The last three months have been a difficult and challenging time for me. In more ways than the usual challenges that I have encountered throughout my life. One of the most difficult things I have had to try to wrap my brain around has been the fact that there are things that I have never considered when it comes to my family’s preparedness. While I never have claimed to have every single possibility covered, I have always felt that I had a decent grasp on the scenarios that my family and I were likely to face. Of course, since that Murphy guy seems to really exist, I have since learned otherwise.

It all started on August 25^th, a day that started with no special meaning to me other than it was another beautiful day and I woke up in at least the same condition, or better, than I went to bed in. My day started early, about 5:30 AM, as a set out to help a friend acquaintance (more about that later) with some chores around his farm. This was nothing new to me and I went about the tasks that I needed to do. Because this was farm work, it is never clean and never gentle so I almost never have my cell phone with me. For what would turn out to be a great deal of luck, I just happened to have my phone on me that morning.

Lesson #1 — The ability to communicate and value of communication should never be underestimated.

I took care of the chickens and the cows and then set off to take care of the pigs. On the farm there is a breeding pair of red wattle pigs and the sow had just had a litter of nine piglets. Well, better make that eight piglets because one of them was stillborn. I guess I should have only said seven because she sat on one and killed it. To be completely clear, I really should have said a litter of six piglets because she also ate one (nature is so gross!).

So I did my usual thing, giving mama pig her food and water but I noticed that one of her piglets was caught in the fence. I knew that if that little piglet squealed, it would mean trouble for me with mom but I couldn’t just leave it caught there so I checked to see where mom was, grabbed that little piglet and set the wheels of disaster in motion! The moments that followed seemed like minutes but I am sure that it was all very quick.

As soon as that piglet let out a squeal, the roughly 450 pound sow came charging towards me. That is the moment that froze in time when I realized that I should have gone with my gut and just left things as they were. I am a three time combat veteran so I do not tend to panic quickly. I merely summed up the situation, saw a course of action and set about jumping to the safe side of the fence. Being that I am not as young as I used to be, coupled with what turned out to be a very weak board (that happened to break mid-jump) that I chose to pull myself up on, I came crashing down to safety on the other side of the fence.

No big deal. I just need to get up and dust myself off. So I try to get up and I didn’t get my feet under me. Try again, same result. Go to try a third time, look down at my legs and my right leg is Broken. And I mean really broken, between my knee and ankle. The type of broken that makes it look like I have an extra joint because my leg is bent about 45 degrees more than it usually does along the mid-shaft of the tibia and fibula. Crap!

Once again, I’m a hardened combat veteran so I won’t panic. I’m also a retired Army medic so I have seen this injury before so I have it all under control, right? This was actually somewhat comforting because I knew what was wrong with me but at the same time is significantly not comforting because I knew what was wrong with me. Luckily, someone was looking out for me that day because my cell phone was in my pocket. I was able to call for help and let my wife know what was going on and to ask her to meet me at the hospital.

This is where I have come to the realization about how much I took communication for granted. Even though my mind can think of dozens of things that could go wrong on a farm, I still did not keep my phone on me. Had this day been like the others, I would have been seriously screwed, for lack of a better description. I can guarantee anyone reading this at least one thing, I will never look at what I am doing, or may have to do and think about communication the same way ever again.

When it comes to emergency preparedness, a communication plan should always be in effect. This means having a communication plan in place and in action, whenever there is a chance that there could be an emergency (which is pretty much all of the time).

Lesson #2 —Eventually, you will find out who your friends are.

The friend (I did it again, more about that shortly) acquaintance whose farm I was working on called 9-1-1 for me and got help in route with the assurance that he would be out to me shortly. It only took him about seven minutes to get there, which wasn’t bad considering he was down the road at the time. Upon his arrival, he lets me know that the ambulance is on its way and then proceeds to ask me what happened. I explained everything to him and he then goes into the barn and starts tinkering around with a few things.

This left me wondering what just happened. My internal dialogue was something along the lines of, “Uh… hello! I am laying here maimed, what could possibly be so important in there?” In hindsight I realize that this could have been a situation that he was not at all comfortable with, and he really didn’t know how to handle himself, so he just went to the nearest place he felt safe or in control. I will assure anyone who asks, I was much more uncomfortable in that moment than he ever could have been. If you doubt this viewpoint, go break your leg. I promise it will put some things into perspective.

Moving ahead to about two weeks after I was hurt, I got a call from the mother of my acquaintance who wanted to know how I was doing. I am sure that she cares on some level but I always have had the feeling that the family was just worried about being sued. My acquaintance failed to call me, or even send a text message, for almost three more weeks. By this time I have already formed the opinion that I don’t actually mean anything to this guy other than being a source of help when he has needed it. Nevertheless, he called to tell me that he wanted to see how I am doing and, without taking even the slightest pause, that he would also still be interested in some help that I had previously offered with marketing the farm.

Maybe you can now see how I have formed my conclusive opinion about this person. This experience definitely taught me that regardless of how I have previously judged a person’s character, I will know for sure when all of the chips are on the table and there is nothing left to lose.

From an emergency preparedness standpoint, I will take this experience and remember it in the future as I approach new relationships with others as well as using it to potentially evaluate some of the relationships that I have with others already. If the time ever comes where I find myself in the position where my life may find it’s way into the hand’s of others again, this lesson will be valuable for me to remember.

I should say that this information about people is not new to me but having this experience reminded me about the true nature of some people’s character. Having seen life and death on the battlefield, I feel qualified to make some of these assumptions as the true character of a human cannot hide from the vile nature of armed conflict.

Lesson #3 —Even the easily survived injury of today, may be the long-term, life-altering injury of tomorrow.

