219: What if you bled to death?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It's never given that you're going to be here tomorrow or in the next hour. You've got to respect that and you've got to live your life accordingly. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 219

What if you bled to death?

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I grew up in a small town in southwest Arkansas on the border of Arkansas and Texas. Lived in this town all my life. I was the only child. My parents didn't have me until they were in their 30s, so as a whole they were older parents.

Just a modest, lower middle income family. Had a good life. Had good parents. Raised in church. Christian and believe in God. And just kind of a good Southern home.

I've always loved basketball. I've loved any kind of sport, riding bikes, anything, kid baseball, kid football, kid basketball from five years old all the way through high school and into college. I've just loved sports and that helped a lot to mold me as a person. Not having any brothers and sisters, that was a chance for me to be around my classmates or my neighbors and be able to learn that you're not always the best. You don't always win.

Values in life that I got from sports have lasted throughout my life, especially when you don't win. That's not the only thing in life because everybody loses at some point. My dad owned a service station. I was three years old. Attendants pumped the gas for the cars. They changed tires. They did minor tune-up work.

He was actually one day working on a car. It was up on the jack stands raised up so he could get underneath it. And some reason or another, the car rolled off the front of the jack stands and pinned him around the waist area in front of the car. It crushed his pelvis, his right hip. He was in the hospital for about six months recovering from that. It was a very traumatic injury for him.

He was never able to go back to work. He couldn't work on his leg all day. So the field of work that he knew he could no longer do. So I grew up with him at home. He taught me how to persevere through that type of an injury. And I wanted to try to make sure that something like that never happened to me.

My mom worked and did the home chores as well. So it was really tough for her. My mom didn't make a lot of money, but never did without. But also probably in my neighborhood, we were probably on the lower of the incomes. And I'm sure there was plenty of times where he didn't feel adequate. And I'm sure he wanted to play a bigger role as far as the traditional father figure from those times.

He had pain throughout his life. He had a limp. And I'm sure it did affect him mentally. Most families, most of the mothers were at home and they cleaned and cooked and took care of the kids. And of course, the father was at work and came home, took care of the yard and the house and the property. So it kind of was a larger burden put on my mom.

My mom was always the glue. She was the glue of the family. She had to be. Not saying she wasn't prior to this accident with my dad, but for sure afterwards she was.

Going through school, I couldn't really decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I knew I wasn't a good enough athlete to get paid to play a game. I probably was a C+ student. I wasn't great. I wasn't terrible. I didn't really have a strong urge to go any one direction. I was very shy, very quiet.

College seemed to be a new start, you know, even though it was in the same town, it was a place that I could start over with people, a lot of people that I'd never seen before, never knew. So it gave me a chance to kind of be more open, a little more charismatic. And I met some of my best friends today I met in college.

After college, I immediately went to work for a rural telephone company I'm at today. I got married at 29, had my first daughter when I was 30, bought my first house. I had a good job, good insurance, good retirement, great neighbors, family was happy, all was good.

Most of my friends revolved around basketball. Played pickup basketball three, four times a week. I had a pretty big network of friends during the off season. They were all duck hunters. So I kind of started hunting mainly as a way to just to be able to spend more time with them.

Once I started, I really, I'm kind of one of those persons, if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it all out. So I immediately wanted to learn more. I wanted to learn how to do my own duck calling, which is an art of its own. I bought a boat of my own. I got a dog, started trying to train it to retrieve ducks. I had a group of, you know, 15 to 20 guys that went to the lakes and scouted for ducks.

This particular weekend that we went, we had had a really abnormal large amount of rain that had fell the week prior to this weekend, which is always good for ducks. The five of us leave out at four o'clock in the morning.

Poor weather usually helps duck hunting, so cloudy days, rainy days, cold, you know, all that usually pushes ducks south and that's what we had had. So we were all excited about that particular season because all the elements were coming into place. This particular hunt, being that the water was so deep, we were hunting out of the boats.

We had an Avery blind, which is just about like a tent. If you can imagine putting a tent on a boat. My dog was with us that I had somewhat trained to retrieve. You start around daylight with your duck hunt. So we had hunted till about 11 and we decided that looked like our day had dwindled as far as our chances. We were all ready to go in and get something to eat.

