The Good
 

Destination: The Grand Canyon
 

Home: Fairfax Dr., San Jose, CA

Attempted burglary at my house

My next-door neighbor, Ken, told me he awoke in the middle of the night because he heard a noise outside.  He saw an old English Morgan sports car that was parked under the streetlight.  The Morgan a Classic is very distinctive because it has a leather hood strap.  Watching out a window he saw a man come out of my backyard.  A short time later, Ken, went outside and found our gate unlatched and opened.  Someone was casing our house.  Now I was really worried because we were going on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon.  I purchased “Warning Burglary Alarm” decals and window security clamps.  When we returned home from vacation we discovered all the window screens had been cut.  But nothing in the house was taken.

The Ugly

Destination: Home, Bear Creek Road, Santa Cruz Mountains

Car Accident

April 17, 1987 Easter Good Friday

It was about 6:30 PM and a warm sunny evening, when I was driving home to Boulder Creek, California.  I was coming from work in Silicon Valley.  I was an engineering service manager and I normally worked until 6 PM.  Highway 17 through the Santa Cruz Mountains is notorious for accidents.  That day I borrowed my wife’s sports car a 1983 Mazda RX7.  Normally, I drove a red 1987 Honda CRXi, two-seater.  As usual, I turned off of the main highway on to Bear Creek Road, which has many sharp left and sharp right hand turns.  This windy hilly road I joking referred to as, “Mister Toads Wild Ride,” a ride by that name in Disneyland, Anaheim.  That day cars driving into the town of Boulder Creek were tailgating me, which was a normal game played by the locals … including me.  That day I let them pass, but later I decided to catch up to them.  So I sped up.  I came to a bend in the road over a bridge and lost control of the car.  The car skidded sideways and hit a steel road marker then I narrowly missed a telephone pole and hit two more road markers.  The car ended up just off the road and perpendicular to it.  The dust swirled up and enveloped the car.  I sat there dazed.  I looked towards the windshield and saw a lot of small black spots appearing and disappearing … ping, ping they went.  I knew I was in shock.  I looked down at my legs and I saw a white fluffy cloud covering my legs and a streak of red.  Blood! I thought.  Instinctively I knew that one of those road markers went through my leg.  A 4 inch wide steel road marker had hit the left front magnesium wheel and bounced off and twisted its way through the floor board between the clutch and break pedal.  Then it had continued on impaling my leg, and wedged between the fibula and tibia without breaking a bone!  A real miracle!  I opened the car door and I could not get out because the road marker held me back.  It was still in the ground!  I knew I had to flag down a car or I would bleed to death.  I pushed myself up and pulled at my leg to bend the metal post.  Finally, I was able to hang my left armpit over the car door.  I waved at three cars and the fourth cars, but no one stopped.  By chance, two brothers who were the first people to stop were paramedics.  They were on their way to work at the Santa Cruz Community Hospital.  Though my fog I felt them trying to help.  Then others finally stopped to help and one person used his CB radio to call the fire station in Felton.  I lost my voice and then my eyesight was going out of focus.  My life was receding to some foggy background and I was slipping away.  Afterwards one of the doctors asked me if I felt, “calm and at peace” and I answered, “Yes … exactly.”  He said that people who were dying usually felt at peace.  This was something that I knew and had read about.  I knew I was bleeding to death, so I took off my belt wrapped it around my leg and looped the end through the buckle.  This made a primitive tourniquet, but it saved my life.  I held onto that tourniquet for dear life.  They had to pry my fingers from that leather belt.  I heard one of the two paramedics bother say, “Why didn’t I think of this?”

 I lost my voice so I wrote my telephone number and my wife’s name Sheri in the windshield’s dust.  Just like a dying cowboy writes the name of his love in the desert’s sand.   The fireman arrived and started the power saw, but they hesitated and I suddenly found my voice again I said, “Get your asses over here and cut me lose.”  The steel road marker had not broken off, but was still stuck in the ground, so that my leg was pinned to the ground.  Finally the fireman cut me loose for the ground.  Later, I figured out that all the people at accident scene did not want to help because they were afraid of being infective with the AIDS virus.  This was the latter part of the 1980’s and people were all scared of contacting this disease because so little was known as to how it was transmitted.  I arrived at the Community Hospital within one hour of the accident.  I was volume depleted, which meant I had no blood.  And worst I had severed two arteries.  Which usually means that after one hour … you are dead.  Months later the records showed that I had two coronaries along the way.  The fireman put me in a special rubber suit like the Michelin Man’s logo character.  Then they pumped me full of plasma.  Next, they took me along with the 2-foot steel road marker still embedded in my leg to the hospital. 

It’s a wonder I didn’t have brain damage, which the medics were expecting.  A neighborhood doctor, a pulmonary specialist, ran from his next-door office to the emergency room and said that he just caught me … in time to save my life.  He said the tolerance was +/- 1 second.  Close! 

It took three doctors six hours to remove the steel post from my leg.  One of the assisting doctors was the former mayor of Santa Cruz, California.  He said he never saw anything like it in all his years and he was so close to retirement.

