mama says om theme: ache

Even after almost ten years, he sometimes forgets.
"Why is my leg aching so badly?" he wonders.
"It must be about to rain," I remind him.
"Oh yeah! I can't believe I always forget!"

He's only 36 but sometimes seems like an old man with his aches and pains and ability to predict the weather by the feelings in his bones. But he's lucky to even be alive and able to walk.

In the summer of 1996, while working odd construction jobs, he went out to a worksite in Kendalia, Texas on a rainy morning. He was up on the roof of a three story barn when a fellow worker slid some materials to him. He reached for them and lost his footing. The last thing he remembers is going for his hammer to slam the claw side of it into the roof to try to stop his fall. He was too late. He slid over the edge and down 30 feet. His fall was broken by a pole sticking out of the ground below. It broke his femur, the largest bone in the body.

His co-worker came running around the corner and saw him lying there. He threw up. My husband was in shock and was trying to move his contorted leg from it's unnatural position back to where it was supposed to be.

They were so far from a major city that a helicopter was sent out for him. They had to move him to an open area to be picked up and the nearest open area happened to be a cemetery. He was confused as they took him there and thinking they were just going to bury him, said, "I'm not dead yet!"

He made it to the hospital in San Antonio which, sadly for him, was a teaching hospital. They learned a lot from working on him. When he first arrived, they could not give him any more pain meds than the paramedics had already given him until he went into surgery. But in the meantime, they had to prep him for surgery and that included drilling a hole in his leg to keep it in traction. The nurse completed the gory task but when the doctor checked her work, it turned out she had drilled in the wrong spot. So she had to unscrew it and start again. The second time she put the drill on his skin, he told her he could feel it because the pain meds were wearing off. Too bad, it had to be done, and it was.

He made it through the surgery in which they put a titanium rod in his leg. He was actually recovering well from that when a few days later he started feeling weird. He told the hospital staff he could not breath right but they said he needed to get up and move around. He collapsed. Some fatty embolisms had leaked from his broken bone and gone to his lungs. His brother who was living in Australia at the time was called and told to return home. His big brother was dying.

After much more time in intensive care, he made it through. He was finally sent home to recover. He went from crutches to a cane and then to independent walking within a short amount of time. He was a former Marine afterall!

One of the most interesting things about his story is about the pole that broke his fall. As awful as it was, it could have been so much worse. By breaking his leg, it prevented him from landing on his head or breaking his neck or back. Just a few days before the accident, he had been asked to remove the pole from the ground. He is as strong as they come and he tried everything possible to get it out but it would not budge. Later, after the accident, a young boy was told to remove the pole because no one could bear to look at it and think of what had happened. The boy walked over and plucked it out of the ground with no effort at all.

We joke about how God kicked my husband off of that roof to get him back on the right track in his life. He was headed the wrong way and needed to take that detour. He's a stubborn man and I guess it takes a lot to get his attention. He listens a little better now. And every time his leg aches, you can count on rain within the next day or two.

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