I went to the left front of the boat and was taking down the Avery blind that we had up to conceal ourselves from the ducks. As we were taking down this blind, you know, I heard a noise, just a thud sound, and immediately had a fiery ball feel in the back of my leg. It felt like somebody was burning a circle in my leg, in the back of my thigh, like with a little blowtorch. I immediately lost my sight.

I crumbled into the boat. Luckily, I didn't fall out of the boat, but I just kind of fell down into the boat. You know, I could feel things, but I don't remember seeing anything. I was feeling a lot of pain, just incredible amount of pain, not knowing exactly what had happened. Something bad's wrong. I had immediately started bleeding severely. I knew I felt the blood running down my leg. I knew how much was coming out of my leg. I knew I was dying quickly. What do we do next?

I can remember, you know, briefly hollering, you know, it got the attention from the guys in the boat next to us. The guy that was in the boat with me, he lost all sense of reality and kind of was no help. So my good friend Scott jumped in the boat with me and he immediately came in and started asking what happened other than me hollering. They really didn't know what the deal was.

He immediately asked what happened while he was scrambling, and that's when the guy with me said the gun had discharged in the back of my leg. So until then, I really didn't know what had happened to me. And I just knew how far I was away from medical help. How am I ever going to make it back to the bank? We were in such a remote location. How can I survive long enough to get to help in order to live?

I just went into a mode of survive. I just didn't have time to think about, you know, was I going to be able to see my wife and kids the next day? But it was like I knew it's just a crazy thing. I just knew that I just didn't have time to do all that and survive. I could hear it in their voice. They were already, you know, panicking. I was more worried about if I started panicking, I just knew that wasn't going to help.

I remember talking to Scott and going, hey, man, you know, you got to get a tourniquet on my leg. And I remember telling him where to find, you know, a rope. And I also told him, you know, that I had a little knife, a clip-on knife that was on my duck bag. I told him to get that and be able to, you know, to cut the rope to the length. So he got the rope, put the rope on my leg. First thing he did, he tied it off up high on my thigh.

Obviously, it wasn't near this calm, but I said, that's not tight enough. You're going to have to get it tighter than that. And I can remember hearing him break a limb in the tree that we were in and putting the limb in the rope and using it as a vice to be able to really secure the tourniquet really tight. I knew that it was as good as it was going to get when the tourniquet started hurting worse than the gunshot wound. We started the procedure of getting everything loaded into the boat so they could get me out.

probably 10 to 15 minutes from the boat ramp. And then we're probably eight to 10 miles from the nearest city where there was an ambulance. We start out, they start to motor. We go probably 15, 20 feet. And I hear the motor stop. And I remember asking, hey, what caused the motor to stop? And Scott said, man, that net that we have on the Avery blind, it got out of the back of the boat and it got hung around the prop and it choked the motor down. So we're going to have to cut that off.

So they jump out and they cut the net off of the prop, which seemed like, again, forever. It probably wasn't very long. We again start rolling back toward the bank. As we're running to the bank, by that time, I had lost quite a bit of blood. The blood still wasn't running out to where Scott could tell how much I was bleeding because I had all those clothes on and it was filling up my boot.

I've been told that I probably hold around 15 units of blood and they estimated I lost about five units in there. I do remember looking down at some point in the boat at my leg and when they picked me up to move me, I looked down and remember seeing my leg not turn. My foot didn't turn with me. So it stayed turned the wrong direction. So I knew that I had, you know, massive bone injury there as well.

As we're going back to the bank, you know, I was starting to struggle to breathe. I'm breathing and I'm breathing heavily, but I'm not getting oxygen. I can tell my body's shutting down. It's a crazy feeling. It was terrible. And I would take, I remember taking a huge breath of air. And just as soon as it got in my body, I was needing another breath. I mean, it was just like I could not get enough oxygen in my body. I was like a battery running down.

Every minute, you know, I was running down more and more and more and nothing I did made a big difference. Since blood carries oxygen to our brain, you know, it's hard to tell someone how that feeling was, but I could tell that I was dying. I was starting to shut down. The pain in my leg was gone. I wasn't feeling pain so much anymore.

