HOUSTON – It is a brand new day, a brand new mission, and a brand new future for marine veteran Christopher Katthage of Houston.
Talk about tough? Katthage is an award-winning bodybuilder, physical trainer, and former combat veteran who fought in Iraq right after 911 and whose life has nearly been stolen from him twice since then.
In April of 2021, he was shot 9 times by two thugs that he encountered in the parking lot of his apartment complex.
He underwent 9 different surgeries and he was in intensive care for months.
He fell into a coma and had to have his entire digestive system rebuilt.
But he survived, because of his never-give-up attitude.
”Every morning you got to get up and get happy and get moving. Life does not stop and every morning you gotta keep up with it,” Katthage said.
After the shooting, Katthage lost 80 pounds and nearly died several times, but built himself back into body-building shape then in April of this year, exactly two years later, he lost control of his motorcycle and plunged off the top of a freeway overpass, tearing his right leg off in the process.
“When I went off the overpass, I was sure I was going to die. I made my peace with it, I folded my arms and fell 60 feet onto a moving police car. I bounced off that and rolled about 15 feet along the highway,” Katthage said.
Yes, Katthage lost his leg, amputated from the thigh down, but now, barely 6 months later, all of that has changed.
Provided and paid for by the Veterans Administration and made to work by Jason Falknor with The Centers for Mobility, Katthage has what amounts to a brand new, bionic, right leg.
And what does this new leg mean for Katthage? What can he do now?
“I can do anything with this new leg, the world is my oyster,” Katthage says, as a big smile breaks over his face.
So just what makes Katthage so impossible to kill?
”I don’t know what it is, the Marine Corps, my belief in God, so, so much,” Katthage said.
So here’s to the toughest man I have ever known, walking tall, beating the odds, and staying strong.