During my life I have been a very lucky and blessed man. I have done so many different things and met so many incredible people along life’s road while Traveling Life’s Highways.
Life Number Five – Iced over Airplane
After poor maintenance on the helicopters and a couple of crazy landings, one on an active train track at Piedmont Park (train stopped 3 feet from the rotor blades) I decided it was time to leave the helicopter squad but stay in Special Operations, so I became a paramedic with the police department, which was before the fire department took over all the EMS duties.
After the police department I went on to several career choices. I started flying hang gliders for a few years and started crewing and flying hot air balloons with my friend Harold Carter. We were the first balloon and hang glider pilots in Georgia and spent several years flying the tournament circuits and enjoying the times we spent ballooning. I was a professional hang glider pilot and connected with Frances “Tut” Woodruff, niece to the Coca Cola founder, George Woodruff. She had bought Hang Glider Heaven in Clayton, Georgia and sponsored a team of fliers to go to tournaments and exhibitions all over the world. Tut was fifty-six years old, and we (the fliers) were all in our twenties. She had no fear of leaping off mountains tandem flying with me in her big “butterfly” hang glider. She had a house on Lake Burton and during the summers when we were in town, Tut would do “church on the water” and after the service we would perform a water skiing and kite flying exhibition.
On my 28th birthday, April 7th, which I shared with my mother, I took her to lunch for our annual birthday celebration. She worked with First Atlanta Bank and was in charge of the ATM operation and had about 75 people working under her guidance. During our lunch she asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, as she was embarrassed to tell her friends and co-workers that her oldest son flew kites and balloons for a living. I assured her I was traveling the world on somebody else’s dime and was not doing too badly. She was persistent so I decided to use my GI Bill and started flying fixed wing aircraft, working at Epps Air Service at Peachtree Dekalb Airport while in flight school getting my private pilot’s license. I continued to build time and worked on my Commercial, Instrument & Multi-engine Ratings. I worked for Epps as a charter pilot for a time before getting hired by several companies at the airport to fly their aircraft. Eventually I worked for Refrigerated Transport (RTC Transportation) going to American Airlines Training Facility in Fort Worth Texas where I received my Airline Transport Rating (ATP) and Type ratings in the Cessna Citation and Lear Jet. One of my classmates was a young John Travolta who had just finished the ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ television series and was pursuing his pilot’s license to possibly become an airline pilot if his acting did not work out. He did well in both endeavors.
We had flown the Cessna Citation jet down to Valdosta, Georgia for a new paint job and have the interior refurbished and needed to get back to Atlanta. I had gotten one of the pilots from Epps to fly down in one of our other airplanes to pick up my girlfriend and I for a return flight to PDK airport. It was well into the night as we approached Atlanta air space. It was January and there were icing conditions below 4,000 feet as we approached the east side of the Terminal Control Area.
We could hear over the radio that some of the big heavy jets coming into Hartsville were loading up with thick ice on their wings descending during their approach to land. I should have known better as the air traffic controller told us to descend to 3,500 feet putting us into the cloud layer. We were still about 45 miles from the airport. I tried to get the controller to allow us to stay at altitude and vector out past the TCA so we could stay above the clouds and the icy conditions. He told us to wait while he talked to several other airliners leaving us stuck in the soup gathering ice on the wings. I was flying a small Cessna 172 without any anti-icing equipment with 4 souls on board. I could not get the controller to answer me and should have started to gain altitude to rise above the clouds and the icy conditions, but it was too late by the time he responded.
The wings were loading up with rime ice as I increased power to try and gain altitude. The plane would not gain and with full power we were barely keeping the plane level. The controller realized he had screwed us up and gave us a heading directly toward the airport. As we flew toward PDK and continued to load up with more ice the plane could not hold altitude, and we started descending whether we wanted to or not. We were still on instruments (IFR) in the clouds so you could not see anything outside the airplane like landmarks or horizon. Robert kept taking the flashlight and shining it all over the place looking at the leading edges of the wings. He would blind me every time he switched sides to see how much ice was building up.
He was worried we were not going to make it to the airport as we still had to go around the east side of Stone Mountain and all the towers in the area between us and the airport. We continued to lose altitude and had not come out of the bottom of the cloud layer yet as things tensed up. I told him not to worry, that if we went down and did not make it to the airport it was going to be all right as everyone, we would see on the ground would be trying to rescue us and working to save us. They were not going to be shooting at us or kill us like previous times I had been in a crash situation. Robert thought that was a weird concept, but he seemed to feel better about the situation.
