It has been, by any measure, a remarkable decade for Robert Michael Sanders. He’s directed and performed for a dozen theater companies across the Front Range. He’s introduced hundreds, perhaps thousands of young people to live theater. He married one of Colorado’s most admired actors. He wrote and released his second acoustic album under the name Robert Michael. He was named Chief Operating Officer of Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center. He developed a new musical that will soon debut off-Broadway. He’s had a direct hand in helping to raise more than $100,000 for the Denver Actors Fund, a nonprofit that was founded, in large part, in response to the horror he went through back in 2013.

By any measure, that is, but Sanders’. “I don’t think I’m that interesting, to be honest,” he says. On that point, he stands alone, given that he’s done all of that since a badly botched outpatient shoulder surgery left him largely paralyzed from shoulders to fingertips. It’s remarkable that he found a way to climb out of the resulting despair and anger at all. Because, in the early days, when the finality of it all started to fully sink in – that he was never going to be able to lift a hammer, firmly grasp his future wife’s hand or pick a guitar ever again – Sanders was put on a suicide watch.

“I expressed to people that I would happily off myself if only I were able to hold onto something with my hands,” he says now with the same pragmatic, caustic sense of humor he shares with his wife, Megan Van De Hey. Suicide was of no great concern to her at the time. “Not to make light of it,” she says, “but the likelihood of him being able to carry it out was probably slim to none. The idea of him pulling a trigger? That was not going to happen.”

If you have met Sanders since April 24, 2013, there’s a good chance you don’t even know that his right hand only sort of works – and his left hand, barely at all. “I still have no triceps, no pecs,” he says. Another thing he hides beautifully, Van De Hey adds, “is that he is in nerve pain 24-7. Every day.”

For that, he takes a pain blocker called Gabapentin – 2400 milligrams a day. “Ten years later, I can’t live without it,” he says with blunt honesty.

Ten years with a disability does not seem to Sanders like something to celebrate. But those of us who watched it play out in front of our eyes believe Sanders’ story, and, more important – his response to it – should be shouted from rooftops.

I mentioned Sanders’ 10-year anniversary this week on Facebook, and it stirred deeply conflicting memories and emotions in him, even as it elicited public admiration and anecdotes from friends and strangers alike.

“You are SO MUCH MORE than what you used to do … or what you ever will do,” wrote his pal and frequent co-star, Shannan Steele. “Robert is a super-special person, one-of-a-kind in the very best way,” added his friend, Rebecca Joseph, a mother of two who was widowed in 2017 at age 34.

“I feel this wonderful gratitude and appreciation for where I’ve gotten to now,” Sanders says. “I’ve managed to move through and move forward. All that’s great. But what’s hard for me to accept is that a lot of people don’t know that I’m still actually super messed up. People don’t know that I’m not all better. And part of that is because I hide it.”

But he’s pretty much done hiding it. Because he has nothing to hide.

April 24, 2013

I’m all mixed up in this story because, back in April 2013, I was directing a pretty big production of “Always, Patsy Cline” at the PACE Center in Parker, with Van De Hey cast as Patsy Cline herself.

Sanders, a Denver native and graduate of Broomfield High School, was by this time one of the few local professional union actors who had managed to find steady work on one show or another for a solid, seven-year stretch. Still, a significant part of his income was coming from construction and set-building jobs – work that had done a number on his shoulder over the years. He was scheduled for a rotator-cuff procedure that is so ordinary, the patient doesn’t even lie down on a table – he sits up in a chair.

The couple scheduled the surgery for April 24 because that was the Wednesday after our show was supposed to close – but because we had pretty much sold out the whole run, we were offered one more weekend of extended performances. Sanders would be home by mid-day Wednesday, so Van De Hey would have no trouble working in a few more shows starting Thursday.

She delivered Sanders to Denver Health at 6 a.m. Wednesday and got him all settled in. When he was taken in for surgery, she ran a few errands like picking up his prescriptions and favorite foods. When the procedure was over, “I remember the surgeon coming out and telling me that everything had gone really well,” she says.

It had not – but no one inside that operating room was saying anything about it. In recovery, Sanders went from characteristically grumpy to uncharacteristically agitated. The nerve block wasn’t wearing off. He was groggy and in pain. And Van De Hey wasn’t getting any help. She tweaked her back trying to help Sanders adjust his position in the bed. After three hours of this, she lost it. “I had my Shirley MacLaine moment,” she admits with a grin. “I kicked a chair and yelled, ‘We need some (bleeping) help here!’ And that’s when they finally took him in for an MRI to see what was going on.”

