MONROE — As a 5-year-old, Collyn Wilde had to adapt to living with Tourette’s Syndrome. Early medicines weren’t the easiest way out, but over time he learned that hyper-focus helped mitigate some of his twitches.
Among a variety of interests, he took on sports as a youth and claimed a hole-in-one while playing on the high school golf team. He also loved to bowl and helped the Monroe High School bowling team reach the state tournament all four years, including bringing home the state championship as a junior in 2017.
Wilde graduated in 2018 and went to school in Milton for welding. He lives with a friend in Monroe, and tries to follow the golf team when the season is ongoing. He’s also an assistant with the bowling team.
Now three years removed from high school, he’s spent more of his free time as an outdoorsman, fishing in lakes, ponds, rivers and creeks, and hunting during whatever season is open. He’s currently preparing for the upcoming turkey season.
But on Oct. 3, 2020, Wilde was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the unexpected nearly ruined all of the fun for good. Wilde was in a tree stand bowhunting with a friend of his when the stand broke.
“I fell 15-18 feet, landed on my feet, and broke three vertebra,” Wilde said. “It was excruciating pain. I was paralyzed from the waist down for about 10 minutes, then I started getting my feeling and movements back. It was very scary.”
He spent the next five days hospitalized, alone, due to the pandemic and the fact that he was an adult.
“After a lot of discussions with the spinal surgeon, he had two options: They could do surgery to repair it or Collyn could wear a back brace made for him to try to let the fractures heal,” said his mother Kellie Wilde. “He was in excruciating pain and scared he would never walk again or be able to do the things he loved.”
He opted for a personalized, fitted brace, a thoracic lumbar sacral orthosis brace (TLSO). For the next 2 1/2 months he moved back into his parent’s house to recover.
His dad, Dennis Wilde, took him to his doctor’s appointments. By the fourth week, X-Rays were beginning to show signs of healing.
“The recovery process was hard — it was not easy to go through. You go from being so self-sufficient and independent with everything, to being able to do so little. When you break your back to the severity that I did and how I did it, you can hardly move at certain times without being in excruciating pain,” Wilde said.
By Christmas he was back to living on his own, away from his parent’s house. At a Dec. 31 doctor’s appointment, he was given the all-clear to return to work and sports — though he had to retrain his body how to do much of it, and safer this time.
“I was fully out of it and back to pretty much my normal self — back into bowling, softball, golf, back to work, and everything,” Wilde said. “After going through the recovery process, I feel awesome. I can do everything I could before — to an extent. I’m not quite 100% yet, I am very well on my way to getting there. You just have to bear down an get through it — do what you have to do.”
He said that the recovery process is more than just getting back to physically being able to get around.
“I know physically that I am pretty much 100% back. Mentally I am not. In the back of your head you think, ‘If I stick a little bit in bowling, I could hurt myself; or swing a golf club a little too hard I could overtwist or pull a muscle or hurt myself,’ and it’s the same thing with softball. You’ve just got to get over that mental blockage. Once you get that back, everything is limitless.”
Wilde jumped back into competition at the Tuesday Night Best league at Leisure Lanes. Less than three months after getting the brace off and returning to daily life, Wilde bowled his first-ever league-sanctioned 300, a perfect game of 12 straight strikes, on March 9.
“Exhilarating. Nervous. Exciting,” Wilde said, trying to wrap up his mixture of emotions. “I mean, it’s not easy to do — it’s one of the harder things to do in sports.” Twice before Wilde had rolled a 300, but both times were while practicing and not during a sanctioned event.
He said by the time he was halfway through with the round he had a shot at the mark.
“After the fifth frame and I carried the one, I knew I had a pretty good shot. I get all the way to the 10th, then I got the first at the 10th and knew that I had a really good shot. I threw my 11th and got a little lucky, and then I thought, ‘OK, roll a strike’ — and I hit it perfect,” Wilde said.
While it’s hard to come across many people that have hit a hole in one or bowled a 300, it’s even rarer to find someone who has done both. Wilde said that in his eyes, it sort of sets him apart from others, while also remaining humble to the fact that because there is a bit of luck involved, it could happen to anyone.
“A hole-in-one has a lot of luck, but it has a lot of skill involved — the same with a 300. You still have to be skilled enough to hit the shot or throw the ball to give yourself a chance to shoot a 300. It’s a lot of luck and a lot of skill and a lot of talent,” Wilde said. “In a way, it sets me above some others, but also, we’re all human and we could all do it if we tried hard enough.”
His mother was excited, too.
“The doctors told him he was lucky to be alive, let alone walk again. And he did it and then some,” she said.
A hole-in-one, a 300, and a five-time member of the “Fish of 10,000 casts” club
He’s found that in adult life, he’s ready to come home from work most days and relax — or head out to do some fishing or hunting. He and his friends have multiple spots they frequent, a pond here, a small creek or a river there. Sometimes on a weekend they may drive a few hours away and stay overnight on the river in order to catch something good. When in doubt, he said Yellowstone Lake and the river below the dam have a more-than-adequate supply of fish.
“You can catch pike, walleye, musky, bass, suckers, different carp — there’s so many fish down there now because they’ve either gone over the dam or they all swim up the river. If you get up there at the right time with the right lure, you can catch a lot of fish — but it’s all about timing,” Wilde said.
He caught his first musky with his current roommate years ago. He no more than cast out his lure from the lake when he noticed something peculiar. He cast out again to the same spot and was met with surprise.
“I no more than clicked the reel with two cranks and I nailed it. I fought him for probably a good half hour,” Wilde said of catching his first musky.
The duo used butterfly nets they brought along for catching minnows to haul the musky out of the water. “It was quite a day,” Wilde said. “I’ve caught five muskies out of there now, though I think I’ve caught the same one twice.”