The plane was loaded with ice, we were descending and finally broke out below the cloud layer about 15 miles from the airport. Stone Mountain was off to the left of the aircraft, its antenna on top of the mountain flashing brightly. The large television tower next to Northlake Mall was still between us and the airport as we continued to lose altitude. Trying to figure out the distance and our altitude it appeared we were going to be about a mile short of the runway. I alerted the tower to start emergency equipment to the area where I thought we would end up. They acknowledged our situation. It looked like we would end up at I-85 and Shallowford Road. I may try to put it down on the interstate as it was well after midnight and not many vehicles were on the highway. We could see the lights of several emergency vehicles making their way toward where we would end up.
The ice build up was about 7 to 10 inches in front of the wings leading edge and I could not believe we were still flying and not stalling out from the heavy load of ice and the shape of the wings. With full power descending about 150 feet above the ground and ½ mile from the airport a large chunk of ice fell off the right wing about midway out to the tip, slowing the fall and allowing us to speed up a little and extending our glide path and coming over the end of runway 34. I think I made one of the smoothest landings in an airplane I have ever done as we taxied to the company hanger.
Once outside of the aircraft walking around to see all the ice still on the wings and tail it was apparent we all should have died that night. I went inside and called the air traffic controller and told him he was lucky that he had not killed the four of us that morning. I told him to be more aware of smaller aircraft that may not have the equipment the big airliners have in handling different situations. We were all lucky that time and each of us learned something.
Lesson learned – Never trust someone sitting in a room somewhere making decisions for you when you are in the thick of things and know what you need to do.
Life Number Six – 25-foot Ladder Fall – Broken Back
It had been a few years living in Alaska without any incidents other than the life changing attitude from living in such a beautiful and unique place. I did have a heart attack in 2012 that probably should be on this list but I had written about it on my blog, ‘Icewind’s Ramblings’ (where it can be found from a quick Google Search.) I spent almost 25 years there before retiring and eventually returning to Atlanta when my brother-in-law passed away. I returned to help my sister and had been on a several months walk about while I tried to figure out where I wanted to end up and what I wanted to do.
After COVID, we opened an ice cream shop in Helen, Georgia where we make adult ice cream along with traditional and dairy/sugar free ice creams and frozen desserts. We have been awarded best ice cream shop in Georgia and Best in Helen, both for three years in a row. We have also won a national award for our strawberry ice cream.
December 12, 2022, while putting up Christmas Lights on the trees outside I fell off a ladder from 25 feet in the air landing on my back and side. I lay there on the frozen ground for 45 minutes before Maria, who was doing laundry, came and saw me on the ground. I tried to sit up on a sapling tree while I waited to be found but the pain was too great, and I laid back down flat on the ground. She took the side by side which was close to me and turned it around and backed up close to where I was lying. We got me up onto the 4x4 rear flatbed and drove up the driveway to the car. We moved me into the car seat and off to the hospital we go. In the emergency room they did several tests, x-rays and decided to transfer me by ambulance to Gainesville hospital for additional treatment. I spent 20 hours in the ER waiting for a room before I was transferred to a room.
I started my in-patient physical therapy (PT) learning how to move my legs again, walking a few steps to the bathroom after several days of using a bedpan, since I could not walk. Luis was a life saver during my bedpan days taking care of me. The PT was intense as they initially told me I would not be released until the 9th or 10th of January. I told them I wanted to be home by Christmas, so my therapist, Butch, put me on double workouts each day. I did two sessions of 1 ½ hours each morning and the same every afternoon. I had a one-hour session of Occupational Therapy (OT) every other day learning how to put on socks, clothes, and bathe. I was asked what obstacles I needed to overcome at home and I told him I had 18 steps up to the main living area of the house. We worked on climbing steps in the PT room but there were only three or four steps up and down. He told me those would not work to get me walking again so Butch took me to the hospital stairwells where there were 10 steps to each landing. Butch and I did steps for many hours a day until I was completely worn out. Then there was a ‘clown’ car mock-up I had to be able to get in and out of before I could go home. We did about 20 minutes each time, morning and afternoon.
Finally, I was released to go home from the hospital on Christmas Eve. Relaxing with my pain medicine until after New Years was a nice way to end the year.
