My dad is what you might call accident prone. My first clear memory of one of his gory accidents is from a firewood cutting excursion somewhere in the White Mountains of Arizona. I don’t recall exactly how old I was – probably around five. I thoroughly enjoyed our occasional trips into the woods, as I was allowed to run around and imagine myself some sort of woodland creature or forest fairy while my parents chopped and loaded firewood. One afternoon, the constant buzz of the chainsaw stopped and my play was interrupted, first by my dad yelling for my mom, then by my mom just plain yelling and finally by my mom yelling for me to hurry up and get in the car. I came scurrying back to the clearing to find my dad cursing loudly and limping about, his jeans soaked in blood. He had slipped with the chainsaw, right into his leg.
I recall feeling mildly concerned but more disappointed that my play in the woods had been cut short. That sounds a bit callous, but these sorts of calamities were quite common and even though the Chainsaw to the Leg Incident is the first one I have a specific memory of, I had been witnessing others since my birth. In fact, one of my dad’s accidents is responsible for my name. Shortly before I was born, he fell off of a barrel (I believe he was substituting it for a ladder) and knocked himself unconscious. A little neighbor girl named Rhonda saw what happened and ran to tell her parents, who came to the rescue. After that, my dad refused to consider any other names or even the possibility of my mom giving birth to a boy. Ronda (no “h”) it was.
The accidents have continued in a steady stream, ranging from relatively minor to extremely serious. I can’t begin to count the gashes and burns and punctures and contusions. In one particularly grisly episode, my mom’s grocery shopping was interrupted by my dad racing into the store with a piece of metal sticking out of his eye. She was forced to leave her cart mid-aisle and rush him to the hospital. My mom began keeping a box of bandages on the counter inside the front door because she grew annoyed with blood being splattered all the way through the house en route to the bandage drawer in the bathroom. I haven’t lived in the same town as my parents for more than 20 years and I still can’t hear an ambulance siren without momentarily being gripped with fear and wondering where my dad is.
Me and my dad, circa 1980. He looks normal enough. No visible ghastly injuries. Speaking of appearances, I must have been at one of those awkward ages. I was getting too old for the pigtails and my teeth are all messed up – some are missing, some are growing in and many of them are saying “You, my little friend, can look forward to years of orthodontics.”
My dad’s accidents have become a bit of a family joke. “What did Larry do this time?!” The frequency and freakishness of his mishaps truly stand out, and I think humor is the only way we know how to handle the situation without going out of our minds with worry. Besides, he always bounces back like some sort of indestructible cartoon character. Until a year ago this week, that is, when he fell off a ladder and suffered a serious head injury. My mom was at work, so we’ll never know exactly what happened, but by piecing together various clues, trails of blood and vomit, and the condition my dad was in, we are fairly certain that he fell early in the morning. Somehow he made it into the house where my mom found him late that evening. An ambulance transported him to the hospital and from there he was airlifted to a bigger hospital. I was at the beach, eating ice cream with my son when I got my mom’s call. At first I thought it was going to be the usual “boy-did-he-get-lucky” sort of scenario, but it quickly became clear that this time was different. I remember it in slow motion – standing there with ice cream dripping onto my legs, my confused and alarmed son staring at me as I said, “Mom! NO!” after she responded to my question, “Is he going to be alright?” with “I really don’t know.”
The good news is that my dad is alright now, or at least as alright as he can be after the kind of injuries he sustained. He’s alright in the sense that he isn’t dead or seriously brain damaged. The fall broke multiple ribs and fractured his skull in three places, resulting in brain bleeds. When I first saw him in the ICU, he knew who I was but couldn’t remember or figure out much more than that. Given the extent of his injuries, we are thankful to have him back on his feet and doing almost everything he used to do despite occasional issues with balance and short-term memory loss. He is also now deaf in his right ear (which was previously his “good” ear) as a result of fracturing his mastoid bone all the way through. To commemorate the passage of a year since his fall and to celebrate the fact that it turned out much better than it could have, I decided to compile a collection of some of my dad’s most memorable accidents.
Ski Patrol
My dad is an excellent skier, so when I was very young and just learning, his habit was to ski with me in the morning and then turn me over to my mom in the afternoon so he could hit the more advanced runs. At the end of one crisp, sunny day on the slopes, I was riding the lift with my mom, admiring the wintery landscape, when I noticed something interesting going on below us.
“Look, Mommy,” I said, pointing at the scene below.
“What?” she answered distracted and tired.
“Look, Mommy! Over there!”
“Oh yeah, the ski patrol.”
“What are they doing with that person on the stretcher?”
“Well, that skier must have gotten hurt. They’ll carry him down the mountain.”
“But Mommy“, I said, “It’s DADDY!”
And sure enough, it was my dad, bleeding all over the snow and being strapped to a stretcher for transport down the mountain. Actually “mountain” is a bit of an exaggeration, seeing as he was on the “bunny hill” when the accident happened.
Proper Pitchfork Protocol
Undoubtedly the most dramatic dad disaster I ever witnessed happened the summer I turned nine. My dad was burning brush in a gigantic bonfire. I watched him use a pitchfork to scoop a stray pile of branches onto the fire. When he put the pitchfork down, I picked it up and pretended to do what he had done. I made the mistake of putting it back down with the prongs pointing up and got a lecture about how dangerous that is. “You see,” my dad explained, “if you fell down, you would land right on the prongs.” I eyed the sharp, rusty prongs, clearly understood my error, and promptly turned the pitchfork over. The next time my dad used the pitchfork, he set it back down exactly how he had just told me not to – prongs up. Seconds later, he tripped over a can of gasoline and fell. From the other side of the fire, my mom and I felt a burst of flames, heard my dad screaming and saw him writhing on the ground. We thought for sure he was on fire and ran to him as quickly as we could. Fortunately, he was not on fire, but he did have a pitchfork sticking all the way through his shin. My mom helped him limp to the truck, where he grabbed the pitchfork and yanked it back out of his leg. They were arguing about who would drive to the emergency room and for some reason, my dad insisted he would do it. You can’t really drive a car with a giant pitchfork sticking through your leg, so I guess his only option was to pull it out, but based on how much it seemed to hurt, I’m not sure it was the right choice.
