The Worst Day of my Life

On July 23^rd, 2022, I was in a lawn mower accident.  

It was a Saturday and I spent it the way I spent many Saturdays that summer - taking my kids to the zoo.  It was a nice day, mostly sunny, but it did rain that afternoon for a little while.  I remember hiding under one of the coverings in the Safari section until the rain passed.  After we came home, I decided I would mow my lawn.

Even before my accident I hated mowing my lawn because it was such a tiring task.  My front yard is easy enough, but my back yard has a steep incline that makes mowing difficult.  The whole ordeal takes 2 hours to complete.  A week before my accident I had purchased a riding mower and was able to use that some but there were still certain places that were too steep to use the riding mower on and I had to use my push mower.

After I had mowed my lawn for about an hour I was at the place where I had to use the push mower to mow the parts of the grass that were on the steeper incline.  Normally I would have walked up the incline while carrying the mower behind me but I had just been bitten by a snake 3 weeks earlier and I was very nervous about walking forward into high grass, so I decided to push the mower downhill on the incline at a diagonal angle.

Well as you probably guessed the wetness from the earlier rain combined with the downward slant that I was mowing the lawn at, coupled with wearing shoes that didn’t have enough tread on them (which ironically came from thinking it wouldn’t matter because I mostly used the riding mower), coupled with being tired from walking around all day at the zoo all likely contributed into my slipping on the grass.

Most people who I have told this to have asked me why I didn’t just let go of the lawn mower when I started to fall.  Obviously if I could do it again that’s what I would do but as a reflex I attempted to use the lawn mower to catch my fall and inadvertently caused it to go up while my left foot went under. The blade hit my foot as I was letting go of the lawn mower that thankfully pushed my leg and the lawn mower away from each other after the initial hits.

Some people have asked me what it felt like and honestly at first it went completely numb.  And it actually stayed numb for a little while.  Right after I was hit I called my wife on the phone and asked her to come.  My heart sank when she first didn’t answer.  I had thoughts of crawling up my steep hill alone to get to the car.  She answered the second call so thankfully I didn’t have to do that.  In hindsight I should have called 911 because not only would they have helped me up the hill but I wouldn’t have had to wait to be admitted in the Emergency Room but for some reason the thought didn’t come into my mind at all.

When she answered I told her that it was really bad and that it wasn’t a joke and that I was really hurt.  She came down the hill to me and she helped me hop up the hill while using her body as a support.  We went immediately into the car, and I went into the drivers seat.  Yet again with hindsight being 20-20 I wouldn’t have done this because I could have passed out or something while driving but after I got into the driver’s seat the thought of the difficulty that it would take to get out and going into the passenger’s seat made me decide to just drive myself to the ER – which was just about a mile away.

I called my brother and his wife came to watch the kids so we drove off with our kids with her.  They would later be split up that night – with my son going to my sister’s house and my daughter going to my brother’s house.  It was very a very traumatic time for them. My sister-in-law told me later that my daughter cried all night long and even though she had just turned 3 at the time she talked to us about it one day how she went to “aunties house and that she cried a lot and was really scared”.

We made it to the Emergency Room in a couple of minutes and Jinhua helped me get into a wheelchair and helped me get in line to get admitted while she parked the car.  Like I said earlier I regret not calling 911 because it took them about a half hour for me to be admitted.  After I signed the paperwork I was sitting there in the wheelchair and the pain started to hit me really strong.  I have no prior experience that I can use to explain the pain that I felt.  It was the most pain I had ever felt in my life.

In these moments I remembered a prayer that had been prayed by Greek Orthodox monks who were a part of the Hesychastic movement.  The prayer they would pray over and over again while they were seeking God was “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.  Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  They would say the “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” as they were inhaling and the “Have mercy on me, a sinner” as they were exhaling.  I prayed this prayer over and over again and I was able to make it through to the time they admitted me into a room.

When they admitted me into the room they cut off my shoe and sock and I saw my foot out of the corner of my eye.  I made a purposeful decision to not look at it directly.  I knew it was bad, people were telling me it was bad, I felt the pain, I didn’t need to fixate on it.  One way that I knew it was bad was that my wife specifically asked that they change the channel of the TV – it was on the food network, and she said that the meat that was being prepared by the chefs looked like my foot.  I was still praying my prayer when they tried to give me an IV for the pain medicine.  The first IV failed and apparently my blood shot out all over the room (this is what I’m told) but I didn’t know that because I was already in an incredible amount of pain and I was focused on the prayer that I was praying.

They put a second IV in my other arm without the problems that the first one had and they started giving me pain medicine.  At some point along the way I started going into convulsions.  I remember shaking uncontrollably while continuing to pray the prayer.  I had shorted it now to just “Lord Jesus, Have mercy”.  My only focus during the convulsions was to keep my left foot from shaking because I didn’t want it to be damaged any more than it already was.  I focused all of my energy and strength on keeping that leg firm while the rest of my body convulsed on the hospital bed.

The doctor at the ER said that she needed to clean the wound because the blade was very dirty.  I strangely don’t remember any extra pain during this part.  I really believe that God shielded me from experiencing this as I focused my mind on praying the prayer.

After she was done she told my family that I was “really tough” to be able to hold still so she could clean it.  And it turns out that a big part of them being able to save my big toe was connected to how good of a job that she did in cleaning it.  I was strangely coherent and even talkative during this time and even found out that she was friends with one of my neighbors.  A couple of months ago I was able to tell them to tell her thank you for me because the Lord really used her cleaning of the wound to set the stage for my big toe to be saved.

As things began to settle down though she told us that she thought that in looking at the x-rays that I was going to lose 3 to 4 toes.

By that time much of the pain medicine had kicked in and the convulsions had stopped.  I was very coherent – almost in a heightened way when it came to communicating with people – so when she told us that I was taken aback.  When she left the room I spent a minute or so processing it and something came up within me that said that I wasn’t going to accept that and that I was going to trust that God would preserve me.

With my wife and my parents, I told them that I was going to trust God and I prayed Psalm 103 very passionately right there in that room.  I’m not sure what other people thought – I honestly didn’t care – but it was then and there that I committed my soul to grabbing a hold of the God who heals and preserves and made a decision that I was going to trust Him to preserve me.

Many people would come to me throughout the process and try to encourage me by telling me that life wouldn’t be that bad if I lost my big toe.  I know they said this to comfort me and they were obviously right. Many have lost much more than a couple of toes and the Lord has blessed them and used them in incredible ways. Sometimes things happen to us that may change how we have to approach life. This isn’t the end but rather a new beginning - where one can lean into God (and see Him move) on an entirely new plain. I go into this more in depth in the appendix of this book. But while I truly believe that amputation wouldn’t have been devastating, I made it a point to keep my heart fixed on the God who heals.

I did this not only because I cared about being able to run, dance and play tennis.  I did care about that but honestly the main drive in me doing this was that I knew in that room that I had been given an opportunity to touch the heart of God with faith for something that I had been told was either unlikely or impossible.  I really believe that one of the big lessons in the Gospels is that a human being has the ability to touch the heart of God through faith.  Think about the Roman Centurion.  Did you know that the only time (or at least the only time that I know of) where it says that God was brought to a place of wonder was when Jesus saw the Centurion’s faith in Matthew 8:10?  Think about that.  There isn’t much that can make the Creator of the Universe wonder.  I mean He’s seen it all, He knows it all.  But when God looked at the faith in the heart of a man, He marveled.  His eyes dilated.  His heart soared.

I’ve always wanted to be able to offer something like that to God and it was my ambition that day to give it to Him.

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