On the Unrecognized Aspects of Our Parents

I've been helping my Mom clean out some of my Dad's belongings this summer. It will be four years since his passing and every day there are more things found to deal with: to shred, to file, to store, to destroy, etc. etc.

As I was cleaning out a box that was full of miscellaneous paperwork in desperate need of filing, I ran across an envelop addressed to my Dad from the American College of Surgeons, dated 1967. There is a myth about how my Dad, as a young construction worker, fell on a pipe and was nearly killed, but because my Dad never talked about it, the story always seemed surreal. When I opened the envelop to see what was to be done with the contents, the reality of my Dad's story was visible in a picture taken by the Fire Department of Chicago.

In the picture, a younger version of my Dad (who looks a lot like my brother Kevin and I) lays on a stretcher, his faced wrenched in pain. He was surrounded by a lot of concerned looking officials and one guy smoking a cigar (which dated the picture, as no one these days would smoke a cigar around a bleeding neck wound). There, centered in the picture, is a pipe protruding from my Dad's neck, piercing his bloodied shirt - the pipe that was never really talked about, but clearly existed. My first though: Shit. My Dad's a badass.

With the picture was the March and April, 1967 edition of the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, Vol. 52. This issued dealt with ambulances and trauma, and featured a small write-up on my Dad in the section titled, "What's New in Trauma in Your Area?" Here are the first two paragraphs:

Keep the Wound Plugged. Just two months after Chicago Fire Department ambulance drivers were instructed in the technique of handling a person who has been impaled they were summoned to give first aid to a construction worker with a reinforcing rod through his neck, and take him to the hospital. A tuckpointer, the man had fallen 16 feet onto the rod.

As instructed in the annual course given by the Chicago Committee on Trauma for those who are first to see the injured, the firemen left the rod in the tuckpointer's neck. With an acetylene torch the protruding part of the rod was cut off a given number of inches from the man's body, and he was gently transported to St. Luke-Presbyterian Hospital where doctors removed the rest of the rod. He recovered, returned to work, and is now in college.

It goes on to say that the procedure done in the hospital was to be used as an example in future courses taught on the subject of impalement.

My Dad had a lot of admirable qualities. He was a hard working, loyal man who cared a lot for his family - both his brothers and sisters, and his own children. Finding this picture and the clinical, emotionless retelling of the events added a lot of shading to the picture I had drawn of my Dad. He, evidently, was the type of man who could take a pipe to the neck - a pipe THROUGH the neck - in stride, not letting a near death experience detract from his work, school or family. Hell, if that had happened to me, I would have had turned completely inward, seeing life through some sort of pseudo-religious lens. I would have talked about the wonderment of fate, and questioned what my role in life was.

I have had three "serious" injuries in my life: I tore my hamstring in my junior year of high school (a class two tear, the size and depth of the average pinky finger) while running track; and I dislocated the second knuckle on my right index finger, fracturing the joint - this happened while playing pick-up basketball as a sophomore in college; my forehead exploded when I bumped it against another man's forehead at a Flogging Molly concert. When I tore my hamstring, six weeks of electro-therapy fused the muscle back together; and while I never regained the spring in my jump, I walk just fine now. In college, my finger was bound for a few weeks, a bone fragment fell out some six to eight weeks later, and then was fine. I had five stitched put in my forehead, which left a now mostly faded scar.

I like telling the stories of these injuries because they make me feel athletic and, at times, a little tough. I mean, I took a blow to the head that required the concert venue to close down while they mopped up the floor; the in-house doctor said he could see my skull. That's tough, right?

In light of my Dad's injury, documented by a major medical bulletin, which he never talked about and was only made obvious by a thick scar that sometimes was seen above the collar of his shirt, I find two things are true: 1) I now don't feel so tough; 2) I have more respect for my Dad who lived his entire life like he never had a pipe pushed through his neck. Regardless of the reason why, that he never talked about it speaks volumes about how my Dad lived his life: he bore his problems and hurtles with a quiet resolve to continue moving in his life, focused on what was more important. [Note: later in his life, diagnosed with a terminal, muscular degenerative disease, my Dad would rarely complain about his lot in life, working until he could no longer physically make it to the building (and even then fielding phone calls). In light of the neck injury, this makes a lot more sense.]

And finally, I miss my Dad quite a bit now. There were times I really fought with my Dad who did not really understand me. It sucks that now, almost four years after he's gone, I'm finally starting to put together a picture of the man. I wish he were here now so we could talk about how badass he is.