In the photo above you can see bundles of fence posts and rails produced by the mill where I was working. I was standing on top of one of those kind of bundles when my accident occurred.
The mill where I had borrowed the jack in yesterday’s blog, also played a part in my next fainting episode, which happened about half a year later.
One of my jobs at this cedar mill, which made split rail cedar fences and posts, was to bundle and strap the posts into bundles. To do this I had to climb up on top of the posts which where laying in a crib. From this vantage point about 4 feet above the floor, I would insert the metal strapping that was strung around the bundle, into a manual cinching machine, crank the strapping up tight, and then clamp the straps, to secure the bundle of posts.
I did this thousands of times, but on this one particular day, we had run out of the regular steel strapping we normally used, and I was told by the boss to use another type of strapping which was noticeably narrower.
“Go ahead and cinch it up tight,” I was told, “This strapping is real strong,”
I stood up on the bundle, my legs apart, bent over and put the strapping into the machine and started cranking the machine to tighten the strapping around the bundle. The posts were being gathered together as the strapping squeezed around them. I was bent over a pulling against the crank on the machine when suddenly there was a snap, and the steel strapping broke. The ends flew in opposite directions and suddenly the force that I was pulling against vanished, and I was flying through the air to the concrete floor waiting below.
My hard hat saved my head, when it bounced against the floor, but when I picked myself up, I noticed that I had broken my right arm at the wrist. I remained calm and a co-worker came over to help me. I told him I thought I had broken my arm and I had to go to the office for some help. Alone, I walked across the packed snow in the mill yard (Photo below) to the trailer that served as the mill office.
“Bob, I need to go to the hospital, I think I broke my arm.” Bob asked me some questions about how it happened, then told me to get into the company pickup, and he would drive me over to the hospital, which was only a short distance away.
I remained calm, and in control, sitting in the truck.
When we got to the hospital, Bob got out of the pickup and came over to open the door for me. There was about six inches of powdery snow on the parking lot. Bob was supporting me as we headed across the parking lot toward the hospital door, when suddenly, I fainted. As he told me later; suddenly I was just “dead weight,” and he couldn’t hold me up, so I dropped to the snow below.
When I regained consciousness, I was being lifted out of the snow and unto a wheelchair. by a couple of nurses. I was then wheeled through the snow in the parking lot, into the hospital. My right arm was broken at the wrist, and I was patched up and spent the next month and a half with another chunk of plaster on my arm.
You can take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
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