I was scared as much as I could be, but I remember trying to think clearly enough to help. You know, I wanted to be a help and not a burden any more than I already was. So as we're going in the boat back to the ramp, I kind of was falling unconscious. When I would fall unconscious, you know, everything would slow down. The boat motor would sound, would get muffled. It was kind of like I was underwater, just floating freely and everything was okay.

It was almost like I was just kind of floating in space. You know, I wasn't in pain. The pain went away. Everything slowed down. It was just more tranquil and it was real peaceful. Scott would slap me and wake me up and tell me, you know, hey, stay awake, stay awake. And, you know, pain, you know, immediately comes back in my leg, heart racing, having trouble getting oxygen to my brain. So I was breathing hard.

For a certain amount of time, I would be awake and then I would go fall back into being unconscious. And then the same thing would happen again. I would just be real peaceful, kind of like I was floating, just real tranquil, no pain. But when he woke me up, I'd be right back into hearing that motor running accident and everything's scary, everything's scary going on with that for me. And, you know, and it was just like, just leave me here. Don't wake me back up. Let me stay here because I wasn't hurting there.

We did this probably three different times that I can remember. The boat ride itself back to the ramp, maybe 10, 15 minutes. I remember coming up to the ramp and asking Scott, hey man, you know, is the ambulance here? And I remember him saying, no, they're not here yet. And I remember calling him again.

It was terrifying because I knew in my mind, you know, how long it took to get from my house to the boat ramp. Do I have 30 more minutes of life left to get to the hospital? You know, it was scary. It was very scary. He called 911. He got the operator and she said, you know, we've got a ground unit on their way. That was the best news that I could hear because I knew I was dying.

The rider in the ambulance that come to get me at the boat ramp grew up three or four blocks from me. He was a lifetime friend. They load me up into the ambulance, raised up and looked out the window and laid my head back down and just like turn the light switch off. And that's the last thing I can remember.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. From that point on the bank, when I heard the ambulance to the time I woke up in ICU, that's a three-week gap that I don't necessarily remember a lot about. I was having really bad dreams, and those dreams are very vivid.

One dream, I was a drug dealer in Dallas, Texas, and I was actually running from someone else and was getting shot at. And then one dream I had was where I was getting buried alive in a trench.

Right before that weekend when I went hunting, we were burying some new fiber optic cable under where they were building the interstate through our territory. There was a pretty wide, deep trench. They were burying the cable about seven, eight foot deep. And I, in my dreams, coming out of my coma, was in that ditch and it actually did cave in on me. And I remember instead of somebody grabbing me and pulling me out, they threw me a water hose and I was able to breathe out of that water hose.

I had been on a ventilator for 26 days. The ventilator you're breathing through a tube, you know, just seemed like dream after dream. You know, I was dropped into a pit of rattlesnakes and I was having to run from them, you know, and to try to climb out to get away from them.

One dream, I was in one of our telephone company buildings. They only have one door leading out. And for some reason or other, the door got jammed and the building was being flooded with water. And the water was filling up to the ceiling. And I was having to get up as close to the ceiling as I could to breathe. And just ridiculously bad dreams that I was having coming out of that coma. I woke up in ICU on December the 24th.

I had restraints on my arms and my leg because I would fight them coming out of the dreams when I would wake up. I would start fighting to get up.

The restraints made the dreams worse. And then when I'd wake up, I would be in a hospital, no one in there, four white walls, you know, just the generic, you know, hospital room. You wake up into that and it's kind of like, okay, so those dreams were very vivid and very real. And then I wake up in a hospital room restrained on a ventilator with chest tubes in both sides of my chest and IVs in my neck. And so which one was real? And it was really hard to figure out

Finally, when I woke up, I'd say peacefully enough to where I didn't cause a disturbance. I remember just looking around the room and kind of taking in, you know, basic things, you know, like the air conditioner, the heater blowing and just normal sounds. And then, you know, I looked down at my leg and I had remembered enough to know that, yeah, I lost my leg.

