Injured Pittsfield soldier recovers in Texas

PITTSFIELD – It has been a week of surgeries, healing and brief family reunions for Craig Ardry, 30, the Army National Guard specialist from Pittsfield injured in Iraq during an insurgent ambush.

Ardry’s mother, Carol Wyman of Oakland, and his wife, Nanette Ardry, have spent a week with the soldier, who is healing in a U.S. Army hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

Ardry is showing strong signs of improvement and he’s sitting up, according to a relative.

The guardsman was injured while driving in a convoy outside of Mosul.

His mother-in-law, Georgie Farrin of Pittsfield, said Thursday that the skin grafts on Ardry’s right arm and left hand, which doctors warned might not take the first time, seem to be a success.

The doctors who performed an 111/2-hour surgery Tuesday have decided not to put pins in Ardry’s left leg, just above the ankle. They feel confident that it will heal on its own with help from a brace.

He can speak, but hoarsely, because of damage to one of his vocal cords. Farrin said doctors said it would heal on its own or could be fixed through surgery.

Doctors initially thought Ardry had suffered lung damage from the heat and chemicals connected to the explosion in front of the convoy in which Ardry was lead driver. The soldier sitting behind Ardry in the same vehicle, Spc. Christopher Gelineau, was killed in the April 20 attack on the 133rd Engineer Battalion.

Ardry also is having to adjust to other things, including the death of Gelineau, and has a fuzzy understanding of time.

“He asked if the [November] election has been held yet,” Farrin said.

Burns on his face are healing, she said, and he’s starting therapy and is encouraged to sit in a special seat for a few hours each day.

Ardry is glad to have his family by his side at the hospital. Farrin said he doesn’t want his mother and wife to leave Sunday, when they are scheduled to return to Maine.

Farrin said her son-in-law remains in terrible pain, although the hospital has him on a morphine drip and he takes additional medications at night, including sleeping pills to help him rest.

In an earlier operation in Baghdad or Germany, doctors removed a muscle from his left leg, and the soldier likely will require additional support to help him move his foot.

Much healing and rehabilitation lie ahead for Ardry. Farrin said it would be another five weeks before he will be well enough to leave the burn unit, and it will take another three to four months of healing for the burns.

Ardry could require several years of physical therapy, doctors have told the family.