Inspiration(Jordan Young) Inspiration

I sat across the table from him after we all finished dinner, and listened to my grandpa talk about the past like it was yesterday. Halfway through the story, he got up to get the films and showed me all of the skeletal contusions, fractures, and breaks that he had received when he had crashed. My grandmother looks as though she had traveled back in time with the way her eyes had glossed over once my grandpa brought it up. I felt tears gather in my eyes as I listened with rapt attention, realizing that in that one moment I could’ve lost him. Glad that I hadn’t, I wrote this story in my point of view, had I been there.
About twenty years ago, a crash occurs, threatening a man’s life. It was a head-on collision, and strewn about the car were shards of metal and glass. He opened his eyes, seeing the other car and faces looking towards him. Had they not been there, he would be vanishing three hundred feet over the mountain ridge, the corner was so sharp. The night was silent besides the hum of a fire slowly creeping its way to the unsuspecting man who sat with legs crushed amidst dashboard and seat of his ’69 Opel G.T. The gas tank was punctured, and every minute counts before it spreads to him. The happening of a concussion unpreventable swarmed his head as if a tornado had hit, making sight and consciousness a blur in the dimming light. A state of shock drifts over him as he gazed into colors mimicking the sun. Heat swept over him as he gained rational thought, tugging his legs for a slight shift in leverage. His right leg bending at an unnatural angle, he was unable to climb out of the car, which increased his moves to escape into frantic blows to the windows. Hands crumple into nothing more than a heap of flesh and bone, a man appeared at the passenger door.
The next moment crucial, hands tugged at his axillary region with much strength, maneuvering him out of the near-exploding vehicle. Glancing back at the vehicle aflame, he closes his eyes.
Water from the fire hose was pooling beneath him, causing him to awaken frozen, the rescuer having pulled him into a ditch to avoid any more collisions. After the EMT’s found him, they stripped the man of his clothes to keep chances of hypothermia minimal and life-flighted him as he is half conscious to the ICU.
Lights, blaring lights.
Loud voices surrounded him, and confusion arose.
Needles pierced his head and neck when attempts to turn it failed, and the creaking of plastic sounds in his ear. His eyes slowly adjusting to the harsh glow of the lights, memories revealed themselves.
The feel of flames on sweat-drenched skin, and a wave of calm washing over as the strength of the inevitable flows over him. Then it was cold, very cold. Being out of the car registers. Queer, unknown faces show themselves. Flashing lights with uniforms emerging beneath them. Then came the welcoming darkness.
Gasping, feelings of pain, wonder, and astonishment overwhelm the man. Breathing became cramped, ribs ceased to remain neutral as nausea came to the surface. Nurses immediately started to the sound of his awakening, asking about pain levels and consciousness. Being given morphine to soothe pain unbearable, doctors examined lacerations and contusions, skeletal x-rays and neuro-images. Horrendous mutterings of the shattered left zygomatic arch, mandible, maxilla, and frontal bone reached his ears. Doctors approached, bearing bad news; the likeliness of walking again approximately nil. Disbelief coursed through the veins of a stubborn man. The doctors say that his right femur was shattered and was to be held together with a rod, pins, and needles. The left ankle and foot was crushed, as well as the right side of his face. Failure to walk is impossible, a farmer unable to accomplish the duties thirty acres requires daily unthinkable. A woman came to see him and thought his face unrecognizable, but saw him despite rumors of brain damage. Ten days and fourteen hours of surgery later, he was lying in a hospital bed mulling over those thoughts of frustration unendurable, when finally he was released and headed home bound with the woman he would spend a lifetime with.
Waking in the dead of night, cold as ice, but he was sweating as a furnace. Withdrawal from morphine is a struggle, as visions of unearthly beings dance around his home. Screams seeming to come from miles far gone awoke the woman he had come back to. Panicky chants of aliens coming in through windows with the thought of leaving with bloody hands and spare limbs began to immerse themselves among his terror. “Don’t come any closer!” the man shrieks, thinking of defending her from the extraterrestrial beings only he had a sight for. The woman urges the man to calm, as he will harm himself further otherwise. Slowly, he returns to his dreams. Days seemingly endless passed by, the man’s cold sweats diminishing day by day. The woman takes care of him through thick and thin, changing sheets twice a day, as well as serving meals. The man became restless while visiting an uncle’s ranch; he was determined to be included in the work and even chopped firewood while sitting in casts. Through the holidays, the cast colors changed: orange and black for Halloween, green and red for Christmas. During Christmas, the man rode into the woods on a motorcycle, coming home with a tree to celebrate, still in casts. One day, six weeks before the date the man was supposed to have the cast on the left leg removed, the man cuts it off and gradually begins his journey of walking again. All the while, the woman is assisting him in accomplishing this task, while raising children and holding together a tarnished home.
He walks! The man is filled with joy and arrogance at defying the doctors’ prediction. Soon he returns to work, restoring the farm to what it is today. The man and woman ran away for a rather short time, eloping. This man and woman are my grandparents, alive still today. Now in their mid- fifties, they still work as one, building a tree house, they finished not one, but five buildings I perceive as a symbolic message from the universe, that a miracle they won.
This man through all of this has had a fabulous sense of humor. When he talks of this, he narrates with such comedy you can’t wait to hear more. He told me of how he got sick of waiting for the doctors to remove his left cast, and so he cut it himself. He talks of how after they took the gauze (14 yards!) out of his nasal passageways and he was just exiting the lobby of the hospital, that it felt like “a jet engine was blowing air up both nostrils because before he was unable to breathe through his nose. My grandmother reminds him of the time when she went to a birthday party, and my grandfather didn’t want to let her go alone, so he went along after cutting a pair of jeans to fit over his casts and danced with anyone that was willing to hold him up. When his casts were changed, they gave him a variety of colors, and as he looks back, his comment is, “Those cast people were cool!” because they let him do almost anything with them. He laughed and mentioned that two months afterwards, he went to drive and found his toe broken after he pressed on the gas and it bent backwards, missed because of major injuries. His face scrunches up and he grumbles when anyone mentions a commode, having too much experience with one after the accident, and was distraught when he heard they cut brand new boots into shrapnel. His first words to my grandma when she came to the hospital were, “Bionic man, huh?” making her laugh despite the circumstances.
Every single day that I look at him is another day that I thank fate that he is alive. He is stubborn as hell, never takes ‘No’ for an answer, and can cook the best darned smoked beef jerky anyone has ever tasted. I have literally seen this man accidently slice through the tip of his finger with a saw, curse up a storm even Zeus couldn’t muster, and go back to work thirty minutes later with his finger wrapped up in tape and gauze inside a small splint. Although he had a good sense of humor, he does have seven titanium plates holding the right side of his face together, pins and rods in both legs and feet, feels an odd bubbling sensation he’s grown used to when breathing, and has to put a lift in his right shoe because that leg is shorter than the other so as not to misalign his spine, they are the people that positively influence me to become successful. If a fifty-four year old man can build a tree house eight feet in the air made up of timber from his own property after being told that he wasn’t ever to walk, then surely I will be a college and medical school graduate.

“Hell, I’ve been walkin’ around with a god-dang tree house stuck in my head, it had to be built or y’all would’ve had to build my some sorta weird contraption to keep my head up!”
-James Meacher, 2011

Link to the tree house video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j_klpAehlY

Word Count: 1,603

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