Life Number Seven – Bee Sting # 1 Brown Hornets
May 30, 2023, while taking the trash out before going to the shop to make ice cream, I was stung by a brown wasp three times while lifting the lid to a large trash bin. Apparently, they were starting to build a nest under the handle, and I disturbed them. He flew up, started attacking me, stinging me close to my wrist then moved to the top of my elbow and lastly hit me once again on my arm just above the elbow. It hurt and I came into the house, took two Benadryl tablets for no reason other than I was hoping it would ease the pain from the stings. Took a quick shower to get myself ready to go make ice cream and about 20 minutes after being stung I started feeling like my tongue was swelling. A few minutes later my throat started closing and I had difficulty breathing. This was weird because I have had multiple bees stings during my life with no effects whatsoever. This felt different as I struggled to breathe. It was time to go to the Urgent Care facility a few miles away as it was closer than the hospital.
Driving to Urgent Care, breathing was getting more difficult and both my arms started to itch and felt like they were on fire. That pain worsened as we arrived and by then I had could not breathe or move any air. I went up to the desk with my hands at my throat like I was choking then pointing to my arms showing the bee sting locations. They opened the door to go back to the treatment rooms as I was losing consciousness, so they grabbed me to keep from falling and put me on a gurney and started treatment. Oxygen, a shot of epinephrine, and an IV was started.
A few minutes later, I was breathing better. They kept me for about an hour, then transferred me by ambulance to the hospital. At the hospital, I was observed and vital signs were checked to make sure I was ok and getting better. About six hours later I was sent home with a prescription for an Epi pen and more Benadryl. At the pharmacy the cost of the Epi pen was $165.00. I was enraged that the pharmaceutical companies could charge that much. Diabetics have another uphill battle getting their insulin at a decent price.
I got two Epi pens, one for my black bag that is with me wherever I go and one for my pocket. It is hard to stuff a 10” long pen/needle into normal pants pockets.
Life Number Eight – Bee Sting # 2 – Yellow Jackets
July 28, 2024, Deja vu, beautiful summer day getting chores done cutting several acres of grass when after a short break to rehydrate climbed back on the lawn tractor to finish cutting the last two parts. I mowed down the right side of the driveway past the wall and cut the area by the road. No problem, it looked nice from the wall to the street and made my way up the driveway to get the last area to mow. About 20 feet past the wall, I felt the pain of the first sting and saw a swarm of yellow jackets all around me. I continued to drive away from where I must have driven over an underground nest. They chased me all the way up to the house and when I put the mower away realized I had been stung 8 times. I thought this was not good since my last encounter almost killed me when I could not breathe anymore. This time was probably going to be similar as I climbed the steps to the kitchen for more Benadryl. I took a quick shower to remove the sweat before we went to hospital. The first Epi injection was after the shower before I got dressed. I felt lightheaded as I sat on the edge of the bed while getting dressed. That is all I remember as I passed out as Maria found me on the floor. The ambulance was called and within about 4 minutes they were coming up the steps. Their fire station is about a mile up the road from the house so a quick response times not difficult to accomplish.
The medics came, got me into the ambulance, another shot of Epi, #2, had some oxygen and off to the local hospital emergency room we go.
Arriving shortly at the ER I was wheeled back to an observation room and did all the normal things done in the emergency room, vital signs while being poked and prodded for blood and an IV insertion. Are we having fun yet? The timeline at this point from the sting to the ER is approximately 45 minutes. The oxygen and Epi helped with my breathing, but they wanted to keep me for a couple hours observation. Another shot of Epinephrine was administered (#3), I’m not totally sure what for at this point as I am not in any distress and feeling better.
In the observation room my vital signs were checked about every 20 minutes and things looked like I would be released soon to go back home. Another blood sample was drawn and once the results came back, they found my troponin levels were elevated. A normal troponin level ranges from 0–0.04 ng/ml. Levels that are higher than 0.04 ng/ml can indicate a recent heart attack or other injuries and conditions that affect the heart. Mine were starting to rise upwards of 1200 so they decided to admit me to the hospital for observation and to flush out my system. After 24 hours the level was still rising to over 2,500 so they decided to medivac me to the cardiac unit at the hospital in Gainesville. While in the cardiac care unit (CCU) the troponin level topped out over 5,000 so I was continuously being flushed out to get the levels to come down. It took several days of IV therapy to get to levels below 1,000. I was basically overdosed on Epinephrine which caused some heart damage.
I spent a week in the CCU and before I was allowed to return home, I had to undergo a chemical stress test to map my heart and see what damage was done. It was a very weird sensation with the chemicals and dye injected into me to map the damage. Lying very still in the CT machine your body felt like it was running an uphill foot race. A couple days later I was released to go home but 2 weeks later had to do another stress test on a treadmill. I continued to go to my cardiac doctor every 4 weeks to monitor my progress and see if the medications were doing anything to lessen the damage.
