So, some good news to start the day. Jim suggested that it would be better for me to work on other hill projects instead of the garden, since I was likely going to be the only person working on other hill projects, so my time was allocated that direction.
That put my first project of the day at seeing if the fix for this skid steer was what I hoped it was going to be.
And guess what?!?! It was! Wahoo!!! 🥳
The repair was relatively easy. I installed the new fuel intake tube and seal assembly together into the tank. It took a bit of extra pressure to get it all to pop in and fully seat down, but it was relatively painless, compared to what it could have been. 🎉
Then I hooked the fuel lines and whatnot back up, bled the system, and she fired right up.
🥳🎉🥳
So I dragged the other two big sidewalk chunks from up by the shop to down by the creek ramp. Then I spent some time weeding the ramp area itself, and then I decided I wanted to do some instant gratification work, and I headed down to the fields below the greenhouse in the west side pasture. Clumps of trees have been growing up in the middle of the pasture, And they badly needed to be thinned out. A few shade trees for livestock is a good thing, but these had turned into thickets of basically unusable for livestock.
So I chopped down a whole bunch of trees, and then I started the field on fire because it was so full of thick matted grass that the new stuff couldn’t grow in thickly.
Then I put out the fire that I started because I figured I should probably ask Jim about it, and when he came down with the tractor to help load all the cut down trees into a big burn pile, he said that he would love to have the field burned, so I lit it back on fire. 😁
I love fire. 🙃
For the next couple hours or so, Jim and I kept working on cutting and moving trees wild tending the field that was on fire. Once we had pretty good coverage on the burn of the field, and once the vast majority of the trees and limbs and whatnot that I had cut were moved into a burn pile, Jim headed back to the house because he had things that Steph needed him to do up there.
I stayed and kept chopping down more trees and then also lit another field on fire that was full of thick matted grass. At some point, the batteries in my chainsaw were all drained down, and I hadn’t swung an ax in a while, so I grabbed the ax, so I could keep delimbing and burning the branches of the trees I had cut down.
That went just fine for a good while, cutting limbs, tossing them into the fire, cutting more limbs tossing them into the fire, etc. But then I went to cut one of the limbs, and something happened that I didn’t foresee:
When the ax went through the branch I was cutting, it came down at the perfect angle so that the top of the ax, as best I can guess, hit The thicker trunk of another tree underneath it, sending all the force of the ax rebounding directly at me.
Directly at my leg, to be specific.
😬
In an instant, I saw the ax hit my leg super hard and bounce back out.
I knew right away that it wasn’t just a little hit.
As soon as I looked down and saw a gnarly wound, a whole bunch of yellowish watery liquid began gushing out. I think maybe the best way to describe it was as if my leg were full of yellow liquid, and somebody was just sort of squeezing it so that it was overflowing out of the wound and running down my leg.
😶
The first thing that popped into my head was Jesus getting stabbed by the spear and water coming out. But what on earth would be yellow and running out of my leg is though it were just yellow water?
And even before blood came out… 😶
The blood soon followed. 😅
After the initial gushing out of yellow liquid, the blood started gushing out. In fact, the blood was coming out so quickly that I was worried that maybe I hit an artery or something. I had seen that it was a super deep gash, and I was pretty confident that the ax had hit the bone as well, and there was… so much blood… 🩸
I tried to hold the wound together with one hand while I reached for myself phone to call my mom, but lots of blood was just coming out. Still, I grabbed the phone, called my mom, and simply said something to the effect of “Mom I need you down in the field right now.”
My mom knows what that means. 😅
As soon as I hung up with her, I called Jim and told him that I had hit my leg with the ax, and my mom was coming to get me, but I needed someone to come and take care of the fire, because I had that small field on fire, in addition to a couple of burn piles and whatever else.
I tried holding pressure on the wound, but it kept bleeding pretty good. Blood all over my hands. 😅
Gratefully, somehow when I injure myself badly, I hyperfocus and don’t go into shock. Which is nice, but it’s also a little odd because I’ve gone into shock for other things injury related that wouldn’t seem like an issue at all (specifically, three times when I’ve had injections directly into a joint, once in my thumb and I think maybe twice with my wrist? I’ve had this feeling of a surge in pressure inside the joint followed by a lightning fast and super sharp pain that radiates from the joint through my whole body, and my body has reacted by basically dropping my blood pressure to critical levels, which I’m assuming is a shock response.)
