Divine (Albeit Awful) Design
When life throws a wrench into your plans…literally.
“Hello baby…I don’t want you to worry…but…I think I’m dying…”
Growing up, I had often thought about and been around death. I remember when I was in my early teens, I had found a motherless brood of quail chicks wandering around our backyard aimlessly. I was ecstatic. As a young bird enthusiast there was nothing I wanted more than to be able to take care of these beautiful younglings. (The fact that the mother had died was lost on me at the time…but writing this adds another layer of newfound heartbreak.) I eagerly ran and found my parents and begged them to let my siblings and I take care of them. We went back outside to where I had corralled them, and we all took turns gently petting and holding them. After my parents saw our happy tear-filled eyes, they relented, and we set about creating a new little nest home for them. I was in dreamland.
The first week was wonderful. The chicks were taking to the milk droplets we were offering them, and they happily gorged themselves before indicating that they wanted to be set back in the nest with their siblings. This was summertime, and I didn’t have any other responsibilities to attend to, so I happily sat with the chicks and played with them around the yard. I had trouble making friends growing up, but animals were another story. I quickly became attached to them, and they to me. When I would wander around the backyard, they would scurry in a huddle behind me, their confidence increasing as our bond grew. When I wasn’t playing with them I was hatching different schemes to try to make sure they were having the best life possible, from planning little field trips to gathering every bug and worm that existed in my parents’ backyard. My summer plans had quickly started to revolve around the chicks and their feeding and play schedule.
Of course, neither my parents nor my family were fully equipped to properly care for these little ones long term, and no amount of prodding or poking would convince the birds to continue taking the warm milk we had been giving them. We had also tried to find little bugs or worms to place in front of them, but I never had the courage to eat any of them to show the chicks what to do. I remember my mom calling the veterinarian clinic to ask if there was anything they could do. They were entering their busy season and said that nature would have to take its course. If memory serves, there were 7 of the little chicks.
None would survive past the next week.
After each little chick’s passing, I would carefully wrap the small, frail body in a paper towel, place it in a small box, dig a hole in the backyard, say a few words, and finished the funeral by burying them. My resolve and love for the remaining chicks only grew as their numbers shrunk—until the last one’s ailing little body began to shut down. I hadn’t questioned the cruelty of life up to that point. I hadn’t thought of what fate the mother quail had succumbed to right after her brood had hatched. I wasn’t discouraged at my clearly inadequate veterinary skills. My only concern at that time was making sure that those little chicks were loved and cared for during the short duration they were with me. I held the last chick in my hands as its breathing slowed. I remember as the summer night began to darken, and a cool breeze had started to pick up, I kept softly stroking the body, trying to make sure the chick knew that it wasn’t alone. As the chick’s little chest became motionless, the realization hit me that my summer schedule, once filled with so much hope, was now just a bleak cemetery.
I somberly walked to my dad, who was working in the garage, tears streaming down my face as I held up the final chick. My dad knew that the time was coming and had prepared a slightly more elaborate casket for the last little chick. A bed of dried flowers and twigs would support the body. The little dropper I had been using to feed the chicks was laid next to the still body, no longer needed. I asked my dad if I could pick a few of the periwinkle flowers close to where I had first discovered the brood. He smiled and nodded his head yes. I picked 7 flowers to symbolize the brood and placed them methodically around the chick’s body. I took one final moment with the chick, and then closed the casket. Since this was the last chick, I gathered my family together around the little burial site in the backyard. We sang a little song, said a few words of thanks, and laid the final chick to rest. I would go on to have a wonderful summer filled with fun and games, but nothing would compare to the memory of those few weeks with the quail chicks.
Death surrounds all of us, from the shows we watch to the games we play to the stories we read, to the animals that we come into contact with. The lesson I took from my time with the quail brood was that life was indeed short, and sometimes, no matter how prepared we are or how close death might seem, it always feels like a surprise when the moment happens. The quail mother, for her part, set her little ones up for success in a world that would take her and them much too soon. She staged them in the backyard of a young boy who was entranced with their every movement and sound, and though the ending wasn’t what she was hoping for, I feel the love and compassion that my family and I gave to the chicks would have made her proud.
Though death is ever-present and ever near for all of us, the human mind does a fabulous job of dismissing this specter from our day-to-day routines. That is, until something goes catastrophically wrong. For me, this moment of confrontation with my own mortality happened on August 17th, 2022. My plans for the day were simple. First, I had planned to cut off my mid-back length hair to donate in the morning. I had loved growing my hair out, but our son was finally realizing the power his hands possessed, and the target was often my hair. (I can hear my mom cheering from here).