You know, I had those bad dreams, which were here we are 21 years later. So they were very vivid to me today even. And I'd wake up from those dreams, which were really real. And then I'd wake up in a hospital with nobody in with me. I don't have my leg. I'm on a ventilator. You know, that was almost like a dream as well.

I would wake up and try to move and get up and get around. And a nurse would come in, give me more medicine. I'd go back to the dreams, stay in a dream for a while, and then wake up again to that hospital room. So it was like, which one was real and which one wasn't? Getting shot and losing a leg, that could easily be a dream. That was just like the dreams I was having. So it was very difficult for me to bridge the gap there and wake up and remain calm.

Eventually, I was able to kind of get my bearings enough to realize that, okay, not having your leg in that hospital bed is the real life. Looking down and not seeing, you know, two legs is definitely a different sensation. At that time, I wasn't feeling any pain in my leg, so it wasn't hurting me. It just wasn't there. I just started to think, you know, I'm alive.

I did remember why my leg was gone because I knew from the boat my leg was very mangled. I knew I was in really, really bad shape. So just waking up period was a blessing. I just was glad to be alive. Once I was able to see my parents, then I was able to kind of relate more to reality. And I had people come in and explain to me some gaps on what had happened to me. My partner was at the other end of the boat.

He had left his 12 gauge shotgun loaded, not safe, not good. The reason he had left it that way is because it seemed like whenever you go to take down your gear, whatever it is, and go pick up decoys that are out in the water, it seems like ducks always come over you. It's almost like they're just coming by to laugh at you and go, "Ha ha, you know, you didn't get us."

So he had left his gun loaded to maybe possibly catch that straggler duck or two while we were taking down and picking up our gear. His gun, somehow or another, fell over and hit the side of the boat, discharging into the back of my leg, severing my femur artery and femur bone.

That day was a 32, 34 degree day. So hunting out of a boat I had on thermal underwear, I had on jeans, bibs, knee boots with a heavy jacket. So I had on quite a bit of clothing. When I got shot, it's not like you see in the movies and blood goes everywhere. And it actually, the guys in the boat next to me thought that the gun had misfired it. There was a dud. The

The sound was muffled. They really didn't know what happened. They didn't know the gun had went off. They didn't have any idea. So they tried to radio out from the boat ramp to their main base to get air life started my way, and they couldn't get two-way transmission out. He couldn't get a needle started for an IV in my arm because my veins were collapsing due to lack of blood.

So they had to load me up and carry me out to the top of the hill, made contact with their helicopter. Their helicopter was already up and en route to a neighboring city to go pick up a respiratory patient. The people that flew me on the helicopter said that that saved me about 15 minutes. Once the air life crew got to me, they said that basically I was white,

My lips were purple. The flight paramedic said that I was the deadest person they'd ever come upon and was still alive. About halfway home on the helicopter, I went into complete cardiac arrest. My eyes were fixed and dilated, and they were actually bagging me doing CPR. The hospital was there obviously waiting on me.

In the elevator going down, there was a nurse named Christy that got an 18-gauge needle started in my arm. That was the first one that got started. Everybody else couldn't get a needle because my veins had collapsed due to the lack of blood. That was a miracle upon itself because that gave them a chance to start putting fluids back into my body.

Upon arrival at the ER, the first procedure they did on me was a thoracotomy procedure where they cut your chest open horizontally from the middle of your chest to the side of your body, break your ribs, and squeeze your heart. My trauma surgeon told me he squeezed my heart, and it didn't expand back out. I just didn't have any blood left in me to fill my heart.

My body, I'm 6'5 and 250, so I have probably estimated like 15 units of blood in my body. When you give a blood donation, a whole unit of blood is like 16 ounces.

When I got shot in the boat, they estimated that I lost about three to five units. They estimated that I probably lost another third of my blood in the ambulance. And then the rest of it drained out in the helicopter in routes because I was completely bled out by the time I got to the hospital. So I'd lost, you know, roughly 15 units of blood, which is three liters, basically, of

If you think of a three liter bottle of pop, if you poured those on the ground, I've done that before in a demonstration to Boy Scouts, you know, and that's a lot of liquid. So yeah, when they cut my chest open, broke my ribs, squeezed my heart, the first time they squeezed it, it didn't expand back out because there was no blood in my body. It didn't fill back up with blood because I didn't have enough to fill it up. That was the first problem. They had to fix that problem before they could get my heart to beating again.