My mom got her little car that happens to have great ground clearance through all the bumpy field over near where I was, and I hobbled with one hand trying to hold the wound closed while getting into the car.
If I let go of the wound, then blood would run out, but since it wasn’t spurting out, my mom let me know that I had not hit an artery, gratefully.
Also, having held pressure on it for a good while had significantly slowed the bleeding.
Jim arrived only briefly after my mother, and gratefully, he took care of the fire as we headed off to the urgent care in Pea Ridge.
I called ahead of time to let them know that we were on our way, and I was able to give them information that sped up the intake process, which was good because when we got there and they got me admitted in, quite quickly, they found on the x-ray that the ax had hit the bone, which turned the injury from being a simple deep wound that required stitches to being what’s called an open fracture.
Being an open fracture injury, I needed antibiotics as quickly as possible, preferably within an hour after injury, which was what I was able to get at the urgent care.
At first, the people at the urgent care suspected that the yellow liquid that was gushing out was bone marrow, so that’s what we were going with for the first little while.
Gratefully, all of the adrenaline that I had had pretty much zeroed out the pain. I didn’t feel much of any pain from the injury itself that I can remember.
They gave me a shot of 1 g of rocefin, which I think they mixed with lidocaine because apparently it’s not very fun to have in your system.
They also updated my tetanus shot because my last one was I think maybe six or seven years ago when I stepped on and nail I think it was just outside of our garage here.
The guy giving the shots was a freaking miracle worker. I pretty much didn’t even feel the needles as they went in–literally.
Looking at the x-rays, and seeing the damage to the bone, they tried to get a consult with an orthopedic surgeon, but after waiting for probably 20 or 30 minutes for a reply and not getting one, and knowing that they didn’t have the medication that I needed for the second part of the antibiotics, and that I needed it within 4 hours of injury, at least supposedly according to them, they sent me to the ER to get an opinion from the orthopod and to get the second medication because only the ER was open, all the pharmacies having ceased 24-hour operations since covid.
Expensive prescription. 😅
At the hospital, they actually were able to get me in fairly quickly, gratefully, and they said that it wasn’t actually bone marrow that had come out, but something else. They said bone marrow would have been sticky and wouldn’t have come out like water. In doing a tad bit of research online, it seems pretty clear that the hospital was correct and that the urgent care people were not. The yellow bone marrow is only 15% water and like 80% fat, or something like that, so that’s not going to run down my leg like water.
Anyway, up until that point, I hadn’t really had much pain, but when the ER doc came in, she grabbed one of her little pinscher tweezer things and started digging around the wound going as deep as it went, without any anesthetic. I had a little bit of leftover and aesthetic from what they had done while I was at the urgent care, but when she probed to the depths of the wound, oh boy, that was the worst pain I had felt throughout the whole ordeal.
Funny also that the pain I felt during the anesthetic injections that I got right before being stitched up were also quite painful when the ones at the urgent care were such that I almost didn’t even feel them at all. Makes me wonder what the difference is in the needles.
Anyway, the ER doc mentioned that another error in what we were told from the urgent care was that I didn’t actually need the second antibiotic that quickly that it could have been given within 24 hours since I had the first one, so basically the ER visit wasn’t necessary, but it did provide some additional information and correct understanding of what actually happened, at least to some degree.
Oh, they also gave me an oxycodone. 🙃
Anyway, so they left me with four stitches, a prescription for another antibiotic and more oxycodone for the pain, a weird little brace thing for my leg to keep it straight, some crutches, and the left over surgical tools that they used to clean out and sew up my leg.
Funny, for as bad as it was in some ways, the whole gash was only an inch long.
By that time it was somewhere around 10:30 I think, and Mama drove me home.
We had lots on our mind in addition to the injury because while We were sitting in the urgent care room listening in on their conversations about what they were trying to figure out with me and in between their visits to the room itself, I missed a call from Stevie and then got a text breaking some additional news. Steve was going to move back to Arkansas and into the house that we are living in (He actually owns the house, so that’s not really a big surprise), so we’ve got probably until some time in June to find where we’re headed next.
So we sat around the dinner table chatting about all of that, and with me thinking about the irony of that huge change happening right when I’m now not even able to walk. Makes an already challenging circumstance much more challenging.
We did a little looking on Facebook marketplace for RVs and tiny homes before calling it a night and heading to bed.
If any of you were wondering, axes and shins don’t play very well with each other. 😅
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 