Second, after my haircut I was planning on going up to Idaho to help my dad install some windows at the jobsite we had been working on for over a year. This was going to be the last time I was going to be heading up there to help my dad for the foreseeable future, as other life plans were beginning to take shape. We had made sure that the inside of the remodel was as protected as it could be from the elements, but there were those few windows missing that were allowing birds to nest as the temperatures began to drop in the evenings.
My fall semester at school was also going to be starting up the following week on the 22nd, and I had signed up for 4 classes. They were also finally going to be in person after my other classes had primarily been online due to COVID. My plan was that I would be graduating in the spring of 2023, where I was hoping to walk in the same graduating class as my sister-in-law.
Third, I had planned to go to dinner with my wife later that evening while my little brother or my sister-in-law watched our son. My wife’s job had given her 3 months of maternity leave that allowed us the time necessary to bond with our newborn son without worrying about the other pressures of life. She was planning on going back to work right around the time my school started, so this was going to be our last hurrah before life really began to pick up. It’s funny, in a dystopian way, to reflect on how unprepared we both felt to go back out into the world after giving our son 24/7 attention during those 3 months. How on earth would we manage?!
I’ve noticed now that when gauging time, it always revolves around the moment my accident happened: 3:20 PM. Prior to my accident, my son’s birth had been what anchored me: 3:04 AM. The close proximity of the times is something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by me. Life entered the world right around the time, months later, another life almost exited.
I have wrestled with how I wanted to write about my accident. Where would I start? What would I say? Even now, almost 9 months later, the moment-by-moment playback overwhelms me and the trauma reignites as if it’s all repeating. The quote at the beginning of this post is from the phone call I was able to make to my wife as I was lying on the ground, bleeding to death, as my dad panicked to try to stem the flow.
I never had a plan for what I would do if I were to die. This is primarily because I never thought that I would die, even as death has been a semi-regular presence in my life. I have had loved ones pass away. Friends. Pets. My mind, however, insulated myself from the idea that I could be included among their ranks. I’ve had the feeling throughout my life that I am not worthy of the benefits death bestows on the dead: the rest, the answers, the reunions. I’m reminded of Cain from the Bible in this moment, the first murderer in the Bible, cursed to wander among humanity’s ranks without the ability to do that which he had so cruelly brought on his younger brother, Abel. I’ve never really thought about how devastating that would be, though I’ve often watched shows or played games that have characters with abnormally long lives (vampires, wizards, elves, and turtles (thanks, wife, for that last one)). And though I’m not a murderer, (don’t worry Richard, you’re my favorite), I’ve often felt cursed, though my accident would unexpectedly turn this perspective on its head.
The whole day up until about a minute before my accident felt like any other day, and time progressed and behaved as it always had before. A minute prior to my accident, though, time decided to imitate the flow of creating a stop-motion full length feature film, as did the time from the accident until I was carted into the operating room. The frustration of that “Parks and Rec” episode where Ben tries to create a stop motion video is appropriate here, as is the much-needed break to take a breath before plunging back in.
The scenario that I found myself in that afternoon was one that people find themselves in every day and for very similar reasons. My parents live in Logan, and so instead of having my dad drive me back down to Salt Lake after we had finished in Idaho, I decided to follow him up in my little 2012 Kia Rio. (A side note with this car, it has been one of the best cars I’ve ever owned. I bought it brand new a few months after I had started my job at Questar Gas (now Dominion Energy), and it has traveled with me and with my parent’s cross-country from here to their senior LDS mission zone in North Carolina and back. My wife has asked if I ever want to sell it in order to upgrade, and the answer is always the same: never, never ever. I feel the same way about my house, too, and the feeling has only strengthened since my accident. But that is a post for another day.)
My dad was driving the client’s—and our good friends and brother-in-law’s grandpa’s—diesel 2500 Sierra truck. Unbeknownst to either of them, the fuel gauge had decided to rebel and was showing a false reading of how much diesel remained in the tank: just over a 1/4 of a tank remained on the gauge, but in reality, the tank was well past the E. My dad and I both realized this as we were driving along I-15, right around the Willard Bay Reservoir and just past Ogden, as the diesel began to first slow, and then began to bellow thick black smoke from the tailpipe.