So they started putting blood and blood components and they had to get, you know, blood into my body. I don't know. They had two blood machines, two doctors and several nurses pushing blood and blood components into me as fast as they could. And then once they got enough blood in me, he massaged, squeezed my heart again, and it started beating without electrical stimulation, which was, you know, another miracle too.

The doctors lost me a couple more times. So my life was very fragile. My blood wasn't coagulating. It was bleeding out all over. Just a massive battle to keep me alive.

My trauma surgeon needed about a four-hour surgery to be able to go in and repair everything in my leg to save my leg where the gunshot wound was. And he said he just wasn't able to keep me stable long enough to be able to go do that kind of a surgery. So his thoughts were the only way to save me was to amputate my leg, seal that wound off,

My dad having his accident and then here's your son at, you know, 34 years old. When my trauma surgeon came out and told him, you know, hey, look, it looks like to us the only way we're going to be able to save his life is to amputate his leg. That was a really hard thing for my dad to be able to deal with.

At that time, he was in his 60s. I'm sure he was extremely shook up about all of it to begin with. And then his own personal experience with being disabled from a leg injury. He had a lot of issues with that. And he blamed the doctor, obviously, for not saving my leg early on. May have blamed him for the rest of his life. I'm not sure. Eventually, I was put into a medically induced coma for three weeks.

The trauma coordinator, she put together a lot of statistics. And one thing was, you know, I had four complete body transfusions of blood. So that means, you know, I swapped blood out four times. That they only have statistics on somebody surviving two body transfusions of blood.

There's a lot of things that there's no statistics on that survived, but that's one of them. But the blood loss thing was huge. That was something the medical staff was fighting constantly. In ICU, they ran out of blood cartridges for the blood machine. They ran out of blood cartridges in the hospital because I used so many.

The blood, loss of blood, and then the usage of blood in the first day was so massive that it overwhelmed my community. I mean, I basically used everything that was available in my community. Roughly, I used 83 units of blood in the hospital, 12 units in the first 48 hours, and the rest came over my stay of six-week stay.

I use 250 components of blood. There's a lot of different components in blood. So when you go to give, you give one unit. So basically I use 83 pints of blood from different people.

I had one OR nurse tell me four or five years ago, she said, you know, somewhere along the way, we tested your blood type during OR and you went from O positive to O negative. Because O negative is, you know, the blood everyone can use. And so they had so much O negative in me that I had changed to O negative blood type. Being on the ventilator, you know, I couldn't talk. All I could do was write down things. I'm still real weak. Was I going to live another week?

Because, you know, I didn't know if I was still health wise, you know, was I out of the woods? Would I be able to live? Was I going to be able to live as normal a life as possible? All those things were running through my mind. I immediately started thinking, you know, how are you going to live being an amputee? There's a huge unknown.

I was a telephone man. Obviously, I didn't ever deal with people that had lost their leg. I didn't know anything. I didn't know what my capabilities were going to be as an amputee. Everything from being able to drive to work. Basketball was a big part of my life that I really enjoyed, you know, doing on my spare time. Wasn't going to be able to play basketball again. I had two daughters at home.

what kind of dad was I going to be able to be to them

I never knew what a prosthetic was. I knew what they were, but I didn't know how they worked. I didn't know what you could do on them. I wondered if I would be in a wheelchair the rest of my life or if there was more wrong with me than just my leg, because I remembered how much trouble I was having breathing. Did I have brain damage? And you don't know if everybody was telling me the truth. Was I just going to be awake for a few days and then I was going to die?

Obviously, a flood of questions that really nobody could answer. The uncertainty was massive. I quickly recovered. I was in ICU for a week after I woke up. I went to recovery floor for a week, and then I was discharged to go home.

I remember coming home and I had a one and a half year old and a four year old daughter and a stepson that was seven or eight. And they didn't realize how bad sick I had been. So they immediately wanted me to go back to being the dad I was prior. So immediately had to start dealing with being an amputee immediately when I got home. My biggest objective was to get back to work because I thought if I got back to work, that would signify, you know, that I was back to as close to the person I was before.

