By Michael Tuggle
“Your son has 12 hours to live.”
That’s what doctors told Chris Lafferty when he brought his six-month-old son Memphis to the hospital in downtown Dallas. Seven days earlier, Chris had taken Memphis to the same ER when the infant’s symptoms had started, and doctors said it was just a virus that would pass. A week later, after Memphis starting turning blue and his eyes started rolling back in his head, doctors confirmed Memphis had bacterial meningitis.
“When they told me Memphis had bacterial meningitis, I said, ‘Alright. Can you just give him a shot?’ and they told me, ‘No. He has 12 hours to live. Call your family.”
Memphis survived the first 12 hours. But what started as every parent’s nightmare only grew worse as doctors induced a coma to give Memphis the best chance to heal. During the next 100 days, Memphis suffered two strokes in his brainstem. To keep him alive, doctors connected the infant to a dialysis-type machine to keep blood pumping to his heart. In the process, Memphis’s extremities died from lack of blood flow and all four of his limbs had to be amputated.
When Memphis was nine months old, doctors woke him up from his coma. But before they did, they prepared Chris for the most likely outcome.
“They said, ‘your son will be brain dead from the strokes and the coma,’” Chris said.
As Memphis emerged from his coma, Chris’s father took three pictures. In the fist, Memphis looks glassy and vacant. In the second, he looks groggy and confused. In the third, with his eyes laser focused on his father, Memphis is smiling, full of love and recognition. Chris turned to the doctors and said, “You don’t know my son.”
At that moment, Chris said he knew Memphis would be alright. He didn’t know how they would get through everything, but they would. And they did. But it hasn’t been easy.
There are only a handful of people in the U.S. with Memphis’s condition. Even when you try, it’s unfathomable to imagine what it must have been like for Memphis to grow up as a quadruple amputee. And yet, from the beginning, Chris has raised Memphis to understand this was simply their version of normal.
“People are going to stare. Curiosity is human nature,” Chris explains, talking to Memphis. “If a pink elephant walked into this room, you’d stare right? We’ll… you’re the pink elephant. In the grocery, at school, in restaurants, wherever, people would stare. But I’d just walk up to them and say, ‘What’s up? I’m Chris and this is Memphis.’ And when Memphis smiled, he humanized the entire situation and all that went away.”
Indeed, seconds after meeting the Flower Mound teen who graduated from Marcus High School last year, any apprehension about doing or saying the wrong thing goes away. Memphis has an absolute gift for disarming people and putting them at ease. Spend an hour with Memphis and Chris and there isn’t an inkling of pity, or sadness. Only inspiration and the overwhelming want to cheer for Memphis and the good he and his father so richly deserve.
Over the course of his childhood, Memphis didn’t let anything slow him down. He learned to surf. He learned to skateboard – grabbing the attention of no less than Paul Rodriguez and Tony Hawk. He learned to box, to weightlift, and to many people’s surprise – to hunt.
It started in seventh grade when Memphis was in an Outdoor Ed class where they were shooting crossbows. When it came time for his turn, Memphis shot a bullseye and the next thing he knew, Channel 4 News in Dallas came out to do a story about the class and Memphis. Randy Cupp, an avid hunter and supporter of wounded veterans, saw the story and invited Memphis out to his ranch. On that visit, Memphis met a wounded warrior who was a triple amputee, who showed Memphis a gun outfitted with a “bite clip” connected to the trigger that enabled him to fire his weapon by biting.
Randy Cupp also had an adapted gun that Memphis was able to use, and very quickly, he was shooting bullseye after bullseye. Seeing that, Randy told Memphis it was time to go hunting.
A longtime supporter of a local nonprofit called Christian Outdoor Ministry (COM), Cupp called up founder Danny Souder and said he had a father and son he wanted to bring hunting. Christian Outdoor Ministry’s mission is to share a love of hunting, Jesus, and the outdoors with Texas youth and their parents, and Souder was thrilled to welcome Chris and Memphis to their next hunt. It was the first of six hunts the Laffertys would share with Souder and COM.
After the first few hunts and seeing how proficient Memphis was with the adapted rifle, Randy Cupp, David Smith, and John Bonnell – all board members of the Sportsmen’s Club of Fort Worth – contacted Daniel Defense and had them scope out an AR-15 adapted rifle just for Memphis. They presented it to him at the Alpine Shooting Range and the rest is history.
In just the last few years, Memphis has increased his hunting, harvesting an incredible array of animals including a ram, deer, turkeys, hogs, and a bison he proudly notes he shot from 120 yards through the fog.
Now 19, Memphis is moving into a new phase of his life where he’s sharing his condition to inspire others and show them that indeed, with God, anything is possible. Memphis is attending amputee camps around the country serving as a mentor to young kids learning to face life without their limbs. He’s participating in the “Class of 33” at Adaptive Training Foundation (ATF), a gym for wounded warriors and professional athletes who have had career ending injuries, that’s soon to be featured in an upcoming Netflix docuseries. And starting this fall, Memphis’s hunting experience will come full circle as he starts working as a guide on hunts with Christian Outdoor Ministry.
“I like how COM incorporates Jesus and the Bible reading into the outdoor experience,” Memphis said. “The work they do is really cool. Getting kids hunting and in the outdoors but also getting them closer to God and to their parents. I’m excited to start serving with them as a guide.”
“COM has brought us closer together as father and son doing things that we were uncomfortable with,” Chris concurred. “Christian Outdoor Ministry is something we’ve loved doing together and we’ll continue to. It’s something everyone should do.”
Watching Chris listen to Memphis tell his story and talk about his dreams and aspirations to be a motivational speaker, to mentor kids, to give hope to veterans, there a sense of overwhelming pride that’s palpable. Memphis is an exceptional young man. And it’s been the guiding hand of his earthly and Heavenly fathers that have led the way since he was six months old.
“We all have big dreams for our kids,” Chris said, “But don’t worry so much about their future, that you miss the present. You have no idea what the future will bring. Live in the present as much as you can.”
