Just Another Day

Or so I thought.



It was the summer after my freshman year in high school just another day of work on the farm.


Had been home for a long lunch and was heading back to work on my motorcycle as usual, when the bike started to cut out.

Now, motorcycles back then were nothing compared to today's bikes. You were constantly working on them to keep them running. Seems like something was always going wrong with them! So rather than pull over and stop I just kinda leaned over and reached down and started to adjust the carburetor, lean it out nope not better ok then richen it up hey that's better.... ok, then a little bit more, and great! I remember sitting back up and looking ahead just in time to hit a pickup.

The next thing I remember is being under the truck trying to get out and my legs felt funny so I looked at them and remember thinking, my toes should not be touching like that. Turned out that I broke both my legs below the knees.

Lucky for me I knew the guy in the pickup so he loaded me up and took me to the hospital where they set my legs and put me in long leg casts.

So I spent the next 6 hot weeks in a chase lounge or wheel chair! getting placed where I was could not move around too much. 6 weeks of nothing. Did not get TV so I did a lot of reading, built a lot of models, anything to not go crazy.

Finally the 6 weeks was up and it was time to go see the specialist! They had me show up at lunch time as they had no idea how long it would take. Could go into a lot of boring details here, but the only points that still stick out was that I was put into short leg casts (Who hoo) and when I was being wheeled out I'll never forget when they opened the door to the waiting room. It was full of people and one guy stuck out. He was feeling really sorry for himself and he was making sure everyone knew it but when he saw me there was an immediate attitude change, in fact that happened in the whole room.

So the rest of my summer was spent occupying myself as best as I could. After 6 weeks tied to a wheel chair I had plenty of energy but was limited to what I could do. There was of course my friend who stopped by each day after changing water and took me to his house to help me keep my sanity.

The rest is basically anticlimactic as I healed twice as fast as the doctors were expecting and have had no side effects from it.

Now the weird part of this story is that I had put my helmet on that day don't know why probably had not used it for a month, but luckily I did for it was the only thing that saved my life. Interesting how things like that go...

It is what it is

Rod