Okay, so now it was yesterday.
I got sidetracked...
Anywho, back to the mother of all car wrecks.
Seems that around 5:30ish I was coming down the Creedmore Lakes Road in Red Feather and didn't negotiate the corner just west of the Pot Belly Restaurant and hit a logging truck head on.
Why didn't I negotiate the corner properly?
Cuz I was drunk.
Several hours later in the ER at Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft. Collins they gave me a blood alcohol test and it came up .028...today .008 is the legal limit!
I don't remember the accident, and it's not because I was drunk. The body and mind have marvelous coping mechanisms and one of them is amnesia. I suffered what's called both retro and antegrade amnesia, meaning that I don't remember anything for 3 days before the accident nor 3 weeks after.
I was member of the Red Feather Lakes Fire Department EMT team, the first responder team that was called in to the wreck and I was sooooo mangled as was my car that the first two on the scene did not recognize me.
Huh, drunk driver in Ford Escort vs. logging truck...drunk driver looses.
I believe they extracted me from the car and prepared me as best they could with the resources they had for the paramedics who arrived in the Flight for Life helicopter that whisked me away to PVH...my only helicopter ride and I don't remember it!
They got me to the hospital and on the gurney between the helicopter and the ER my heart stopped for the first time so they had to jump start me once they got me inside. That was the first of three times that the ol' ticker said, "Enough!"...well, it warn't exactly old at the time, I was only 36.
'Bout two hours into emergency it quit again so they jump started me again.
While they were assessing and treating me they discovered that I had:
- Smashed the kneecap on my right leg so they just took it out, hence I still have no kneecap on my right leg. Do you know what they call that operation? I didn't, but then again why should I or you have known unless we were prepping for Alex Trebec and Jeopardy...it's a "pattelectomy"...just sorta rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
- Snapped my right femur, a.k.a. thigh bone, in half, dang 'neer right in the middle. So they but a stainless steel rod, called a nail, into the length, but not breadth of my femur. My son Matt doesn't know this but when I croak he gets it and maybe he can use it for shish-ka-bobs.
- Broke the pinky finger along with several other bones in my right hand so they put a cast ... nothing dramatic here...yet.
- Had what's called a commuted fracture of my right hip, meaning that the femur, I'm assuming prior to being snapped in half or this is what caused the snap, was jammed up into the hip socket so that it caused a fracture.
- Broken my jaw in three places...I ain't never going back to those places! Think about it...get it? It's a joke!
- Had actually pulled the nerves out of my spinal cord that control many, but not all of the motor and sensory functions of my left arm, hence I'm a "Uniplegic"! In the medical texts I'm really a monoplegic meaning that I have paralysis of one limb...a paraplegic would have lost the use of two limbs, a teraplegic would have lost three and a quadriplegic four. I just like "uniplegic" better cuz I made it up.
- Probably the most debilitating thing was a "closed head injury" with some minor, although some people would say major, brain damage. All the other things healed in time as best they could and I have learned to live with as I have learned to live with the whack on the head and the ensuing cognitive defects which I still have and haunt me at times...but good things come in weird packages. Some 20 years after the wreck I got to play in the sand and be sort of a research subject for my friend Dr. Lorraine Freedle.
- Many years after the wreck it was determined that I had actually broken my neck where the nerves were pulled out so the went in and took a bone chip out that was pressing on my spinal cord causing me a lot of pain beneath my left shoulder blade, fused a couple of vertebrae and stuck a couple of rods in my neck.
- And there were some other things which left some scars and such.
And you thought I wasn't paying attention!
At 2:04 in the morning, and I can picture this without closing my eyes and, no this is not an out of body experience, I can see myself in intensive care all bandaged, intubated and hooked up to one of those machines that monitor sinus rhythm {I think that's the term for one's heart rate} and it's going along fine going "blip" and peaking, "blip" and valleying, up and down, up and down when all of sudden "bzzzzzzzzzzt", a.k.a. flat line. So they came a runnin' and jump started me again.
now the lesson that I have learned from this is invaluable and has kept me going through some pretty tough times.
"The lesson?", you ask.
The lesson being that lifes ups and downs are normal and that "bzzzzzzzzzzz", a.k.a. "things" just going along "just fine" is pretty dangerous.