Backtracking to the point where I am waiting on the ambulance to come pick me up…

As I lay on the ground in the worst pain of my life, I began to realize what it is like to be completely dependent upon others (a position that I despise being in). There was nowhere that I was taking myself (although I had already considered what it would have been like to drag myself to help if I did not have my phone that morning… queue up the shivers down my spine) so I was thankfully waiting on help to come to me. This led me to think about a lot of things in my life, but one of them was what a similar event might look like if telephone calls and emergency medical services were not available.

I would go on to the hospital where they would confirm that my leg was indeed broken and I would then be transferred to another hospital where they actually have the capability to do the surgery that I needed. Several hours later, I was higher than a kite in my hospital bed, with a leg so swollen that it looked like a blimp, and despite feeling incredibly messed up, I realized how fortunate I was because a different set of circumstances could have led to a much different outcome.

In my case (especially because we live in a very rural area), I could not help but think that during a national or widespread regional crisis, my injury may have led to a much different outcome. Probably the best-case scenario would have been a crude surgery to save my leg but the bones would not have healed the way they should and I would never walk the same ever again. As the wheel of possibilities continues to roll along, the scenarios would probably get worse and include options like losing my leg and ultimately my life.

Lesson #4 — Things won’t always go as planned.

As it turns out, even with the best resources available, my leg would not just be repaired and heal like it is supposed to. When I had my surgery, things were a little too broken which led to a complicated repair. As I began to heal, a sore on the side of my leg formed where my broken tibia bone had poked through the skin and, were it healing OK, would not have been too big of a deal but it took a long time to heal shut (approximately nine weeks). This led to some additional steps in wound care being required to keep it from becoming infected.

The x-rays that were taken on my six week follow up visit would reveal that my leg was not healing properly and another surgery would be required. This becomes another time in life where I am reminded that things will not always go as planned. The second surgery I needed was done three days later where bone grafts could be done and wire wraps placed around my tibia to keep it tightly together so it would heal properly.

It has been close to three months since the day that I broke my leg on the farm and I am still not able to put 100 percent of my weight on it. I am slowly working up to that point because as the doctor said it to me, “we want to be sure that everything heals properly before you start pounding away on it.” That makes sense to me!

It is worth pointing out that between now and my second surgery a few weeks ago, an infection set into my leg that was able to be quickly stopped with the quick solution of a prescription for antibiotics that was phoned in to my local pharmacy by my surgeon who is roughly 50 miles away. Once again, if these conveniences were not in place, it would only take a day or two for me to die once the infection reached my bone.

For me, not only did things not go as planned, they are also not going as planned for my wife and family. During this time that I have been disabled, all of the work around the house — helping the kids, driving anywhere for anything and more — has fallen solely on my wife. This has been rough and while she has put up with it now, I could only imagine how much more difficult things would be if our lives were changed by disaster, conflict, etc.

This highlights the importance of making plans, rehearsing them and then discussing alternatives to cover the potential contingencies that might happen as the result of circumstances that were not initially considered. Something as simple as who will sit with the water filter and keep it running could be completely screwed up as one person is taken out of the mix, regardless of what the reason for it is.

Lesson #5 – You will get kicked while you’re down.

Over the last few weeks I have been recovering well and as expected. It is nice to feel like there is an end in sight for this healing process and I am greatly looking forward to walking around on my own two legs once again some day. After all of the drama with my broken leg seems to be starting to diminish, we are all looking forward to things returning to normal around our house.

What would the fun of that be though?

The sound of rain in the middle of the night last week would bring about another reminder of the fact that I can’t plan for everything. What was forecast as a couple of rain showers that would move quickly through the area overnight became a weather anomaly while it somehow stalled out over our county which would lead to flooding across the area.

Ever since childhood, I have always lived in a house with a concrete driveway. This is typically a fact of suburban living but because I now have the choice to live where I can be happy, we live in a rural community, in a house on several acres, at the end of a long gravel driveway. All in all this is no big deal, we have not had any major problems when it comes to weather with our property, and we do not live in a flood plain of any sort so we should be good to go. At least that was the case until we had the previously mentioned weather anomaly settle over our house for the night.

We escaped having any flooding that affected our house but our property would turn out to be another story. The volume of water on the property would turn out to be so great that our gravel driveway would wash out and leave a nice ditch between the road and the rest of our driveway. Combine this with the fact that I still cannot stand with all of my weight on my leg and things got interesting. My wife and I would end up being able to get one of our vehicles out the same day but only because we have a truck and only because she did all of the hard work to get some of the area filled in while I sat in a chair in the water logged yard and raked gravel into piles that could be shoveled into a wheelbarrow. By every stretch of the imagination, it was an absolute ridiculous set of circumstances.

For our emergency preparedness efforts, I have been careful to look at the various types of weather we get and how those may or may not affect us. I have looked at historic flooding and flood plains along with the historic rainfall, snowfall, etc. that has happened in the area and used this data to form our preparedness strategies. None of our existing strategies involved weather anomalies that I was not familiar with.

The takeaway for me in this situation is that things will happen regardless of whether I think of them or not. This can even happen when it is the least convenient time possible.

The events of the last three months have been challenging but I am grateful that these events happened when and how they did. Had this been during a different time in history or during the wrong time in the future, I would have been lucky to have been able to escape the situation regardless of what my outcome would have been over the long term. While it feels like there has been more bad than good to come out of this situation, I am pleased to have been given a different perspective on my preparedness efforts and for the opportunity to put these lessons to work. Hopefully you will be able to learn from my experience without having to have such an experience yourself. I would not recommend it!

–Thomas Miller

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