Now, anyone that knows anything about diesel trucks KNOWS to never run them out of diesel. They are not as cooperative as a gasoline vehicle when they run out of fuel, and their start-up process is miserable and slow-going without the proper tools, of which we had none. I have never owned a diesel, but I’ve operated plenty while working for Questar/Dominion, though my instincts to warn my dad didn’t kick in until it was too late and the truck was crawling to a stop on the shoulder, a 1/4 mile from the exit (another similar number to the tank gauge that surely doesn’t feel like just a coincidence).
Another brief interjection here, and one my dad would appreciate reading. His plans were to fill up in Brigham City before continuing on to our destination just on the other side of Idaho, in a small town called Samaria. The tank gauge was filled up just enough to provide him with confidence that we could make it, and instead of just filling up around Salt Lake, the gas prices up north were worth waiting for. (I know that he has cursed that gauge at least once a day since, and probably will until the sun becomes a red giant. Thanks dad.)
I pulled up behind him in my car, hazards flashing, and we began to troubleshoot what had gone wrong. After some investigation, we realized he had run out of diesel, and we set about trying to remedy the situation. We refilled the tank twice (since we were on a slight incline, and felt that it was better to have more fuel to counteract that), watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials on restarting a diesel, called 5 different mechanics to see if any would be able to come out and give us a hand, and all to no avail. One mechanic finally was able to tell us to give it a couple more tries, and if we weren’t successful, he would be able to come out and get us going again. My dad and I were thrilled, so we set about trying once more to start the diesel.
The process had begun to drain the battery, so I pulled my Kia onto the grass next to the concrete shoulder in order to jump start the truck as we began bleeding one of the fuel lines. Both my dad and I had switched spots about five or six times, where I would try to crank the engine in the cab while he stood in front of the truck, and vice versa. This is probably where I feel the most gratitude for what happened that day, because I can’t imagine having the sense or the sanity to be able to do what my dad did for me as he saved my life. As awful and horrible as this experience has been, it pales in comparison to what could have been, and is something that has helped me to appreciate the “what-if’s” that didn’t happen.
And this is where time begins to slow down.
80 MPH semis crawl past like gigantic snails, the tumultuous wind that they had been generating as they zoomed by now feels more like a soft breeze as they move past.
The other cars behave like little pill bugs, trudging by, frame by frame, moving towards a destination that has no bearing or influence on my own.
The cranking my dad does as he sits in the cab feels like an eternity, and I wonder how the engine isn’t bursting into flames.
The few clouds that are overhead are pinned in place, unable to provide any relief to us on a day that reached 91 degrees.
My own thoughts mirror the sloth that has taken over everything else, and I wonder how much longer we need to keep trying before calling the mechanic back.
I then shift my focus back to the oncoming traffic. I look up from where I’m standing in front of the truck, and my eyes catch a truck not behaving like the others that had come up on us. It isn’t moving into the middle lane as nearly all the other vehicles, save a few, had done while we had been working on the shoulder. The green of the truck flashes in the sun and the little lights on the cab seem to wink as the truck moves closer. I begin to hear a distinct clanging, of metal colliding forcefully with concrete, and I see a flash of metal caught in the rays of the sun trailing the truck. The sound begins to crescendo as the clanging moves closer, the metal object sliding quickly towards where I am standing, defying the sedated movement that has taken hold of everything else around it.
My attention at this point had fixated on discovering what had made the sound, though I briefly take my eyes off the ground to notice the defiant truck pass by, the yellow lettering distinct on the green background. My mind at this point is stuck on two points: 1) unsecured debris is falling off of vehicles passing us, and this is a worrying development that needs to be relayed to my dad, and 2) the type of vehicle made me think that it must have been a tool of some type that had fallen, as it was a larger industrial mechanics truck, one that reminded me of my time at Questar/Dominion, and I was thrilled at the prospect of finding a new free tool to add to my collection. As the vehicle passed, my attention returned to scanning the ground to find out where the item had decided to stop.
I step back from the front of the truck, turn towards the road, and walk to the edge of the driver’s side, scanning the ground as I do so. My eyes catch the glint of metal, and my eyes focus on a large 1 ½” open end box wrench. Having worked at the gas company and with my dad doing remodeling work, this wrench was a familiar tool throughout my life, used in loosening bolts on large gas meter sets, to tightening bolts on sill plates. A feeling of joy swept through my body at seeing this, a small token to commemorate our fractured plans for the day. Unfortunately, that feeling would be immediately and decisively banished from my body mere moments later.
The next few seconds are images, sounds, and feelings that are all burned into my memory and into my body, welded together into a perfect union to commemorate my near-death experience.
A large exploding sound.
A bright flashing object.
A sickening crunch.