I stayed home for two weeks, just kind of getting readjusted to life. You know, since I was 16, I had worked all my life and really never been at home much during the daytime. So not working, I was there and, you know, there was now there's so much violence on TV. Anytime there was a gun involved on TV or any kind of a shooting or whatever, you know, that made me cringe a little bit. And, you know, any kind of violence, it took on a different element for a period of time.

I went to outpatient rehab. I remember going there and them asking me, you know, what were my goals? I said, well, I want to go back to work. I thought going back to work would be the best thing for my kids and family. You know, being as I was raised up with my dad that never was able to go back to work, I felt like going back to work was the closest thing to reality for them and myself.

Prior to that, you know, I'd never been in a wheelchair. So there I am now. I'm in a wheelchair. That's the only way I get around. And I'm dependent on somebody loading the wheelchair up. If I'm going to go somewhere, they got to load it up in the car.

Prosthetic wise, it took about six weeks for me to get a prosthetic. My residual limb was swollen. I still had an open wound on my leg. That 12 gauge, two and three quarters shot shell holds 120 BBs. So I've still got about somewhere close to 80 stainless steel BBs in my leg today. The prosthetic world was a whole different game.

Just putting it on and how you do that and how does it feel? And the leg I got now is a computerized leg that actually kind of walks for me. But my first leg was mechanical. Every step, you got to think about walking. How do you learn how to walk? I mean, it's like learning how to walk all over again.

Just went on a trip to Las Vegas last week and just flying now, being an amputee and flying. That's a big deal. You know, going through the process of checking bags and going through the metal detectors and, you know, they always have to sit and take me aside and they always have to sit me down and they rub my hands with a solution, you know, and then they rub my leg with a solution and I guess they're checking for, you know, narcotics or maybe bomb material or whatever. Yeah.

I lose privacy when I fly, for sure. Just being an amputee as a whole, you know, you get the phantom pains, phantom sensation, phantom pains. They're legit. They're tough. Like right now, when we're talking about it, I can feel the foot and toes that I don't have anymore. Well, I can feel those tingling now. Did not feel that prior to us talking about it.

Usually, I'll have a stabbing sensation on the foot that I don't have, bump the leg to my hip, and then back down in like a split second. And the pain is like very, very intense. So it'll make me jump a lot of times. But phantom pain is probably the worst thing that I have to deal with being an amputee. And it's kind of silly. You know, they don't know what causes them. Your brain just still thinks that you've got that limb there and you don't.

It's a new 100%. You know, I mean, I wasn't the person before. So what am I now? So everything, you know, from work to the grocery store, you know, what happens if I come upon a flight of stairs? Stairs are my biggest nemesis even today. You know, I don't look like everybody else now. That really didn't ever bother me a whole lot. But I just took it as, you know, that's who I am now and we're going to roll with it.

Being a different person, I mean, that's still today. You never totally get over not being the person you were. That particularly has never went away. You know, if I wanted to go play a game of basketball, I can't do that anymore. Not like I could before. This particular time of year, you know, it's duck season. I can't duck hunt like I used to could. So there's a constant reminder that you're not who you were.

Occasionally, it's not as much as it used to be. There was always something funny that would happen. I would say, be putting on my right shoe, and several times I'd picked up my left shoe and tried to put it on my leg that's not there. This is years into being an amputee, and here I am trying to put on a shoe to my leg that's not there. My body still remembers, I'm never going to get away from having to realize that, yeah, this is the new me. I'm not who I was.

But on the flip side, not being here is a whole lot worse than dealing with being an amputee. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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I watched him deal with it. I watched him some days deal with it better than others. He didn't go back to work, you know, which definitely was an influence to me on getting back to work. You know, that was probably why I was so adamant on getting back to work as fast as I could, because in my mind, that was the thing that I remembered about my dad is him not able to work. And that to me showed that he wasn't able to go back and live a quote unquote normal life.

