Chapter One The Long, Road Home · The.og.redrooster

Chapter One The Long, Road Home

Chapter 1

The Story Behind the Scars

Graphic Content Warning ⚠️

The photos in this post contain graphic medical images from my recovery after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Viewer discretion is advised.

You’ll also notice that some of the photos are screenshots instead of the original images. That’s intentional. I left the dates visible to help document the timeline of my story and show that these events really happened when I say they did.

I’m not sharing this for attention or sympathy.

This is mostly for me.

I’ve carried these memories around for a long damn time, and for whatever reason, I’ve finally reached a point where I feel like I need to put them somewhere outside of my own head.

If it helps or motivates somebody else along the way, then that will be good as well.

But honestly, that wasn’t the reason I started writing.

I tried therapy.

I really did.

I gave it an honest shot.

But therapy didn’t help me.

If anything, I usually felt worse afterward.

I’d walk out of those sessions more pissed off than I was when I walked in.

Maybe therapy works for some people.

It just didn’t work for me.

Writing has been different.

When I started putting these memories down, something unexpected happened.

I started remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years.

Some of those memories were good.

Some were painful.

Some made me laugh.

Some made me angry all over again.

But at least they were mine.

And for the first time, I felt like I was actually doing something with them instead of just carrying them around.

So maybe this book is a little bit of therapy after all.

Just my kind of therapy.

A keyboard instead of a therapist’s couch.

And if somebody happens to read these pages someday and realizes they aren’t the only person who has been knocked down, pissed off, lost, broken, or just trying like hell to figure things out…

Then maybe writing it all down was worth it.

Part 1: The Story Behind the Scars

Most people know bits and pieces of my story, but very few know the whole thing.

I’ve never really shared it from beginning to end.

Usually, when someone hears about something that happened to you, they hear the short version.

You know…

“I hurt my back.”

“I had surgery.”

“I was in a motorcycle accident.”

“I almost died.”

Those are the easy versions.

The problem with the easy version is that it leaves out everything that happened between those sentences.

It leaves out the pain.

The fear.

The frustration.

The decisions.

The people who helped.

The people who disappeared.

The things you lose along the way.

And sometimes, it leaves out the person you become because of all of it.

So before I tell you about the motorcycle accident, I need to take you back a little farther.

Because the scars you see in those pictures didn’t start with a motorcycle.

They started years before that.

Twenty-five years ago, I had no idea a normal day at work would change the rest of my life.

I was working at a gravel mine, moving sections of conveyor belt and splicing new belt together.

It was hard work.

The kind of work where you didn’t have to wonder whether you’d gotten enough exercise that day.

You knew.

We had the belt pulled tight with chains while a dozer held tension on it.

Everything was under pressure.

And then, in an instant, one of those chains broke.

The belt snapped back and hit me square in the back.

There wasn’t much time to think about what had happened.

One second I was working.

The next second I had been hit hard enough to change the rest of my life.

I stood up, brushed myself off, and honestly thought I had gotten lucky.

That was the first mistake I made.

I thought because I could stand up, I must not be hurt that badly.

I didn’t know yet that some injuries don’t announce themselves immediately.

Sometimes they just sit there quietly and wait.

I went on with my life.

That’s what I had always done.

Something hurt?

Keep going.

Something broke?

Figure out how to fix it.

Something didn’t go the way I wanted?

Try again.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that attitude would eventually become both one of my greatest strengths and one of my biggest problems.

As the years passed, my back slowly got worse.

At first, it was something I could tolerate.

Then it became something I had to work around.

Eventually, it became something I had to work through.

There is a difference.

Working around pain means you change what you’re doing because something hurts.

Working through pain means you hurt and you do it anyway.

I became pretty damn good at the second one.

Eventually, the pain became almost unbearable.

I continued working in a nursing home and functioned with the help of hydrocodone and muscle relaxers.

Enough medication to tranquilize a damn horse, most likely.

I wasn’t living pain-free.

I was medicating the pain enough to keep moving.

There were still jobs to do.

Bills to pay.

People depending on me.

Life didn’t stop because my back hurt.

And I didn’t really give it permission to stop either.

Then, about fifteen years ago, something as simple as a stomach virus and dry heaving caused another disc in my back to fail.

Something as ordinary as being sick pushed an already damaged back past the point of being able to compensate.

Suddenly, I couldn’t just work through it anymore.

It took almost a month before I could have surgery.

That month is hard to explain unless you’ve experienced something similar.

I could barely walk.

Every movement mattered.

Getting up.

Sitting down.

Lying down.

Getting out of bed.

Even trying to find a position where you could sleep became an accomplishment.

But I never missed work.

I continued working in a nursing home until the day they let me go.

I was working as a CNA, using a cane just to get around, and eventually they decided I was a liability.

I understand why they made the decision.

