Miracle Story #5
“On August 27, 2006 I made a decision to go to southwest Colorado and ride motorcycles for a week with my buddies from church. I had just purchased a brand new Harley Electra Glide with four hundred miles on it and so it was a new bike to me. On the second day of that ride I unfortunately had a significant crash, resulting in some pretty bad injuries to both of my arms.
We had left Durango, Colorado at about 6:00 in the morning and this happened around 3:30 in the afternoon that day. We had ridden all the way from Durango, past Telluride. We went to a little town not far from there called Naturita and then we had made the decision that we were going to ride into Utah and get south, so that we could get into New Mexico and come back up to Colorado from the south before it got dark. So we were riding pretty hard, pretty aggressively.
Three of the people in my party were ahead of me and one was back behind me, fortunately. The crash occurred on Highway 141 where a very long bridge crosses the Dolores River. We had been on a straightaway for quite some time and a lot of things were happening to me, unbeknownst to me at the time. It was day two of these long day rides, so I was fatigued. I was dehydrated and that culmination of fatigue and dehydration and the fact that the motorcycle was vibrating a little bit and the sun was shining on me, I basically fell asleep. And you’re probably like, ‘How can that happen on a motorcycle?’ Well, I’m here to tell you, it can happen on a motorcycle.
My eyes might have been open but my brain was off. I was asleep with my eyes open. I did not realize that I was not making the turn onto that bridge to cross the Dolores River, and the three gentlemen in front of me had no idea what was about to occur. The gentleman behind me, realizing that I was not making the turn, was screaming at the top of his lungs for me to turn. I wasn’t turning because I had no idea I was about to drive into the bridge guardrail. I literally snapped out of it at the second of impact. I flinched, and then I hit.
I had been riding at about 50mph plus, give or take. The bike exploded into that guardrail and catapulted straight up, without me on it because I had ejected over the front of it, over the top of it. My best calculation is that the motorcycle had a little bit of a left glance because of how I tumbled. I tumbled for about seventy-eight feet down the bridge, along the road. I tumbled parallel with the guardrail and at some point, I had flipped over backwards because I was tumbling back handsprings and my left arm hooked up underneath the guardrail, which injured it severely. I did have a helmet on when I crashed, but in spite of that I broke the helmet on impact.
So seventy-eight feet later I was laying now perpendicular to the guardrail and I opened my eyes and I was like, ‘Okay, there’s blue sky. I don’t think this is heaven.’ I knew I had goofed and I knew it was bad. Besides the blue sky, as I was laying there looking up, I started to sit up but then I realized that I couldn’t sit up because my arms weren’t functioning. They were sort of laying there and I thought, ‘Okay, that’s not good.’
I saw a piece of my shirt, with a piece of meat detached, stuck to the guardrail. My next sensation was that I was wet. Now all silliness aside, I thought I had wet my pants, but as it turns out, it was blood waterfalling out of my chest at the point of the injury in my left arm.
As grace would have it, I had been a paramedic for almost twenty years in Wichita. I had the wherewithal to go, ‘Okay, self-assess here and figure out what is wrong with you and what’s not.’ I knew I was in trouble because I was bleeding profusely and I thought, ‘That’s got to be number one priority.’
So when the rider that was behind me came running up and asked me how badly I was hurt, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “You have to help me stop bleeding because if you don’t, I’m going to be gone in a couple of minutes because I’m bleeding at that rate.”
And in a matter of about two to three minutes maximum, I pooled almost two liters of blood on the ground. All over me, all over the ground. And in that time frame, I was coaching my friend Ron to fashion a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
We slowed it down but we couldn’t get it to stop, so I said, “Alright, I’m going to ask you to do something profoundly gross and you’re just going to have to buck up and do it.”
And he said, “What do you want me to do?”
I said, “I want you to put your hands around my wrist. I want you to sheath all of that muscle and tissue back up. Just slide it back up my arm.”
He was like, “I don’t know if I can do that.”
I said, “If you don’t do that I’m going to die.”
And so he did.
Then I told him to go get my jacket out of one of the saddlebags, wherever my bike went. It had actually bounced about twenty feet away from where I hit. We used my jacket to make a compress and then he tied it up as tight as he could get it. In the meantime, the three guys in front of me had no idea that this accident had occurred. So thirty minutes later, they finally realized that we weren’t behind them and they turned around and came back to find me laying on the road.
While I was laying there two funny things happened. You know, if I’m involved, something is going to get quirky about this. You just have to know this. It’s my fate. So a gentleman in a white pickup truck stopped. We were in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have a cell phone signal. We couldn’t get a cell phone signal to save my life and so we knew somebody was going to have to ride to get somewhere that there was cell phone signal, to be able to call for help. So that was the first plan.
One of our guys got on his bike and took off to go get a signal. Well in the midst of that ride, he stumbled upon a line shack. It’s basically a shack out in the middle of a field that houses a phone. It was a miracle that the rancher just happened to be there at that moment. And so inside of about half an hour, they were able to make that phone call from the line shack to 9-1-1 to get help. The rancher went and got his wife and then came back to the scene where I was.
Now in the interim, this white pickup stopped and this gentleman started talking to the guys as I was laying on the ground. I was paying attention to the clock because my golden hour was running.
I said, “So, if we don’t hear sirens in the next fifteen minutes, I vote that we put me in the back of that pickup truck and find a town.”
And they agreed.
I couldn’t hear the conversation but my guys and the gentleman in the white pickup truck were talking and then he got in the truck and he did a U-turn and pulled around. He stopped beside me and I was thinking that they were going to put me in the back of the truck, but then the truck drove away.
I was like, “What just happened? Where did my ride go?”
