Yeah definitely on the extreme side, but shows how fast **** can hit the fan. But pretty incredible she was able to get back in the saddle against all odds.
I told a new girl at my company whose new to climbing (as am I) to give it a listen. She didn’t seem to interested when I told her the jist of it. I think it’s important to be aware of how dangerous this job is and learn from stories like Brudzinski’s though.
Indeed and agreed.
About 15 years ago, I was fairly new to climbing, and had just become foreman of my own bucket truck. On our way to our bucket trucks one morning, my foreman ran a stop sign and we hit a gal broadside and flipped and rolled our crew cab one ton. My arm went out the window and the backside of my right hand was filleted off. Losing the tendons that operate your middle three fingers. And all of the skin and muscle that covers the back of your hand.
They took tendons out of my right foot to make my fingers work again, skin from the backside of my right leg and muscle from my right thigh.
That initial repair started to die because there was not enough blood flow. So then they skinned the whole top of my left thigh and cut me from my left arm pit down to my waist and took out a great big piece of muscle and then they extended the injury partway up my right arm so they could tie into more vessels and veins to get me better bloodflow. It’s amazing how quickly life can change in this business, even through no fault of your own. It took me three months to get back to work, and similar to Rachel’s story, my employer would not put me back in a tree or a truck so I was stuck dragging brush after that.
So obviously I went elsewhere and moved on. But horrible stuff happens in the blink of an eye. And a lot of us are extremely blessed each and every day that we go home safe to our families.
Furthermore, I had never considered the possibility of having PTSD after a traumatic injury like that until listening to Rachel. I spent a long time crawling inside the bottle, and playing around with green leafy substances. Lost a wife and generally made a mess of my life. Eventually I got my **** together and I’ve been sober for eight years now.
No one needs to experience that...
However it brought me closer to my creator, and made me who I am today.
I certainly didn’t like it, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
It was part of “the plan”, and I’m a more conscientious person because of it.
In my opinion.
STIHL the BEST