Today, June 11. My beloved is crushed, broken, torn, bruised, and exsanguine. Oh God, help him!
Yesterday, June 10. My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy… His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold. His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend (Song of Solomon 5:10-16).
Jeff and I were married after dating only six weeks in 1979. We were so happy. But our lives lacked one thing until February 1980. Brother Roy Pritts, pastor of Willis Chapel Church of God, and his wife Florence sat at our kitchen table praying with Jeff and me and our first new baby. At age 22, Jeff was surrendering his life to Jesus Christ and I was recommitting myself to the Lord. Under the leadership of Pastor Pritts and with support from other members of Willis Chapel, we began to build a Christian family.
Slowly we became increasingly aware of the need of Jesus and His Word in our lives. Pastor Pritts passed away and we missed him. But Pastor Hiram and Lena Wofford came to shepherd us. We thought our life together with Christ was perfect. We had three small children and were buying our home. At age 28, Jeff was a very respected combine mechanic in great demand at Casey Implement Co.
But on June 11, 1986, our lives changed quite suddenly. Mark, the sales manager at the implement company, came to our home in a company truck. I ran to meet him, thinking it was Jeff on his way to a service call. I had slept in that morning and had missed my good-bye kiss to Jeff; I was anxious to see him. But what I saw instead was horror on Mark’s face. He told me to come with him immediately. We took the children to a neighbor’s home and headed for the John Deere dealership.
I started probing for answers, but got only vagueness in return. What was he trying to hide? “Is Jeff dead?” I asked.
He only replied, “No.”
What Mark wasn’t telling me was that Jeff was still trapped in the grain head of a combine. The huge auger, with finger-sized projections on it, sickle, and reel had tried to feed my husband to the threshing unit. He was being eaten alive by a machine. Jeff had known a farmer who had had a similar accident. That man had held on to the auger until the slip clutch burned out and he could be freed.
Jeff had seen the auger swallow one foot, much the same way a food grinder pulverizes bulk meat for ham salad. He grabbed the auger, but it got away from him and fed him farther until he could get a bear-hugging grip on it. The clutch began to slip and Jeff screamed for help.
Fortunately, my husband was working at the shop instead of alone in a field, which was often the case. Frantically other mechanics tried to free him. The ambulance team was close and came quickly. My brother, also a mechanic and good friend, supported Jeff s upper body because the auger had twisted him to a contorted angle. His intestines lay mutilated on the floor of the grain head. His right leg was badly mangled, his left calf cut to the bone. His right ribs and collar bone were broken, and he had multiple scrapes, bruises and puncture wounds.
Jeff plead with my brother to knock him out while screaming instructions for the other mechanics to hurry. They had to use cutting torches but, because the grain head held old stubble, had to be careful not to set the combine on fire. After 45 minutes the auger was lifted from my bleeding, mangled husband.
I knew nothing of this except that Jeff was hurt. I knew only to pray for God’s grace.
Mark and I met the ambulance at the edge of town. It was headed for the nearest hospital. I jumped out of the truck into the path of the ambulance, waving my arms and jumping up and down, trying to get it to stop for me. I desperately wanted to reassure Jeff that everything would be okay. I knew he always went into shock, even from minor injuries. I needed to be with him.
But the ambulance flew by, the attendant waving for me to follow. I knew Jeff must be hurt badly because they wouldn’t take time to stop for me. But at least my brother was with him.
What I didn’t know was that at that very moment, the attendants were all standing in a pool of Jeff’s blood.
It was a miracle that the ambulance team had only recently been certified to start IV’s (intravenous fluids) and apply Mast trousers (which are inflated with air and aid in circulation; Mast trousers are especially beneficial in cases of severe blood loss and help prevent the patient from going into shock). Otherwise, Jeff would have died en- route to the hospital. Now, they wrung out the bags of blood and fluid into Jeff, squeezing life into him. He was suffering from sinota- chycardia, a condition of excessively fast heart beat caused by rapid blood loss.
As I prayed, I thanked God that Jeff had been washed in the blood of the Lamb, even as he was being bathed in his own blood.
At the hospital, I numbly watched them run down the hall with Jeff on a gurney into an emergency room. I was left to wait. A saintly social worker asked if I would like to call my pastor (another hint of the severity of the situation. I still was getting only vague answers to my questions.). Pastor Hiram was in Findlay, Ohio, at General Conference. I called Jeff’s closest friend, also an elder in our church, asking him to start a prayer chain and to come quickly.
A doctor came to tell me that Jeff had life-threatening problems. The intestinal lining that fed the blood supply to Jeff’s bowels had been severed. He would need immediate surgery or bleed to death. After the operation they would move him to Burnham City Hospital at Champaign, Illinois, a Class A trauma center 50 miles away. There his right leg would be amputated.
I pleaded with the doctor to let me talk to Jeff before anesthesia. He agreed. Two nurses supported me by the arms as we walked down the hall. I was okay, but this was another clue of the gravity of the situation. They thought I would faint. (Several mechanics had left the scene of the accident to vomit.) When I first glimpsed Jeff, he was draped from the neck down. He had only a few cuts on his head. I asked him to fight for me and our children. He nodded in agreement. There wasn’t time for anymore. The nurses carried me out.
