BLOOD, SWEAT, & TEARS (#49): Things didn’t always work out like I planned, and there were some serious injuries along the way. I am fortunate they weren’t worse.
The first occurred on a Sunday morning, before we were going to go to a Bucs football game. During construction we had saved all of the pressure treated lumber trim pieces so that I could use them for flower beds borders. I’d lay out the pieces, then get on my knees with a 26 ounce framing hammer. Using the rip claw I would did a trench, place the board, and pound it in the ground. Then it happened. My left thumb slip over on top of the 2” x 8” I was pounding and I hit my thumb as hard as I could.
Damn that hurt! When I was installing insulation in the walls of the house using a staple hammer, I had stapled my thumb once, but just on the tip and I didn’t lose my thumb nail. I thought to myself, “I bet you are going to lose your thumb nail now!” When I looked, I couldn’t even see a thumb nail. The end of my thumb was split apart like a squished red grape. Between the two pieces of skin, I could see blood, bone, and daylight.
Holding my thumb, I ran up stairs yelling for Linda, “You have to take me to the hospital!” She looked at me in gym shorts and tennis shoes and said, “Like that?” I screamed, “I can’t let go of my thumb to put on a shirt! Just grab a towel and the truck keys. Hurry!”
On the way to the hospital I passed out. When I came to I said, “I know something bad happened, but I don’t remember what.” Linda just said, “Look at you thumb.”
Luckily a good friend of the family, orthopedic surgeon Royce Hobby, came in to operate on my thumb. When he first saw it, he just shook his head and said, “Scott, I’ve seen some terrible things. I’ve seen someone lose their leg in a motorcycle accident. But I have never seen anyone do that much damage to their thumb with a hammer.” I just said weakly, “Well, it was a big hammer.”
Dr Hobby did a great job and most of my thumb and thumb nail grew back. For a week I was in a lot of pain. I had to sleep with my hand propped up on a night stand and walk around with my thumb at least at heart level. The first time the bandage was changed, part of the cut had grown over the gauze and had to be opened to get the bandage out. I was taking a lot of Tylenol with codeine for pain.
Two Sunday’s later, I called Dr. Hobby to tell him my thumb still hurt badly. He asked how many pain pills I had taken. When I told him three, he said to have Linda drive me to his office. When he looked at my thumb, he said he had missed a sliver of bone and would cut it out. While he was cutting we heard a loud thump.
Linda had been looking over his shoulder and had passed out. Dr. Hobby put a blood pressure cuff around my arm and got some smelling salts for Linda. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt when she fell.
The second accident was much more serious. It was the night after my birthday, and I was home alone watching the finals of the NBA Playoffs. At half time I went downstairs and walked around the yard. I always saw things differently at night, and sometimes got a good idea for landscaping. This wasn’t one of them. I started thinking about the mess my Sea Grapes made when they dropped their fruit. I got a pair of clippers and went back up stairs to clip the fruit buds off the tall Sea Grape at the corner of the porch.
In the process of trimming I leaned out too far and slipped, going over the guard rail. I manage to briefly grab a branch, but it slipped out of my hand and I fell 13 feet to the granite curb that I had laid at the entrance to the downstairs. Luckily, I landed on my head – and my right elbow, and my right knee. I laid there for a minute taking stock of what I could move. I was able to get up and limp upstairs.
I called my sister to see if she could come check on me, but she was putting her two little girls to bed. So, I called my girl friend, who was away on a business trip, and told her what had happened. She asked where I was. I told her a had made it upstairs and was laying on the bed. “You aren’t bleeding on the new bedspread are you?” I told her I wasn’t, that I had gotten a towel and was bleeding on that, but I was so cold I was shaking. “You are going into shock. Call 911 you idiot!”
I called 911 and as they were wheeling me out on a stretcher, the phone rang. One of the paramedics answered, “He can’t come to the phone now. We’re taking him to the hospital!” Turned out it was Steve Beach calling from Ohio to wish me happy birthday.
I was in the hospital for four days, with a concussion, stitches by my right eye, a sprained right elbow, and a broken right knee cap. It could have been a lot worse.
At the time, I was working as Director of Planned Giving & Major Gifts for Abilities of Florida, a non-profit that helped people suffering from brain and spinal cord injuries. A few months earlier one of the Vice President’s had come into my office, “You know how we always say, it could happen to any one of us? My brother races hydroplanes and his flipped Saturday. He is going to be a paraplegic.” When I got home from the hospital, I read about the Principal of Plant High School in Tampa who was cleaning his gutters. He fell off his ladder and was a quadriplegic.
I just needed to keep my right leg straight in a brace with no weight on it for two months. One of my parents or my brother drove me to work, with me in the back of the four door with my leg across the seat. I dressed in a coat and tie and Tommy Bahama shorts. For years after, it bothered me to wear long pants.
The last injury wasn’t so bad, just a torn rotator cuff in my left shoulder, but how I did it is the story. The city was doing some extensive work on Pass-a-grille Way and kept dumping small limestone rock at the entrance to the alley. I made friends with the construction crew and let them play basket ball using the hoop over the driveway during their lunch break.
I asked them if I could spread out a “little” of the rock over the sand alley and they said, “Sure.” I worked for two nights; 27 shovels full to fill the wheelbarrow, 25 wheelbarrows dumped each night. The morning after the second night, I couldn’t move my left arm. Dr. Hobby said it was a torn rotator cuff and that if I was careful it might heal on its own, which it did.
When I told the operator of the front end loader what had happened, he said, “Oh man. I’m sorry. I could have dumped a few loads for you. No problem.” He dumped one more load of rocks and spread it out. The alley looked great until the next hurricane. After that, Howard paid to have a dump truck full of crushed shell brought in and spread.