A tidal wave of excruciating pain.
Shrieks of unimaginable terror.
Suffocating, overwhelming panic.
And, lastly, a quickly dawning realization that my life, the life that I had known and loved and struggled for, was quickly and painfully coming to an end. And in what I now think would have been one of the craziest and most random ways imaginable.
I discovered that the wrench had come to a stop in the closest lane of travel next to where we were working on the truck on the shoulder. As my mind began to process the thought “well that’s not good”, the “not good” part decided to manifest itself in the worst way possible.
A large orange semi was quickly coming up in the lane of travel where the wrench was lying motionless. They had begun to merge into the middle lane, but in doing so they unwittingly placed their tires in the direct path of the wrench. This would have immediate, catastrophic, life-changing consequences for me as I stood there, the joyful emotions still making their way through my body. The semi drove over the wrench with the front tires, and the way the tires hit the wrench caused it to rattle and stand momentarily on its side, with the pointy open end facing the quickly approaching rear tires.
Here is where I have begun to imagine a few other positive “what-if” scenarios. I like to think that if the driver of the mechanics truck would have known his tools weren’t properly secured, or the driver of the semi would have known or had seen the wrench, or if the wrench would have had agency and the ability to get out of the way, or if the tires would have been able to absorb the wrench in order to prevent its exodus into the air, that each would have done something different in order to prevent what actually happened. Regrettably, the dots would be connected in ways that felt to me like they were preordained.
The rear tire made contact with the sharp ends of the wrench and caused the tire to puncture and violently explode. As a fun exercise in writing this post, I used an AI chatbot to help me figure out the math for this next part: how much force did the launched wrench have behind it as it rocketed towards me? After finding out a few different variables, and after getting sidetracked for 30 minutes just for fun, the chatbot concluded that the wrench was launched with about 4,200 pounds of force, or 18,480 newtons of force. The reason I included the newtons of force is because I found that it typically takes around 4,000 newtons to break the average femur bone. So, the force was more than enough to cause calamitous damage.
The speed at which the wrench was traveling was another factor I was curious about. After some more chatting with the AI, and some more time wasted frustratingly trying to convince the AI that I was not, in fact, cheating on a math exam, it found that the wrench was traveling around 1,145 MPH towards my leg. The average .22 caliber bullet travels around 904 MPH. So, with all of this detailed information, and after actually experiencing what it feels like, I can conclude with confidence that I had a 0% chance of avoiding what happened to me at that moment. A conclusion that feels slightly better with the aid of hindsight.
The trajectory of the wrench was, I feel, divinely drawn out in my direction, and was miraculously aligned to produce a catastrophic but survivable injury. To elaborate, I mean the place where the wrench hit my body was about 4 inches above my ankle joint. Thankfully it missed all of my ankle. Thankfully it missed my knee. And the fact that it didn’t hit me in the torso or the head continues to fill my heart and soul with immense gratitude. But even though I lucked out playing Death's “what-if” game, I was still subject to about an hour of thinking that my life was being forcibly pulled away from this earth and into the unknown. And in those moments where I felt that Death was winning, where he was taking me, I felt that he was also doing it in such a way that allowed me a few precious moments to talk to my wife and my dad.
The force of the wrench impacting my leg caused what the surgeons described to me later as “pulverizing my tibia bone” and “completely fracturing my fibula bone” in my right leg. The full medical term for what happened was an “open displaced comminuted fracture of shaft of right tibia, type iii; closed displaced transverse fracture of shaft of right fibula.” Translation: leg injury—major major. It felt like getting hit by a freight train, and parts of my leg certainly looked as if there were workers trying to bore through a mountain to lay down the tracks.
While the shock of what had just happened began to envelop my body, I tried in vain to maintain control. I instantly picked my leg up, as I wasn’t sure what had just happened, and to my dismay I saw a whole lotta red and a whole lotta white fragments, all surrounding what I can now confirm to be parts of my very broken bone, muscle, and skin.
My mind was quickly devolving and becoming more and more frantic as the pain shot through my body. Though I knew where the injury happened on my body, I did not understand the severity beyond the knowledge that something was very, very wrong, and so I tried to put weight onto my injured leg, which nearly caused me to black out from the immense pain. Realizing this, and still having an ounce of sense left to know that falling into the road would be much worse than my current situation, I feebly hopped over to the grass in front of my Kia, collapsed onto my back, all while screaming and crying uncontrollably.
I was going to die.
I love your "voice" in the writing! I was surprised to find that your quail story made me cry. Thanks for sharing such vulnerability!