Which brings us to Life Number Nine, Go figure.
Life Number Nine – Open Heart Surgery
On December 6, 2024, I had another follow up with Dr. P on my progress of meds helping my damaged heart. Another follow up on December 10 was when he decided I needed to schedule a consult on December 13 for another stent since the meds were not doing anything to help the situation. The appointment was made with Dr. Muhammed, for December 17. That appointment was early in the morning, so no coffee set the tone for my day. I was wheeled back to the pre-op room where I talked with the staff, doctor, gas passer and anyone else who came by before I was going in for the stent. Sometime later that morning I met Dr. Janko, my cardiac surgeon, who explained that I needed open heart surgery where he would do a quadruple bypass. They kept me in the hospital and an opening was set for Friday, December 20, 2024. It is easier for me to let you read my late friend and drinking buddy, Lewis Grizzard’s account of open-heart surgery as our experiences were so similar. Lewis Grizzard wrote all about it after his first heart surgery. Here is a passage from his book, “They Tore Out my Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”
Chapter 8 They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat”
Tubes by Lewis Grizzard
Open heart surgery is easy, for most of it you are asleep and do not know anything about what is going on around you or to you. I am sure there were power tools to cut open my chest, some kind of medieval torture chest spreader and there was mention of a heart/lung machine to keep me alive when they stopped my heart to do the repairs. What you don’t expect is all the tubes that are put into you.
Tubes are what heart surgery is all about, especially after the patient reaches the CCU where the tubes begin to come out.
There are seven places on a human body where a tube may be inserted without making a new hole. (I’ll wait a second while you count.) I don’t think God had any intention for anybody to go sticking tubes, or anything else, in at least a couple of those holes, but they stick tubes there anyway when they operate on your heart.
I’m not certain the exact number of tubes they eventually stick in you before, during, and after heart surgery, but it is considerably more than seven, which means they have to make some new holes. Just north of your navel, they make two, one to the east and one to the west, and that’s where your chest tubes go. I wasn’t aware of it when they made the chest tube holes in my stomach because I was under the anesthetic at that point. Nobody would have made chest tube holes in my stomach, otherwise, because as a small boy growing up in the rural South, I learned if anybody came at you with something sharp with the intention of making new holes in you, you ran away as fast as you possibly could and called the local authorities and reported somebody was trying to cut you, which was against the law in my country unless it could be proved the victim needed cutting.
One morning after I had regained some of my senses in CCU, I was relaxing with a jar of morphine when a doctor I had never seen before walked casually into my room, whistling. “I’m going to remove your chest tubes”, he said, once he stopped whistling.
My chest tubes, I had been told earlier, were for the purpose of drainage. Some tubes they use to put things into you. Others they use to take things out. Fully-tubed, a heart surgery patient bears a great deal of resemblance to the distributor cap of a 1956 Plymouth Fury.
It hurt. Morphine or no morphine, the removal of my chest tubes was the worst thing that happened to me during the entire experience of having heart surgery.
“You okay?” asked the doctor once he had removed the tubes.
“Get away from me,” I said.
I felt like he had snatched my innards from their very holdings.
“Come back here with my pancreas!” I screamed at the doctor as he left the room, whistling again. I didn’t even get his tag number.
I will never forget how it felt to have my chest tubes removed. Now, every time I hear a whistling sound, I double up into a tight knot and fall on the floor and lie very still, which is a problem only when I am driving in heavy traffic and the radio station to which I am tuned tests the Emergency Alert System.
The chest tube experience did have its value, however, and that was to assure me that I had lived through the operation. You can’t be dead and hurt that badly at the same time.
After the chest tube horror, I began to count the other tubes that were running in and out of my body. I started with the one …
Before I left CCU, the cough lady came to see me. I don’t know her official title, but she came into my room and explained that it was time to get out of bed, sat myself down in a chair and coughed.
“You need to cough up the fluids in your lungs,” she said. She helped me out of the bed to the chair. My first steps were slow. After I sat down in the chair, the lady brought me a heart shaped pillow and said to hold it to my chest as tightly as I could. “This will ease some of the pain when you try to cough,” she explained. She even told me how to cough. “Take as deep a breath as you can take and then cough several times as hard as you can. Like this …” She took a deep breath, clutched the pillow and made sounds like somebody trying to crank a pulpwood truck on a cold morning.
“HRRRACK! HRRRACK! HARRRACK!” went the cough lady.
