My dad used to have a business building barbed wire fence,
corals, and other enclosures for livestock. In high school and college I would
often come home on the weekends, or during winter breaks, and build fence to
make a little extra money.
Building fence requires huge amounts of physical labor, and
often times the weather is either blazing hot or freezing cold and you can
usually count on the terrain being quite rugged. There are also the usual irritations
associated with the outdoors such as ticks, mosquitoes, and the occasional
venomous snake. Besides all of the environmental hazards, anyone who has ever
worked with barbed wire can testify that it is impossible to avoid getting
poked, cut, or gouged by the needle sharp steel barbs. Of course these are all
minor infractions. I have witnessed on at least three occasions a coworker
catching a steel barb at the wrong angle and having a large chunk of flesh
excavated from their body, requiring a trip to the emergency room for stitches.
However, despite all of the opportunities for injury afforded by the task of
building fence, my most significant impairment didn't happen performing the
job, but on the walk to the job site.
One cold winter morning, I was home from college on winter
break. I woke up late as usual and was in a big hurry to get going. Unlike most
job sites that required a fifteen to thirty minute drive out to the middle of
nowhere, the fence that we were replacing was within walking distance of my
parent’s house.
I got my boots laced, found my hat, and shuffled out the
door. Across the road from our house was a wooded area with a steep grade about
30 feet tall that once served as a railroad bed. On the other side of the hill
was another fifty yards of wooded area, then open pasture where we were
working. There was a heavy frost on the ground that made the leaves I was
walking on quite slick. As I began climbing the foot of the old railroad bed, I
slipped, my feet came out from under me, I fell forward, and as my momentum
took me face first into the ground, a small pointed stick burrowed deep into my
left eye.
The pain was instant and excruciating. It felt as though a
knife had been stabbed through my eye and into my brain. Tears were flowing
from my eye like a fountain, and every time I blinked the entire left side of
my face would scream with pain. I could not see anything, and I had every
reason to believe that I had completely disemboweled my eye.
I sat down and held a handkerchief to my face hoping to ease
the pain. Gradually my eye stopped watering and although blurry, my vision
began to return. A few minutes more and the sharp pain subsided to a dull ache
in the back of my eye. Finally, I felt the worst was over and I climbed the
rest of the hill and hiked on over to where my dad was working.
Assuming I was just late from sleeping in, upon my arrival
my dad asked me to bring over a pile of steel posts that I would pass on my way
over. I did as I was told and loaded the posts up into my arms. The physical excursion
once again caused the sharp pain to return. I walked over to where my dad was
standing and explained what had happened. He walked over to get a closer look
at my eye and I immediately knew by his reaction that my eye did not look well.
“You have a hole in your eyeball!” my dad proclaimed, “Get
in the truck we’re going to the emergency room!”
So off to the hospital we went. This happened at about eight
in the morning. By four o’clock in the afternoon having been examined by three
doctors, an ophthalmologist, a CT scan, x-rays, and countless eye tests, it was
determined that the stick had made contact with my cornea, and then slid down
to the sclera (white part) before penetrating into my eye, thus saving me from
being permanently blind. For a couple of days after, a dull ache remained
behind my eye but nothing worse than a slight headache, and by the end of the
week I was as good as new.
To this day I still flinch from time to time when a tree
branch hits me in the face, or I slide down a creek bank.
Man that hurt.
