“Survival
of the fittest”, a quote by some person from days gone by,
more likely that of a healthy human being not faced with the fact
of trying to survive with a diagnosis of being terminally ill.
I know there are others out in the world that are in the same
predicament that has been handed to me. We all have our trials
and tribulations we deal with on a daily and sometimes hourly
or even minute-to-minute basis.
This is my
trials and tribulations I would like to share with others, maybe
I can be an inspiration to someone, I’m not sure, but believe
everyone should at sometime try to help inspire others to fight
with all they have and believe in.
I will start
with the few days prior to my personal tragedy, so that the true
feeling of it is in proper form.
I was employed
as an Operations Manager for a large, privately owned wholesale
floral nursery. Over seeing the operations of order filling and
truck dispatching. It was the week before Mothers day in May of
nineteen-ninety-five, one of our biggest times of the year. Orders
were stacked up tremendously, I had one trailer load of fresh
potted roses, sitting at the loading dock that was suppose to
be on the road to our customers in the state of South Carolina,
around a twelve hour trip to the first stop on the delivery route.
My driver
called in sick at the last possible moment, all my fulltime and
part time drivers had already been dispatched and on the road.
Ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday before Mothers day,
around eight hours later then the truck should have been on its
way up the road. Only the owner of the company and myself left
as qualified drivers on the premises. I called the wife to have
her rush me a change of clothes while I went threw the routine
of inspecting the truck and fueling it to head north.
With a load
of very perishable roses and customers waiting on the inventory
for one of the biggest sales day of the year in the floral business,
I drove straight through to my first stop, twelve hard hours of
driving after already putting in a full day at the nursery. I
spent all day and most of the evening that Thursday trying to
catch up the route time. After the last delivery I could possibly
get in that day, I drove another four hours before finally parking
the truck in an empty parking lot about an hour from my next scheduled
stop.
An hour away
from my next to last stop on the route, and a very tired human
being, I fell asleep slumped over the steering wheel of the truck.
I had always taught my drivers when in a predicament as the one
I now found myself in, to park in front of a business that will
definitely wake you when they came in to open for business and
found your truck parked in front of their door. About three hours
later, rapping on the driver’s window door, had me up and
at it again. On the road and to my delivery, looked like I was
catching up to my schedule, only had these last two to make before
the end of the Friday before Mothers day.
By the time
I arrived at my last delivery, I was beyond tired, both physically
and mentally. The last drop was a small flower setup in the corner
of a car sales lot. No unloading dock and only one person to help
me unload an order of three thousand, three pound potted rose
bushes. On top of all that, being the last delivery on the trailer,
the roses were at the front quarter of the fifty-three foot closed
in trailer. A long walk carrying four three-pound pots, two in
each hand, especially with the temperature outside in the upper
seventies and feeling like a hundred degrees in the stuffy closed
in trailer.
I’m
not a small man, standing at six foot one inch and weighing in
around two-hundred and seventy pounds, with the previous week
of long hours at the nursery and the hectic non-stop last two
days my body was own to its last bit of strength. Not long after
we started carrying the roses to the end of the trailer and piling
up a bunch of them were we could then get down from the trailer
and carry into the small shop, I got to the point were I couldn’t
even mustard up the strength to climb back up in the trailer.
I had already stopped a few times and sat down in the shade for
a few minutes, after feeling sharp cramps in my chest, all I could
think about was to keep going and get to a motel for a shower
and a long nights sleep.
A little past
the point of having over two-thousand of the roses off the trailer,
I was once again climbing up the rear of the trailer again and
collapsed, falling into an unconscious big sweaty heap onto the
ground. Not sure how long I was unconscious, because the customer
helping me unload the roses, didn’t really miss me at first,
he thought I had went and sat down again. Though once he saw me
on the ground unconscious he jumped down and tried to revive me,
according to him that was at least three to five minutes of unconsciousness
that he knew about.
After a few
more minutes to the point were my head was a little clearer, he
helped me to my feet and into the office of the car sales. He
explained to his boss what he thought had happened, the owner
immediately called my office in Florida to notify them I had went
down. However being a Friday afternoon and I being the only driver
who had not made it back to the yard, the office had closed early
that day. I momentarily passed out again in his office and they
immediately loaded me into the owner’s vehicle and he drove
me to the small hospital around the block there in the backwoods
town.
Emergency
records reflect that I was brought into the emergency room entrance
at five-thirty-three on the afternoon of May 5th, nineteen-ninety-five,
in cardiac arrest. The small emergency room staff worked on me
for approximately twenty minutes until I was stable. A nurse tried
my office again and again, but never reached anyone. She asked
me during one of my conscious moments who else to contact, and
I reached for my wallet with all my family phone numbers in it,
of course they had cut my clothes off me by now, so I told her
that in my wallet was my brothers number and to contact him.
I told her
I didn’t want them contacting my wife, since we lived out
in the woods away from others and she was home alone with three
children, one being a new born. Well Friday afternoon and my brother
was celebrating the end of the work week at his favorite little
drinking establishment on the way home. By sometime around seven
o’clock, I was stable enough to do the only thing left,
they let me contact my wife, and try to break it to her as gently
as possible as to what had taken place. What the conversation
after me telling her and assuring her I was fine was between the
nurse that took the phone from me and my wife, I’ll probably
never really know.
After being
determined stable enough to take a ride, I was placed in an ambulance
and took a two and a half hour to the closet big city that had
facilities to care for me, Charleston South Carolina.
There I lay,
around fourteen hours from home, surrounded by strangers, scared
to death of what I was going through, not sure if I would ever
see my wife, children and other loved ones again.
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