I took a deep breath and squeezed the pillow to my chest. I didn’t go “HRRRACK!” at all I barely made a sound. “You’ve got to try harder.” Said the cough lady. I tried again, but I didn’t try any harder. I knew if I tried any harder, it would hurt and no stupid pillow would make it stop. The cough lady came back two or three more times and tried to get me to do a couple more hrrracks. The cough lady left and went to bother somebody else.
The only thing still attached to my body that hadn’t come attached in the first place were the pacemaker wires on my stomach. That next morning another doctor I had never seen came to take those out. He carried a pair of wire snippers. He snipped this wire and then that wire. “Dang if you’re not a bleeder,” he laughed. I looked at my stomach. It was very red. I remained as still as possible and didn’t say a word while the doctor finished. You don’t risk arousing a man who thinks a stomach covered with blood is funny, especially if he is packing a pair of wire snippers at the time. My cardiologist came in and checked my heart. “Sounds just fine,” he said. A couple of his assistants came in and they listened to my heart, too. “Outstanding,” said one. “Couldn’t be better,” said the other.
My blood pressure had been high before the surgery, after I was one-twenty over eighty. Perfect. I looked at my scar. I had expected it to be much worse. There would also be two small scars from the chest-tube incisions, but once the hair grew back on my chest, they would be barely visible.
There was pain when I tried to get a deep breath, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The area around my collarbone and my sides were sore from the chest retractor during surgery, but that wasn’t so terrible, either.
I experienced much of the above written so beautifully by Lewis Grizzard. Back in the 80’s we would meet at Harrison’s on Peachtree to drink the night away, swap stories about our ex-wives and our dogs, Catfish and Aspen. Lewis died at 47, much too soon from his fourth heart surgery complications. I miss my friend.
I had made it. The surgeons performed the quadruple bypass. My blood pressure couldn’t have been better, and my prior feeling of being delirious with pain at this point had been a needless worry. They made me get up out of my bed and walk once I was back in my room. I would walk up the hall around the nurse’s station and back to my room. On the second day I tried to walk around the nurse’s area a little too fast and just before getting back to my bed started to pass out. Everyone was concerned as my eyes rolled back but they got me back in bed, so disaster was avoided.
My progress was going well but Dr. Janko came in on Christmas Eve and said they were going to release me early to go home. We thought it might be better to stay in the hospital another day, but he said a woman had been admitted to the floor who had staph infection and was walking the halls, so he didn’t want his great work and my good progress ruined by getting some infection. That afternoon, with the clothes on my back and my trusty red heart pillow I was led to the car, buckled into the back seat, pillow between the seat belt and my chest and off we went. I felt like Miss Daisy but knew for the foreseeable future it was going to be Driving Mr. D everywhere I went. It wasn’t much the first two weeks as I could barely move, coughed up phlegm, and exhausted easily.
Our friends, Danny and Sheila, met us at the house and Danny got me up the 18 steps to the living area. They brought food and ran to the pharmacy to get prescriptions. Billy and Jeanne also brought us food and prescriptions as we were too sick to cook anything. Maria had walking pneumonia so after several days suffering with 104-degree fever and both of us not being able to take care of each other, Maria’s best friend and next-door neighbor, Julie, returned from Virginia and scooped her up for a doctor’s visit. Julie was a life saver as she went to the shop every day for about two weeks feeding the 8 to 10 feral cats we provide for. Our friend Shawn met us at the shop and disconnected all our water lines and water heaters to avoid frozen pipes during the upcoming freeze. We are so thankful for our amazing friends.
Many laps (45 steps) around the house have built my strength up, not really coughing now but my trusty red heart pillow is at my side almost like a trusty dog. I am one month post After my visit with Dr. Janko yesterday, I am mending well; he was surprised how good I looked and reminded me that for the chest to mend and meld back together it will be another four to six weeks before the grinding and popping sounds go away when I cough or sneeze.
I’ve taken a lickin’ and kept on ticking! Life is good and so are friends who show up for you, ready to drop everything and fly across the country, which was a very humbling experience for me. For many years I have toasted life every day as it is never guaranteed, and things can change in an instant without warning so everyone needs to embrace life, get involved in it and make each day better than the last. “To Life”, Cheers!
In ‘A Soldier’s Prayer’ these two lines have been my mantra since I was a young man.
“I asked for all things that I might enjoy life . . .
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.”
These words still ring true for me today as I continually celebrate another day that God has given me.
In the television series, The West Wing, President Jed Bartlet would end meetings or talking with his staff with “What’s Next”. I kind of feel the same way.
What’s Next?
