Let's Try This Again!

Hello Everyone,

I hope all is well with everybody. It has been a while since I have written and we have a lot to catch up on. As some of you know, I have been down for a while with a leg injury. You may ask why would that stop you from writing. I will explain shortly. As far as not writing in the blog over the winter, well that was just being lazy. Let's start with some racing

The last time I blogged was when Sandy was runner up at Farmington Dragway. That was my first and only race of the year so far. The next race was the Moorseville divisional and Sandy had a third round loss. Then it was onto the Spring Nationals at Rockingham. Coming into this race Sandy had qualified for the Summitt All Star race. Sadly he was a first round causality in that race as well as the national event. Not a good weekend. For me, all I could do was follow along on the web. We do have a photo of some of our friends hanging out in Sandy's trailer at the Rock.

From there it was on to the Renegade race at Piedmont Dragway the weekend of the divisional race. The Renegade class is a new class that Piedmont created this year to draw more race cars that have a hard time running the Big Dog race. It has the basically the same rules as Top Sportsman, but you can only use one nitrous system. It is also heads up, first one to the finish line, which Sandy loves. Finally, his first win of the season. In the finals, he ran good friend Stacy Hall. The neat thing is that it was an all small block final. Winning E.T. 4.45. The Piedmont divisional was not as good. A second round red light. The photo is our old pal Doug West working hard for the Sandflea at Piedmont.

Let's talk about a leg injury. That day at work was slow and I continued the cleaning out of one of our buildings. I was cutting all the metal up to take to the scrap yard. I had cut up some barrels and cut on one that had not been vented. Big explosion. Totally my fault because I did not prepare. Been around cutting and welding my whole life. Can't explain why I screwed up this time. But it happened. Moving on.

The barrel was laying down and the blast hit my left lower leg. I fell to the ground and was dazed. I heard my torch still burning and reached up and turned it off. I wondered how bad my leg was bleeding and when I looked, I could only see a couple of spots on my pants. When I raised my leg to see if their was a pool of blood (their wasn't) my leg went 90 degrees about half way down below my knee. That's when I panicked a little.

The next thing I wondered was where was my phone. By the way, I was there by myself. I realized my phone was in my jeep about 30 yards away. I crawled to my jeep and got my phone and called 911. I am leaving out a lot of little things that you can ask me later. But basically the first responders came and took care of me. Then I was air lifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, NC.

While in the hospital for two and half weeks, I received a titanium rod with lots of screws and staples. I lost the front muscle on my leg because of the blast. Believe it or not, they cut my stomach, leaving about a 10 inch scar while taking a stomach muscle and transplanting it to my leg. Ugly! Also a nice skin graph from my left thigh.

It has been 5 and half weeks since my accident. They say it will be 6 months before I can put any pressure on it. I still have to keep my leg elevated, so I only have three spots to sit. Bed, recliner and wheel chair. I went to the ortho doc yesterday and he said all is good. I go to the plastic surgeon tomorrow and I hope I will get another good report. But for now, I do a lot of sitting and surfing. I finally got everything set up so I can blog at will. Trying to get up to date . Even set up a Facebook account.

I want to thank everyone who has prayed for me, called, sent cards and came by to visit. I am truly lucky to be alive and my life has changed for the best because of it. The Lord has always been good to me, even though I have let him down a lot in the past. I will keep you up to date from here on out. My goal is to be at the Fall Nationals in Rockingham. Talk to you soon.

Don