Everything's back to normal when I go back to work, so to speak, even though they weren't. Growing up with him taught me kind of how not to do things, so to speak, as much as anything. It's probably harder on the people around me, me being an amputee, than it is for me a lot of times.

I was told by my trauma surgeon going back at a visit with him after I was out of the hospital, he told me that we offer counseling. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm all right. I'm alive and I've made it through this. So I don't need counseling. What I didn't realize was that just because I didn't necessarily think I needed it, it didn't mean that maybe somebody else didn't. And maybe my whole family might have needed it.

But he told me then that, you know, when you go through a traumatic event such as what I did, your family either comes tighter than it ever has and nothing will ever come in between you or it's going to blow it apart.

My parents had an issue in the hospital with my ex-wife. It revolved around information on how I was doing that didn't get transmitted to them. You know, again, them being older probably didn't help. They probably didn't understand a lot about what was going on with me. You know, I was for at least four or five days, you know, they didn't think I was going to survive. So it was a very fragile period of time. So therefore it made an animosity between my ex-wife and them.

That also spun off to some of my friends not being real happy with my ex-wife, which did not help my marriage. I was just pretty happy to be alive. I didn't really understand the magnitude of what was going on until it was probably too late.

I guess I was just in the mindset of survival and moving forward and having a loved one, getting a life or death for that amount of time. And then the uncertainty with them went on for a lot longer than it did for me. I didn't grasp that for a long time. It was way too late by the time I started grasping it.

I definitely remember the feeling of dying and that's spooky. That's a real spooky feeling. You know, I wouldn't wish that on anybody ever because the helpless feeling of

I guess the 10 or 15 minutes that I knew I was dying is stronger in my mind than the things that would get me down. I knew how bad off I was. So it's not hard for me to go back to go, yeah, no matter how bad it is here, it's still a little better than where I could have been.

It's something I don't always discuss, but the guy that was in the boat with me, he lived a block or two away from me. He was seven, eight years younger than me. He was in his mid-20s, married, no kids. He was born and raised duck hunting. He had duck hunted far, far more than I had. And I'd just known him probably a year or so. He was pretty new to the neighborhood.

He went into shock when I got shot. And then during the hospital stay, he came back up one time when I was in ICU and I remember seeing him and, you know, I remember him coming in and saying he was sorry and I couldn't talk to him, but I remember him coming to see me. And then I went home and I got home first day or two and he called. He said, hey, if you don't mind, I'm going to come down there and see you. I said, yeah, man, come on.

And that was the last time I ever talked to him. So it's almost 21 years this went by, and I've never heard anything from him. Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had jurisdiction over my accident since I was on the water. So they did an interview with him at the boat ramp, and then they did an interview with him at the hospital. At the boat ramp, I had a chocolate lab in the boat with me.

He said that my dog was roaming around the boat and had hit his gun, pushed it over, pushed the safety off, pulled the trigger, and it shot me in the back of my leg. That was his story at the boat ramp. Then when he got to the hospital, he said that the dog was tied up and that the gun fell over and hit the side of the boat and discharged.

Obviously, that's a huge difference in his story. So I always, instead of blaming the dog, I've always went with the second version there. Unfortunately, in this day and time, lawsuits abound on situations where mistakes are made. And I don't know if he felt like I was going to be pursuing him for financial gains through lawsuits. That never was any intent of mine with anybody on any level.

By the time I got out of the house and was able to go back to rehab, he had already moved. He had moved out of state. Had I been able to talk to him, I could have told him that, you know, no worries, you know, I'm not holding a grudge against you for anything, and I sure don't want to sue you for any recourse. But for whatever reason, you know, he went back home to his parents. And so it's something through the years that I've always wondered, you know, would I ever see him again? Would I recognize him? You know, what would we say?