Now, y'all, remember the retrograde and antegrade amnesia?
Lemme 'splain, Lucy...
Seems like three (3) days before the accident I had spent the entire day going over my subdivision, Mountain Meadows (the 9 hole sand green golf course in Red Feather) with the Larimer County Health Department and no, I was not drunk and I don't remember that or taking Matt down to Fort Collins and dropping him off with Linda for a few days...I wasn't drunk and not in a black out. I've only had one black out and that was a couple of years later on my last drinking binge!
I don't remember where or how I got so intoxicated on the fateful day of the wreck, either.
Antegrade amnesia.
Apparently I had been throwing a hissy fit in the hospital after they moved me out of Intensive Care and into a regular room. I think this was may have been week after the wreck, or sooner.
They had not put me in a cast for my broken hip and femur but had me in this elaborate splint held together with Velcro. They wanted to start physical therapy on my "knee" as soon as they could.
I wanted to go back to work and they people trying to care for me weren't hearing me...so I tried to escape!
They found me in the wee hours of the morning crumpled up in front of an elevator!
So it was back to the Operating Room to redo my leg & hip and they went ahead and put me in a body cast.
Sidebar (Had anybody ever heard of a "sidebar" before the OJ trial?): When they took out the pieces of a once splendid kneecap and stitched up the incision they left about 4 or 5 inches of what appeared to be fishing leader that they used to stitch with on neither side of the incision, and for the almost 3 months I had that body cast on I had a constant itching where the suture material was rubbing on my skin under the cast. Because while I was under the influence...chuckle, chuckle...of the antegrade amnesia I was such a boisterous chronic malcontent, everybody just blew off my b****ing {I just noticed that "itch" centers in the word "bitching"...isn't that interesting. Maybe not to you, but now to me as that was the "problem".}. I'm lucky I didn't get some sort of gangrenous infection from my attempts to scratch that itch by cramming an unfurled coat hanger down the cast.
Remember my broken jaw? And how they set and hold it together with what looks like braces?
Well, a few days after the foiled escape attempt I must have had something terribly important to say because somehow using my casted right hand I managed to rip out/off a good portion of the "braces". That had to have been really tricky because I was then in restraints...I had both arms tethered to the siderails of the bed.
So, another trip to the OR, not Oregon...although that might have been a thought and my brother Kevin who lives in Portland could have become one of Americas Most Wanted for harboring a fugitive...to rewire my jaw together.
After that incident and until I "came to" I was moved to what was then called the Evergreen Unit, known on the inside as the psych ward and I had to be guarded 24/7. They actually hired an off duty Deputy Sheriff to help shoulder the burden!
Now, remember my chronic malcontentedness?
This is all taking place in July of 1985 and I didn't quit smoking until January of 1991.
Poudre Valley Hospital had just gone non-smoking but I raised such holy hell that they allowed me to smoke! They still p***ed me off by rationing me to one pack a day.
Now, remember I'm still being restrained so whenever I wanted a smoke, or to suck on a straw to down my broth (Remember my jaw is wired shut...), my "guard" had to untether my right arm and stood close by while I finished my smoke or my broth.
Remember that closed head injury?
One of the immediate problems I had was that my short term memory was, and still sometimes is(?) shot. One of the things that I could have to "eat" were milkshakes.
Hospital meals, and milkshakes do not appear in real time. There's a delay of at least 30 minutes or so. So I'd hit the Nurses help button and they would respond and I'd order a milkshake. She or he would politely say, "Coming right up!" or some such uplifting response and walk out of the room.3.6530293687 minutes later I'd forget that I ordered a milkshake and place another order and the nurse wold come in, take my order and say, "Coming right up!".
And this would go on until I got my milkshake.
There's more "stuff", but originally I thought I'd just comment on what went on July 10, 1985 but I got sidetracked and then I got sidetracked again so as you can see this is posted on July 12...
Oh, well.
Anywho, thanks for accompanying me down Memory Lane...or the Creedmore Lakes road.
If I was gettin' fancy about this I'd have to thank some Dr.s and Nurses for telling me what went on during that 3 weeks after the accident where I was conscious but have no recollection of what happened.
You know, if I survived all that, beating this cancer thing is a piece of cake!
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