But understanding it didn’t make it any easier.

And honestly, that experience taught me something I’ve carried with me ever since.

Employers don’t give two shits about what you’re going through.

They may tell you they care.

They may ask how you’re doing.

They may even act like you’re part of the family.

But when it comes down to it, they have a business to run.

And when you become a liability to that business, all that other shit can disappear pretty damn quickly.

Honestly, I don’t believe anyone gives a shit about you.

They may pretend to.

They may tell you they do.

They may say they’ll be there if you ever need anything.

But when it comes time for action…

Everybody disappears.

Nobody answers the call.

That’s a hard lesson to learn when you’re already hurting and trying to figure out how you’re going to keep your life together.

But I learned it.

And I’ve never really forgotten it.

I was trying to work through an injury that was getting worse by the day, and eventually my body simply wasn’t cooperating anymore.

But I still wasn’t ready to quit.

I had responsibilities.

I had bills to pay.

And I still believed I could find a way to keep moving forward.

Eventually, the morning of surgery came.

My surgery lasted eight and a half hours.

Eight and a half hours.

That’s a long time to have somebody working on your spine.

When I went into that operating room, I knew there were risks.

I knew there was a possibility things wouldn’t go exactly the way we hoped.

But knowing something is possible and actually waking up to it are two completely different things.

When I woke up, I had permanent foot drop in my right foot due to nerve damage.

It was a known risk before surgery, and my surgeon did everything he could.

But knowing it was a risk didn’t make waking up to it any easier.

Suddenly, something I had taken for granted my entire life—walking normally—wasn’t normal anymore.

My right foot didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

I had to learn how to move differently.

I had to figure out how to compensate.

I had to accept something I didn’t want to accept.

And I had to keep moving forward.

A couple of days later I was using a walker.

A few days after that, I graduated to a cane.

Three weeks later I had 47 staples removed from my back.

Forty-seven.

When you hear a number like that, it sounds almost unreal.

But I remember looking at those staples and knowing every single one represented something I had survived.

Five days after those staples came out, I started a brand-new job at another nursing home.

Why?

Because I was homeless.

My soon-to-be wife and I had separated.

And the week I came home from having surgery, she had decided to shack back up with her ex-husband.

So while I was trying to figure out how to walk again, trying to learn how to live with permanent foot drop, and trying to recover from an eight-and-a-half-hour back surgery, I was also trying to figure out where the hell I was going to live.

I didn’t have months to sit around and recover.

I needed a place to live.

I needed a paycheck.

I needed to get back on my feet.

So that’s exactly what I did.

Looking back now, I don’t know whether that was toughness, stupidity, or some combination of the two.

Probably both.

But I knew one thing.

Nobody was coming to rescue me.

I had to figure it out myself.

I never even told my new employer that I wore an AFO brace because of my foot drop.

I simply did what I had to do.

Maybe I was embarrassed.

Maybe I didn’t want anybody looking at me differently.

Maybe I was afraid that if they knew how badly I’d been hurt, they wouldn’t think I could do the job.

Whatever the reason, I kept it to myself.

Thankfully, I had a few incredible coworkers who quietly helped me with the heavy lifting until I healed.

They didn’t make a big production out of it.

They just helped.

Sometimes that’s what makes the biggest difference.

Not somebody giving you a speech.

Not somebody telling you everything is going to be okay.

Just somebody noticing that you need a hand and giving you one.

Not long afterward, my ex-wife passed away at just 37 years old after battling alcoholism.

That’s another part of my story that deserves more than a sentence.

Because when somebody dies, people tend to remember the final chapter.

They remember the addiction.

They remember the problems.

They remember the things that went wrong.

But people are more than the worst thing that ever happened to them.

There was a life before the addiction.

There were good days.

There were plans.

There were things we had hoped our lives would become.

And then there were things that neither of us knew how to fix.

I’ve learned over the years that sometimes you can love someone and still be unable to save them.

That’s a hard lesson.

And it’s one I would have rather never learned.

One thing I can say with pride is this…

After that back surgery, I never filled another prescription for pain medication.

Not because I suddenly stopped hurting.

I didn’t.

I simply decided I wasn’t going to let those pills become the thing that controlled my life.

For almost ten years, life was manageable.

Not perfect.

Not easy.

But manageable.

I had no idea that another accident was waiting for me down the road.

I had no idea that the worst injury of my life was still ahead of me.

And I certainly had no idea that one day I’d be lying in a hospital bed with a ruptured aorta, broken ribs, fractured vertebrae, an open abdomen, and doctors fighting to keep me alive.

But before I tell you about that…

You need to understand something about me.

I had already learned how to get back up.

The motorcycle accident didn’t teach me that.

Life had been teaching me for years.

The accident just showed me how far I’d come.

And how much farther I still had to go.

0 comments

Chapter One The Long, Road Home