The emergency room nurse later told us it took hoses to cleanse the blood from the walls, ceiling, and floor of the emergency room.
The next 13 hours included surgery, a move to Champaign, and nine more hours of surgery, during which his leg was amputated. A long section of small bowel, one foot of large bowel, and much dead muscle tissue were also removed.
At midnight doctors told waiting family members and Christian friends that Jeff had received 35 units of blood (the human body has only 16 units). He had also received 48 quarts of saline. Jeff had had all the fluid in his veins changed more than eight times in 13 hours.
After all of that soaked into our understanding, another doctor came out. He matter-of-factly said, “I don’t expect your husband to live through the night. His percentages are zero!” (A doctor cousin later told me he had never known anyone who had lived after receiving so much blood so quickly.)
I thanked God that we were in the most compassionate critical care unit in the world. The staff cared for my emotional state as well as Jeff’s physical. Visiting hours were 10 minutes every two hours, but they allowed Jeff’s family and me to stand by his bed by the hours. His body was bloated three or four times its normal size. He was connected to a respirator, and had a temperature of 88, pulse of 180, and a blood pressure of 50 over 30. Jeff’s PTT, Partial Thromboplastim Time (blood clotting time), was in excess of 200; any time a PTT is over 45, there is danger. He had developed a condition called shock lung. I trembled watching them cut off Jeff’s wedding band, wondering if our marriage was going to end through death. It seemed that if one thing didn’t kill him, another would.
I had many questions. I wondered if God was taking Jeff home because he was so good. He had always been a stronger Christian and more self- disciplined than I. When I was too tired to go to church, Jeff would offer to take our children to the nursery, so I could rest during the sermon. Was God leaving me alone to battle out my own Christianity? (Read Isaiah 47:1, Living Bible.) I had always questioned the injustice of God taking a devoted father from his children, when thousands of fathers willingly abandoned their children every day.
But even now, Jeff was strong in the Lord and this gave me strength. When he came out from anesthesia I read his lips around the respirator. His first question, “My leg?” I told him it had been amputated.
“That’s okay,” he lipped, squeezing my hand. “I thought I was dead.”
Prayers for Jeff were lifted up everywhere. Our church had a special prayer meeting that Wednesday evening. Brother Hiram asked for prayer at General Conference sessions. Relatives in seven states were praying. The Baptist Convention prayed. An unsaved farmer told me he was praying. All the local Churches of God prayed, visited and sent contributions. The Champaign area pastors and Churches of God were also very supportive. And yes, Florence Pritts, who had witnessed Jeff’s rebirth, was praying, too.
Fluids poured into Jeff day after day. He received 26 different antibiotics to fight severe infections. (His abdominal cavity had been filled with rocks, dirt, corn and debris in the accident.) He suffered terrible hallucinations from narcotic pain- relieving injections. He continued to receive blood channeled through ice water to help combat high temperatures. Doctors repeatedly performed surgeries on his stump, six in all. After anesthesia, the hospital staff immersed Jeff in ice water to drop his body temperature so he would bleed less freely (analogous to an early grave). I lost count of the number of blood units, somewhere in the seventies.
As a relief for my nerves, I started smoking (I had quit smoking after four years when I rededicated my life to God in 1980). I questioned if God understood my need at this time. I prayed and told Him that I knew His Word was not like a Ouija board or a crazy eight ball. But would He please let me know what He expected of me as a witness to Him. I opened my Bible and the first verse I read was Proverbs 12:4: “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.” The message was clear to me. I didn’t smoke again. A friend showed me Isaiah 26:3 to help me: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.”
At one point when I visited Jeff’s room, he was all one color— white. He wasn’t responding. I asked the nurse what was wrong. She explained that transfused blood “died” after a number of days. Jeff’s body was under too much stress to make his own blood quickly enough. So there were more transfusions. By evening and ten units of blood later, Jeff was back to his supportive self. Thank you, God. And thanks, too, that the blood of Jesus never loses its power.
Seven weeks after the day of the accident, Jeff completed our family circle again. On October 13, he went back to work in the parts department of Casey Implement Co. He has a prosthesis now and is still being strong for us.
Three weeks after the accident, Jeff developed a chronic brain syndrome that was caused by stress and sleep deprivation. It lasted 10 days. Until then he was able to tell us vivid details of the accident and pain. After the syndrome subsided, he remembered very little of the accident.
However, his strongest memory was feeling trapped. His soul and spirit felt trapped in a physical body that was racked with pain; they wanted to be free.
The six specialists who released Jeff from the hospital told him he should have died. They readily admitted that he lived only because of a “Higher Power.” If Jeff had died, he would still have been a winner because he had believed in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.
We thought our life together was perfect before, but it is more so now. Today we realize the value of life. There’s no time for taking each other for granted.
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Tags: Blood, Close Call