And my guys started shaking their heads and said, “You’re not going to believe this but that guy is on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. He is out here hiding and if he takes you to town, he goes back to prison. And he doesn’t want to risk that.”
So he left. He just left me laying there. And I often wonder if he ever, ever thinks, ‘What happened to that guy?’ Or did he have the character to not care? I don’t know. But he left.
A short while later the rancher from the line shack arrived at the scene with his wife. He had a stock trailer hooked up to his truck, so we decided that if we didn’t hear sirens in the near future, we were going to put me in the back of that trailer and go to town.
We did hear sirens, but while we were waiting it was interesting. I was with a bunch of church guys, very grounded in their faith, very spiritual, very everything. And we were doing everything we knew to do. I was directing every single thing in my psyche that I knew, that I was empowered with, having been a paramedic all of my life. And yet, not one of us thought to consider the spiritual side of this event.
And so when the question was asked, “Scot, what else do we need to do that we haven’t already done, while we’re waiting for the ambulance?”
I said, “There’s really not anything we can do but this little tiny cut on my finger is killing me. Can you wrap something around that?”
And everybody chuckled about that.
And then the rancher, the rancher said, “I think we should pray.”
Well there’s a novel thought.
So that rancher and these four other men that I was with, standing over me, prayed for three things that day. They prayed that I would not die. And I didn’t. They prayed that I would not lose my arm. And I didn’t. They prayed that I would be restored. And I am.
I would reveal that I have been a born-again believer since I was a teenager, since I was about seventeen years old. I’ve had prayer life up and downs. You know, intermittent here, intermittent there, but not consistent. My prayer life was never consistent.
Did I believe in prayer? Yeah sure. But did I ever experience, did I ever think that somehow, someway, there was some connection to prayer making something happen in my life? Up to that day, I don’t know that I could answer that question, legit. I could assume, but nothing that ever just stuck out.
But on that day, when that rancher, a total stranger that I had never seen before in my entire existence, prayed that I wouldn’t lose my arm, that I wouldn’t die, and that I would be restored, and all of those things came to fruition, it made prayer absolutely a real thing. A real, viable force of my faith that I had never experienced before.
The ambulance finally did come and they transported me to a little rural hospital in Cortez, Colorado, which was about an hour and a half south of where we were. They could not manage me there so I took a helicopter ride to Mercy Hospital back in Durango, which has a level one trauma center.
I had a complete circumvential laceration with a distal avulsion, proximal to my elbow, with complete neuro-disruption. I crushed my right hand, and fractured all of my fingers. I had a punched-through avulsion laceration of my right forearm with neuro-disruption. And I had a concussion into next week.
In layman’s terms, I cut my bicep in two and all of the tissue and muscle that was around my upper arm completely separated from my upper arm, past my elbow. I had a broken right hand, all of my fingers were broken, and I had a significant injury to my right forearm that caused the inability of my right arm to function because of the disruption to all of my nerves and things that make your arms work.
In the trauma room I asked the trauma surgeon if I was going to lose my arm.
He said, “I don’t know, it depends on how extensive your tissue and muscle damage is. It depends on how much of that you lose, because if we don’t have anything to put back on the bone, we don’t have anything to put back on the bone. You can’t have an open wound, so it will depend on how much of it I can repair. I will do everything in my power to not have to amputate.”
So I went to surgery. I was in surgery for about four or five hours, give or take. I spent a couple of days in ICU and a week on the regular floor in the hospital. I had a great team of people. In fact, my day nurse, we had such a great relationship that she traded shifts so that she could be there when I discharged. I got to know nearly everyone on my floor. Imagine that. I’m a social creature.
That Mercy Hospital is a private hospital, so all of the rooms were private. I was never in a room that I shared with anybody. About the third night that I was there, in the middle of the night I heard a woman in the next room crying. I could tell it wasn’t a young cry. It was an older cry. And selfishly I was thinking, ‘Okay if I don’t get her to stop crying I’m never going to get some sleep.’
So I got up and I went over to her room in the middle of the night. It was a woman who was in her eighties that had fractured her hip, and she had no family. Pretty much for the duration that I was there, every single night I would get up and go over to her room and sit by her bed, hold her hand, and pray with her. I would talk to her for a few minutes, she would go to sleep, and then I would go back in to my room and go to bed.
I don’t know if I had to have a motorcycle wreck to intervene with her but I have to believe that somehow, someway, we are all interconnected in everything that happens in some way, shape or form. If it hadn’t been me talking to her at night and praying with her, who would it have been? It’s been long enough now that I suspect that she has probably left this life by now but you know, unbeknownst to me, I had yet another purpose laying there in that hospital that I didn’t even know about at the time.
It was a very long, uncomfortable ride back home to Kansas. I was pretty banged up. I had road rash from my nose to my toes. I had what they call a class four concussion, which is like one step away from a closed head injury of significance. So I had that to contend with for a little bit, but I came home.
I had a second surgery when I returned to Wichita. And then I rehabbed every day for the next three months. It was scheduled for six months but I pushed hard and recovered as quickly as possible. To know me is to know that I cannot be idle. Even toward the end of that three months, I could feel depression creeping into my psyche. I needed to be back in the mix, back among people and doing stuff.
So on August 27, 2006 I laid on that Highway 141 in southwest Colorado fighting for my life. Fighting not to bleed to death. Fighting not to lose my arm.
In December 2016, I’ve now been playing drums for about 15 years in a praise band at church. And who’d have thought? That could have been a very, very different tale. I could be having a very different conversation with you. In so many ways it could have been different. That prayer that day made it real and it reinforced the hope in prayer, that it’s legit. If you’re a believer it can make a difference for you.”
© 2016 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.
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My name is Scot, and I live in Wichita, Kansas.
In the midst of a motorcycle accident that should have taken my arm or my life,
I AM miracle story #5.