leg ruptured an artery.

He tried to staunch the gushing blood with his hand and managed somehow, when police stormed in, to ask an officer to cut an electrical cord from an overhead projector.

After the officer did, and handed the cord to the dying student, Sterne knotted it into a makeshift tourniquet. He had no pulse when the EMTs reached him, minutes later.

He had lost two-thirds of his blood. Today, one bullet remains lodged in his hip.

For many, such as Sterne, the first steps forward after April 16 weren’t easy.

They were smaller steps and slower steps than young people in their late teens and early 20s are used to taking.

But the survivors are taking them.

Sometimes, those steps are as simple—and as difficult—as walking across the threshold of a classroom.

“It was hard to be in a classroom. I’d notice whether the door was open or closed, or worry about noises out in the hall . . . the sound of a siren,“ Sterne said, recalling his first days back at Tech in the fall of 2007.

“It’s just this anxious feeling. You find yourself feeling kind of excited but for no reason,“ he said.

Sometimes, he’s overcome by a flash of a memory of that day, though it doesn’t last too long.

“It’s not like one day I’ve woken up and felt better,“ he said. “It’s been a slow process, for sure.

“But there were the small victories every once in a while. Being able to stand while taking a shower, or driving. It was the little things that really helped me show myself that I was improving.“

. . .

Sterne’s very first actual steps, in that Pittsburgh-area clinic, came after two weeks in intensive care in Blacksburg and 2½ months of therapy.

He spent four to five hours a day at the clinic. He’d go home, have lunch and start another two to three hours of stretching exercises there, with large elastic bands.

Sterne followed that routine through the summer of 2007, scaling back to a three-hour, onceor twice-a-week schedule when he returned to Tech that fall as a graduate student.

Being back has been different. Tech has been home to him for seven years now—five years for a double major in engineering and communications, and two years of graduate work in engineering. A lot of friends have moved on. And there’s a big sore spot that few talk about.

“Sometimes, it’s like a game when you meet someone new,“ Sterne said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, did you know anyone?‘ and I’ll say ‘Yeah.‘“

People at Tech tend to steer conversation away from April 16. Sterne himself hasn’t been up for going back to the recently reopened Norris Hall. He skipped the tour that a half-dozen survivors took 13 days ago.

The tour lasted about half an hour. While the walls on half the floor had been torn down, the other half was left as it was—which was unsettling but not unbearable, one of the students said.

“It’s not out of disrespect for the building or the events there,“ Sterne said. “I haven’t gone for a tour of the building because I don’t feel like I’m ready to go in there again.“

. . .

And he has been pretty busy these days. He’s one of 12 students shot by Cho who still are on campus; six others have graduated or moved on from the university in other ways. Some still are dealing with serious medical issues.

Sterne is taking his final two classes for a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and he is immersed in his thesis on managing radiation from arrays of radar antennas.

He also has been busy spearheading installation of the university radio station WUVT’s new transmitter—not quite the same kind of advanced engineering he studies, since it involves chainsaws, hatchets and clearing a space on a nearby mountaintop, as well as digging a foundation for a new transmitter building.

He was even busier last year. In addition to a heavy course load of four advanced classes in electronics each semester, he taught two lab sections the first semester and three the second. There were about 20 students in each section; each week he would have a pre-lab paper, a lab report and a quiz from each to correct.

“You eventually get a system, so it goes a little easier,“ he said.

Although one purpose of the roughly $10 million that people donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund after the massacre was to cover victims’ tuition, Sterne financed his two-year master’s degree with the teaching job and a research grant for his radar work. He used his grant from the memorial fund to pay off his undergraduate loans.

“I was working pretty steadily in the week, and then weekends; it seems like I was always having to get in the car and drive,“ he said. There were onceor twice-monthly hauls back home to Pennsylvania for doctors’ visits, as well meetings in Richmond with state officials.

“Sometimes, I’d end up driving 12 hours for a 15-minute doctor’s visit,“ he said. “But all the doctors I started with were up there, and they needed to follow up.“

. . .

His mother still worries that his heavy workload has slowed his recovery. He still has the bullet in his hip—“until it starts hurting me, I have no intentions on risking causing more damage by taking it out,“ he said.

There still are parts of his right foot and thigh he cannot feel because his blood loss caused several muscles in his leg to die, “and they will not regrow.“

He has had to give up skiing and intramural softball.

It wasn’t until last spring that he went on his first hike.

He started modestly—a far cry from his goal of walking the Appalachian Trail some day. A mile the first time, then 2. He always loved hiking the many trails around Tech, and now that’s part of his life again.

During spring break, he and some friends hiked 28 miles along the Appalachian Trail, from Blackhorse Gap north of Roanoke to Apple Orchard Falls, the last day involving climbing a total 2,500 feet before descending about 1,000 feet to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“It was good to be out,“ he said. “But I felt it there, at the end.“