Half the Thumb it used to be
When I was in junior high, two of my best friends had birthdays in November, days apart from each other. It became tradition to combine the festivities. One year we had a big slumber party planned – scavenger hunts, pizza, scary movies and Duran Duran videos. One of the moms picked us up after school on Friday. She had a very serious expression on her face as she pulled me aside and told me that my dad had been in an accident and was at the hospital with my mom. I smiled and said, “OK, thanks.” She obviously had no idea what a routine occurrence this was for me and was a little thrown by my nonchalant reaction. By this time the other girls began to gather around. “What happened?” I asked. “Well . . .” she tried to choose her words carefully but ultimately decided to just tell it like it was, “He, uh . . . he, um, well . . . he ground his thumb off.” Indeed, he did. His glove got caught and pulled into a grinder, along with his thumb. All that was left was a bloody nub at the knuckle. Many years and surgeries later, most of the issues have been worked out to some degree of satisfaction, besides the obvious fact that half his thumb is missing.
If the shoe fits
My freshman year of college, my dad was coming to visit for “Dads’ Weekend” and I couldn’t wait to see him. A few days before he was to arrive, I got a call from my mom. There had been an accident. My dad was working on replacing a portion of their deck. He had been removing old boards and throwing them on a pile below. He was taking the nails out, but he must have missed one because when he jumped off the deck onto the pile of boards (don’t ask me why he did that) a nail pierced his foot – through the sole of his shoe and right out the top of his foot. I know nothing about varying nail sizes, except that this one was quite large. And the most gruesome part is that it wasn’t the point of the nail that went through his foot. It was the head. Ouch. A trip to the emergency room resulted in a thorough cleaning and drugs that made my dad loopy. It was not clear whether he would be able to visit as planned. As it turned out, he did visit. He stopped taking the drugs after the first day (because he is loath to take even an aspirin) and managed to drive the five hours to my college campus and hobble around for a couple of days. “Dads’ Weekend” was a success, but many more weeks passed with the wound stubbornly refusing to heal. I begged my mom to make my dad go back to the doctor, but she had long since given up trying to force him go to the doctor against his will. Finally, she got sneaky about it and mentioned the foot injury while they were at the thumb doctor (I wasn’t kidding when I said the issues and surgeries went on for years.) The doctor suggested they take a little peek. It didn’t take much to see that something was very wrong, so without telling my dad what was coming, the doctor quickly and firmly squeezed his foot until . . . out popped a perfectly round piece of shoe sole. Note to self: a wound will not properly heal if a filthy piece of rubber is left inside it. Note to dad: go to the doctor sooner if a wound will not properly heal.
Q-incidence?
Just over a year ago – right before the ladder accident – my dad had an incident with a Q-tip. “How much damage could a Q-tip possibly do?” you ask, “It’s small and white and has soft cottony tips.” Well, in my dad’s hands, even a friendly little Q-tip can become dangerous. He has a habit of sticking them into his ears way too far. He’s been warned about it but claims he simply cannot clean his ears properly without the deep Q-tip technique. As if sticking something way too far into his ear wasn’t risky enough, he tends to walk around while he’s doing it. I’m all for multi-tasking, but it didn’t work out so well in this case. He bumped into the side of a door, causing the Q-tip to jam deeply into his ear and break off. He couldn’t get it out. My mom couldn’t get it out. The doctor at the emergency room finally got it out. All was well . . . we thought. About two months later, my dad fell off the ladder and completely lost hearing in his right ear. Months of appointments with doctors and therapists and hearing aid technicians went by. Finally someone noticed a significant amount of wax build up in his right ear that would require cleaning by a specialist. An appointment was made. The doctor immediately noted that there was something strange about this wax build up – something “fibrous," something like . . . hmm, what do you know?? A piece of Q-tip!
You might think that the severe ladder fall would have put an end to my dad’s constant stream of accidents. You would be wrong. In the year since his head injury, he re-fractured ribs by falling down a rocky ravine and was involved in another serious fall. This time it wasn’t my dad doing the falling – it was his friend who was three and a half stories up in a tree they were cutting down. The friend happened to land on my dad (I’m not kidding – I couldn’t make this stuff up), which broke his fall somewhat and quite likely saved his life. Miraculously, my dad suffered nothing more than bruises and soreness. His friend spent days in the ICU, recovering from broken ribs, punctured lungs, a torn liver, a shattered arm bone and various cuts.
About a week ago I got a call from my mom and I felt like the accidents had come full circle. My dad was cutting brush on a steep hill. “He slipped with the chainsaw . . . ,” she said. In the seconds it took her to finish her sentence, memories of my doomed playtime in the woods flashed through my mind. “. . . It went through his shoe, through his sock and stopped just short of slicing into his foot.” Whew, an accident narrowly avoided.
I keep hoping my 72 year old father will take up crossword puzzles or painting or anything less dangerous than his usual shenanigans, but I’m not holding my breath. He is who he is and he does what he does, which currently involves climbing around far above the ground replacing a garage roof . . . while my mom is out of town. If you live in Brookings, Oregon and hear an ambulance siren over the next couple of weeks, please let me know.
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