On the way into the MRI machine, Sanders went out. And then … he lost a week.

It was only many months later that Sanders learned that during the surgery, his blood pressure crashed. Then his oxygen. Normal is 96-100%. “Mine got down to 37%,” he says, “and 37% is considered brain-dead.”

The damage becomes clear

Doctors later told Sanders that when his blood pressure fell, the three discs of his spine that control his hand and some arm movement were temporarily deprived of oxygen. And the impact of that oxygen deprivation was the equivalent of a skeletal stroke.

Sanders was moved to Craig Hospital for extended-care physical therapy that he continued as an outpatient for the next two years. After that, what hasn’t come back, he was told … never comes back. Doctors estimate he plateaued at about 50 percent of his past life.

“I don’t think anybody can fully prepare you for what life is going to be like when you try to reinsert yourself back into your routine after something like that,” Van De Hey says. And Sanders, she adds, was really, really angry. She told him to stop taking it out on his medical team, and to put that energy into his rehab instead.

“I went from being a full-time actor and musician to a spinal injury that required me to effectively re-learn how to walk, among other things,” says Sanders, who naturally wondered if anyone would ever hire him again.

They did. First, Rod Lansberry at the Arvada Center. Then Charlie Packard at the Aurora Fox. Then Pat Payne at Cherry Creek Theater. Lansberry cast Sanders in “A Christmas Carol” even though Sanders couldn’t hold his own script – or even the huge ring of keys his character was supposed to carry. Lansberry didn’t particularly need Sanders to play this role. But the way it works in union theater is that if you don’t work, you don’t keep your health insurance. Lansberry hired Sanders to help him keep his. Producers started hiring Sanders as a director or assistant director to both keep income coming in and his self-esteem from crashing. But before long, they were back to hiring him, despite whatever adjustments needed to be made, because he’s considered one of the best actors in Denver. 

The local theater community did what it often does in response to stories like these – they raised money to help Sanders with his immediate expenses. Around that time, I was starting a new nonprofit called the Denver Actors Fund so that money might already be available to help the next Sanders.

And Sanders fully joined the cause. “He’s kind of like this poster child for why we really needed the Denver Actors Fund,” Van De Hey says.

Over the next five years, Sanders produced and presented a fun annual event called “Miscast” that raised more than $30,000. Since becoming CEO of the Town Hall Arts Center, he has designated one performance of every production to fully benefit the Denver Actors Fund – raising $32,000 since the start of the 2021-22 season alone.

Sanders holds many personal milestones from the past decade. Being able to hold a fork again – and keep food on it. Getting his driver’s license back. A big one was performing two solo cabaret concerts at the Aurora Fox in 2019, even though he had to hire musicians to play the piano and guitar parts he used to perform on his own. It was the start of a whole new way of making music.

He also cites being welcomed into Phamaly, the acclaimed Denver theater company that exists to create performance opportunities for actors with disabilities. He played Bellomy in “The Fantasticks,” Henry Higgins in “Pygmalion” and Amos Hart in “Chicago.” One of his co-stars was Lucy Roucis, a ferocious actor who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2021. “Lucy told me, ‘The sun is still going to rise, the sky’s still going to be blue, and even though life has dramatically changed for you, there are certainties,’” he says. “Those words have stayed with me.”

Perhaps the greatest milestone of Sanders’ decade is that he did not simply roll over. And for that, he credits Van De Hey. “Without her, I absolutely would have given up – no question,” he says. Van De Hey, for her part, can see Sanders’ journey from a more objective perspective. She sees a man who, limitations and all, has nevertheless emerged as an indisputably improved version of the Robert Michael Sanders of April 23, 2013.

“I think very few people could have everything taken away from them like he did and still have room for growth and rediscovery,” she says. “I can tell you it would have ruined me. I wouldn’t have come back from it. If somebody took away my passion, my livelihood, I would not have been half as graceful as he has been throughout all of it.”

It’s significant that Monday’s 10-year anniversary almost came and went without Sanders’ notice. “I had completely forgotten about it because we were at Town Hall preparing to host a Denver Actors Fund event that night,” he says.

But then came the Facebook reminder. And when he saw the outpouring from the local theater community, he made an instant promise to himself to make something positive of this moment.

“I immediately reached out to my writing partner and said, ‘It’s time for another album,’” he says. “We decided on the spot that’s how we’re going to celebrate this particular milestone – and it is going to happen.

“It’s funny that, in my attempt to forget all about it – to scratch it out of my existence – it’s going to be a jumping off point instead,” he says. 

Moving through and moving forward. The start of another remarkable decade.