You know, it was his gun that discharged into my leg. You know, he left it loaded. He said the gun was safe, but it obviously wasn't or it wouldn't have discharged. Early on, I kind of wished that, you know, he could have been around just to tell me, you know, this is what we were doing. This is what happened. The only way I know what happened prior to the gunshot is with the guys that were in the other boat.

you know, there's some questions, you know, that he could have answered quickly for me. But unfortunately, like I said, for whatever reason, and I'm speculating on the reason why he moved, you know, when we were hunting that morning, he wasn't talking about moving. So obviously my accident played a role in him moving. Well, I thought a couple of times, what's going to happen if I actually recognize him and walk up on him? You know, of course it would be easy for him to recognize me, especially if I was wearing shorts.

maybe he could tell me something that would make life better for me. I don't know. I don't know what it would be. It's almost like it's not worth it to me. I think I've got more to lose than to gain. But I think I could probably make his life a little easier by him knowing that I harbor no ill will toward him. And so therefore, that unknown almost has been like, yeah, it's better off just not knowing than knowing. That's an unopened or an unclosed aspect of my accident.

One of the big things on December 24th was that we had an ice storm in this city that was a once-in-500-year storm. So we had no power and no water, and it was like in the 20s. It was very chaotic in the hospital.

I was told that they had a hand crank ventilator sitting next to me just in case the generated power that I was using for my ventilator went down. They would have to use that hand crank ventilator. So just a bunch of miracles in God in that process keep me alive. A lot of well-trained staff of the hospital that I owe my life to.

All the nurses that dealt with me while in my stay at the hospital, I tried to go back to them every year on the anniversary and see them and tell them, "Thank you." I wasn't supposed to survive that. And, you know, I was definitely a miracle to be alive. I learned quickly that we can all die at any moment in time. Not that I hadn't heard that before, but life is definitely short. Every day I try to be appreciative that I'm here and try to, you know, give back.

Being as I use the amount of volume of blood that I use, you know, United Blood Services contacted me and said, hey, would you be willing to speak to a group of surgeons and doctors at the hospital? Because we have this new blood machine. You know, we want you to talk about how important blood is and how, you know, donations are. And I was like,

OK, so I made a C minus in college from speech and you're wanting me to get in front of, you know, a group of highly educated doctors and talk about my accident. They said yes. So, you know, I go from being a shy, quiet guy in high school and pretty much the same way, you know, even today to how about you go tell about this this miracle, you know, of your life.

So I did. And since then, you know, I've spoken to well over 150 different groups all the way from Boy Scouts to churches to nursing homes to any different group that calls me nursing students when they're going through their trauma week. You know, I go sit down and tell them this story. They've already heard a lot of things that happen with patients.

But to be able to have a patient come in and discuss it with them gives them a better idea of what to expect, you know, out there in the real world. I can speak to a group that's about to give blood, you know, a different company or organization. They'll hear, you know, the story of how important it is and how any one of them could have a need for blood. And then a lot of people will give blood that normally wouldn't.

Blood doesn't grow on trees. Us giving keeps a blood supply available. I think there's one in four adults will use blood in their lifetime at least once. One unit can help up to, I think, three people in the hospital.

Our greatest givers of blood in American history was the World War II generation. They gave because they had a shortage back in those days, and they learned to give blood, and they gave blood. But unfortunately, that generation now is pretty much gone. And my generation, being 55, has dropped the ball, and we don't give as well as they did.

So it's definitely a volunteer thing, but you could literally save three lives with every unit you give. So it's definitely you're giving life back. I never would have been someone that would have got up in front of a group and spoke. That was just God's plan for me. That helps me, you know, to be able to use this to help others is really cool for me. It's never given that you're going to be here tomorrow or in the next hour.

You've got to respect that and you've got to live your life accordingly. You just learn that, you know, it's just even a bad day is a good day on earth. Another day alive is a good day.

Today's episode featured Glenn Scarborough. You can reach out to Glenn through email at sleepyg98 at gmail.com. That's sleepy, the letter G, 98 at gmail.com. Glenn's story prompted me to look at statistics on blood donation and the national blood shortage crisis we're currently facing. According to the American Red Cross, since the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, there has been a 10% overall decline in blood donation.

Up to one quarter of hospital blood needs are not being met, and less than 10% of people in the United States donate blood annually. There is no adequate substitute doctors can use for human blood, so they rely entirely on volunteers. And as Glenn pointed out in the interview, donating even one pint of blood can save up to three lives. To find out more about how you can give, go to RedCrossBlood.org. That's the American Red Cross at RedCrossBlood.org.

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In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.