Kytes' Travels

How does it feel to have a broken femur? Well, I am quite sure that they took my old leg and replaced it with someone else's. My leg is not black and blue, has a knee cap and moves on demand. This foreign entity attached to my body does not. I have never talked to my limbs before, and now I find myself encouraging and cursing my new leg. "Come on you can do it! Slide into the shoe...get up onto the bed." My new leg has really bad self esteem. Yesterday was my first day of physio in my home, and I kept assuring the therapist that the leg he was looking at and trying to work with was not mine. He held his hand 4 inches off the ground and told me to kick it. I concentrated, breathed deeply, perspired in fear, psyched myself up and told my foot to lift. It just sat there...my leg wouldn't have let me down.

As a family we love to travel. Whether in our amazing home province or halfway around the world, whether by plane or automobile, whether camping or staying in a resort, we have been fortunate enough to say that every one of our trips has been a “success.” Relaxing, invigorating, educational, thrilling, breathtaking, bonding, fun-filled, refueling; these are a few of the words that we have used to gauge the “success” of our trips.

We have never used the simple fact that we returned home alive and with full use of our bodies as a measuring stick that deems a trip a “success”. This changed drastically with our recent family road trip to California. It was with an air of excitement we headed south on March 31 to visit our close friends, the Klassens, in Fresno. We were combining this visit with picking up a slightly used wakeboarding boat that we purchased online, and we (Dan especially) were extremely excited with the prospect of wakeboarding and wakesurfing behind a world-class inboard boat for this and many following summers. The trip was a ton of fun – the kids did amazingly well on the long drive down; we spent quality time on the coast of California near Pebble Beach with our friends, the new boat was as immaculate as it had appeared online and On April 5th we anticipated an uneventful drive home pulling the boat.

Near the end of our first day of driving home, at 10:00 PM, just north of Eugene Oregon, a south-bound 5-ton moving truck crossed over the I-5 median immediately in front of us. Dan had just enough time to avoid the truck from hitting us head on, but it did hit the front of us with the rear axles. In two horrific seconds our big heavy duty truck was crumpled like a tin-can and we ended up beside the freeway turned on our side with the driver’s side on the dirt and the passenger’s side up in the air. Air bags galore deployed, and in that nightmarish moment God had protected us in ways we will not fully know or understand in this life. We quickly realized we were all alive, the Peace of God descended on our vehicle and filled our hearts, and we were able to calmly assess that our kids were safe and not in any immediate pain. Tammy and I then confirmed with each other that our legs were severely pinned but we could move all our toes, but we were both in extremely severe pain.

Praise God!!!!! We are alive, and not paralyzed so far!!!! Our kids are unhurt as far as we know!!!!! - These are the thoughts that flooded our hearts and minds. He gave us the strength to remain calm for our children, and we prayed with them and encouraged them to pray the help would come.

Help soon arrived, and for the next hour an army of Firemen and EMTs were God’s hands and feet for us. They were amazing. Heroes in the truest sense of the word. We owe them a debt of gratitude that I cannot express with words. They had to cut the roof off our truck, extract our kids, and then figure out how to unpin us. As our kids were leaving with the firemen we were yelling our love for them from the truck. During our extraction the pain was constant, at times overwhelming, but God gave us the strength to endure it without passing out. After 45 minutes of being pinned, Dan got free, but the firemen working on Tammy were still searching for a way to get her out. It took a full 90 minutes to get Tammy freed. All that while she was hanging basically from her right femur (the upper part of her leg). Dan and the kids were Ambulanced to the hospital and Tammy was Life-Flighted via helicopter.

Following immediate surgeries – Tammy had a titanium rod inserted through the middle of he right femur, and Dan had his right Patellar tendon re-attached and his right shoulder popped back into place– we started taking stock of the amazing number of ways God blessed us through this situation:

We all survived – which is a miracle according us; even some firemen and a policeman admitted they find it hard to believe none of us died.
The kids were unhurt except for some seatbelt bruising.
Neither Tammy or I were paralyzed.
Except for some minor cuts on our bodies, there was no external wounding and no facial or head wounds. If you were to see the amount of broken pieces of plastic and fiberglass, you would be amazed.
We crashed within ten minutes of a hospital that is only just over a year old, with top-notch surgeons and five-star facilities.
At the time we were driving, there were no other vehicles immediately surrounding us, which could have made things far worse.
From the first phone call home to inform our families, we have felt an overwhelming amount of love and support through our families, friends, church, and business associates. The help has been tremendous, through prayer, phone calls , emails, food brought, flowers, rides given, the list goes on and on. Thank you all!!!!!

We spent 5 days in the hospital in Oregon, our dads came down immediately and were invaluable in taking care of police report stuff and recovering our personal belongings from what was left of our truck. After 2 days, they drove our kids back up home. Our good friends Rennae and Allan then came down and began tackling so many logistics for us – opening claim files with the various insurance agencies was the biggest one – oh, and they brought us amazing sushi for dinner one night!!! Rennae, in her usual “get-stuff-done” fashion, managed to get ICBC (with the help of our cousin Gail) to arrange for Tammy and Dan a medical flight straight home in a Lear jet! After being discharged from the hospital on Saturday April 10, we were ambulanced to the Eugene airport, had a 50 minute flight to Abbotsford airport, and were ambulanced straight to Tammy’s parents’ home, where we spent one night before returning to our home. All it took was 10 minutes in the ambulance from the hospital to the airport to realize an 8-hour drive home would have been out of the question, both for our bodies and our minds. We are not ready to spend a long time on the freeway yet. We are extremely grateful to our dads and to Rennae and Allan for truly serving us in this fashion!! It is hard to express our gratitude to its full extent.

We are well-insured and ICBC has been extremely supportive and responsive. We currently have in-home help for 8 hours a day, they set us up with wheelchairs, a hospital day-bed on our main floor, and we have not had to concern ourselves with hospital bills (which we are told are very large), and our property damage will be compensated for.

Our moms and siblings have also been an amazing support. Since we have returned home they have helped us in so many ways. (Thanks for the massages and errands run Laura! Thanks for the legal advice Jules! It will be a blessing to work with you on this. Thanks for the new nephew Steph and Dean! It was so good to hold him in the hospital.)

Tammy and I have injuries that with time and disciplined therapy will heal. Maybe not 100%, but we are praying it will be enough to eventually return to our active lifestyle. It is with great disappointment we are having to cancel a hiking adventure in Southern Utah’s National Parks with Dan’s sister that was supposed to happen at the end of April, and we won’t be boating this summer, but God spared our lives and bodies, and we count ourselves blessed with family and friends that have shown to be of the highest quality anyone could hope for.

I guess from the right perspective we could deem this latest family trip a “success”.

All Glory and Honor be to Our Heavenly Father, every good and perfect gift comes from Him!!!!!!