When I awoke in the Intensive Care Unit, I asked my wife if it was Saturday and she said no that it was Tuesday.  After I got out of ICU, a male nurse came to visit and introduced himself by saying he was “my breath,” and he surely was by performing CPR on me.  I thanked all of then for saving my life, of course.  Another visitor, a fireman, said he was there at the accident scene and told my wife that in twenty years he had never seen anything like it … me refusing to let go of my life.  He told me he also worked at this hospital part-time and every night sat by my bedside until I came out of my coma.  During my coma, he whispered into my ear, “Please don’t give up” and other words of encouragement.  The paramedic brothers came to visit and asked if I remember anything about the accident.  I said that I could, in deed, recall much that happened.  One of the brothers said, “Please don’t blame them.”  I knew immediately what he was talking about.  He was referring to all of the on lookers who did nothing and the two firemen who hesitated with the power saw.  I thought with all the blood who could blame them.  They were scared of contacting AIDS.  The brother’s mother wanted to know if there was something special that saved me.  Maybe she thought Jesus helped?  Maybe it was the white light at the end of the tunnel?  Did I see God?  I replied, “No, I saved myself by not giving up.”  I was sorry to disappoint the mother.  (Besides I didn’t want to tell them that years ago my master teacher, Amon Hotep, an Egyptian stood before me and said, “I would live a long life and with my many incarnations I learned many lessons.”  They would think that I was crazy.)

My primary surgeon, Doctor J, a vascular specialist, visited me early every morning and usually knocked on my food tray.  He always asked the same question, “Did I decide to have my leg amputated?” And “The prosthesis would be like pulling on a boot,” he said.  He explained that I was missing an artery and the normal leg has three arteries.  He said the leg would soon grow cold.  But one of the assisting plastic surgeon, Doctor T, told me not to agree to an amputation.  He had an idea he was pursuing.   After a month in the Santa Cruz Community Hospital, I was moved sixty miles North to the Davies Medical Center in San Francisco.  The micro surgeon removed a portion of my latisamis dorsi back muscle and then used a vein from my good right leg to replace my missing artery.  Dr. Harry Bunky, the father of microsurgery assisted on the operating team.  The operation lasted thirteen hours because they had to redo the surgery three times.  As a result the doctors ran short of the new artery and had to remove a vein in my right arm and splice to the new artery.  The anesthesiologist asked during the surgery if this was a normal medical procedure and the surgeons all laughed … saying, “No.”  Later my primary surgeon remarked to me that they discovered that I was a super blood clotter and was close to being non-human.  They had never seen a clot number that high before.  Maybe that is why I survived and it was … God’s miracle.  The good came from this situation was that from then on the Davies Medical Center checked every ones blood clot capabilities before this type of surgery.

A month later after I went for a check-up and one of the assisting doctors said that he was really mad at me because he missed a wedding.  Tough luck … it was my life!

Epilog:  During my one-month stay at the Davies Medical Center I developed a serious infection in my repaired leg.  As a result, my body temperature went to over 100 degrees. The doctors were always whispering in my room and to me this was not a good sign.  The doctors tried different antibiotics and then called in a specialist, but none of this worked.  So I realized that if the fever didn’t break then my leg would be amputated.  I had my wife make up a sign that showed 98.6 degrees and place it at the foot of my bed.  Then I concentrated on it and a couple of days later my fever broke and the leg infection disappeared.  My primary surgeon said on a follow-up visit that I was a legend and …  I imagine the talk of the hospital. 

I once read a book by Doctor Norman Cousin’s called, “Laughter is the Best Medicine.”  So I kept up the good humor by greeting all the doctors and intern’s early morning visits with a smile and cheerful greeting.  During my hospital stay and surgery recovery both in Santa Cruz and San Francisco I applied my own brand of comic relief, especially to awful bedpan jokes.  I believed this really helped in my recovery.  One month after the surgery, I was discharged from the hospital.  Then I endured five month’s of painful therapy.  Then one day, I went to the vascular surgeon’s office, Doctor J, who wanted to amputate my leg.  I had no crutches or cane, but came walking in under my own power. 

This was at the urgency of my savior, Doctor T, who told me not to offer up my leg for removal.  And it was he who got me admitted to the Davies Medical Center.  Doctor J was quite surprised that the blood pressure in the surgically repaired leg was better than my good right leg.  Lesson learned about what is called in medical terms a “muscle flap repair.”

And don’t race on mountain roads like I did.

My wife’s Mazda Rx7 that I was driving that day had low air-pressure in the three remaining tires.  A friend told me, while visiting in the hospital, that he checked the RX-7’s tire pressure after the accident to be sixteen pounds a far cry from the recommended tire pressure of about 30 pounds each.  He believed that the accident never should have happened if the tires were inflated properly.  I am guilty even though the car belonged to my wife because I should have checked them with an air-gauge myself.  One ironic note, Doctor J’s car was a white RX7 Mazda like my wife’s, which was a blue 1983 RX7.  Her Mazda was totaled, but it looked like it could be repaired.  I offered to buy her another RX7, but she refused.

The Good

Scotts Valley, CA

Auto Accident - Road Rage

On my lunch break from work two young guys who were intoxicated hit the rear of my little CRXi Honda.  I got out the car and proceeded to write down their license plate number.  Then I asked them to pull into the nearby gas station, which they did.  However, in the street and gas station they were hostile.  I think they wanted to fight me.  But then they noticed a cast on my left leg and apologized.  After checking for damage to my car I found none and we all left the scene happy.

The Good

Sunnyvale, California 1997

Thief of Car Receiver Thwarted

I was tired of getting my car stereo receivers stolen, so I installed a burglary alarm.  Some people have the belief that car alarms don’t work because the alarms are always going off and no one pays any attention.  However, I disagree because alarms have saved my property on a couple of occasions and thefts like stealth and not a lot of attention.  My son and I stopped for lunch at the Sweet Tomatoes restaurant.  This restaurant is located in front of a Costco Warehouse, and this parking lot has a lot of activity especially on a Saturday, the day we were there.  Before arming the alarm I remove the receivers control panel and locked it in the stow away compartment.  After lunch I found a long scratch down the side of the car.  I figured since the thieves couldn’t steal the receiver they would damage the car.  I pulled out of the lot and a truck with a bunch of young guys past me.  My son said they were laughing and pointing to the car.  Obviously these guys were the thieves.