Saturday 9 August 2014

The Day I Nearly Broke My Back

A Year Ago

All I could think as I lay on the wreckage of the stairs there was that I was paralysed.  I could feel blood running down my arm and everyone shouting my name. For our first morning in France it wasn't going well.

It had all started with a phone call. One of my best mates, and a fellow carpenter, had rung me up about a trip to France to go and do a job for a week, would I be interested as he couldn't do it. The money was good and it sounded like a bit of adventure, just what I was in need of as I’d been working on the same house for 18 months and I was feeling a little stale.

I rung the firm, someone I had worked for 10 years previous, everything was paid for, hotel, food, etc. All I’d needed was a work mate and my tools. The job was fairly simple, install some stairs and second fix a house.

I knew straight away the carpenter I wanted to take with me. He’s one of the most energetic blokes I've ever met and one of the very few that I rate to be as good as I am (sounding big headed now but never mind) I rang him up. “Tom , what are you like at fitting stairs? And do you fancy a week in France?”

We were all set, they even sent someone to the passport office for me to pick me up a new passport, and on a Saturday morning we set out for France in two rental vans. We were accompanied by our drivers Ricky, a plasterer and jack of all trades, and Paul, who was coming along for the ride. The journey was eventful, we missed our ferry but they just put us on the next one.

As we stood looking at the white cliffs and leaving England behind, Tom said “I've never fitted stairs before…”

We arrived late that night, the owner of the hotel cooked us a huge BBQ and we went to sleep happy.  The next morning we arrived at the job and started to have a look round. Straight away we could see problems, The door linings they had brought with them were the wrong size, and as we unpacked the stairs I could see that they had been made to measure but with no tolerance what-so-ever to get them in.

We got to work, assembling the bits we could and laying it all out. It’s important to methodical with a job like fitting stairs, if you do something in the wrong order then the chances are it won’t go together. The instructions were as much use as an empty crisp packet so we set about measuring up and marking the walls where everything was going to go.

The stairs turned a full 180 degrees as they came down but we could see that all the walls were too tight to get any of it in. Basically they’d designed it to be airlifted in with the roof off. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We started by putting the top treads and newel posts together and when we lifted it up we could see straight away that we were going to have to cut the wall away to get them in.

We wedged them in place, I held the top and Tom started to mark the underside.

That’s when it happened. The wall broke on the far side of the stairs. Instinct takes over and I grabbed the top of the newels to try to prevent the oak stairs from landing on Tom.

They went down anyway, somersaulting me over the top of them. When I landed, after the 3m fall, I was facing the other way. The lower half of my back was on the sharp string (the thick bit on the side of the stairs) and my arm had a nasty cut on it. I just lay there for a few seconds.

Weird things go through your head when something like that happens; I just thought I wasn't going to be able to walk my daughter down the aisle. I remember I wiggled my toes before I did anything else, then the adrenalin kicked in and I got up and lay down on the floor face down. The others said later that they thought it was like something out of a car crash where the victim walks around with a broken leg without realising it. I lay for a few minutes, Tom was unharmed, a small scratch down his leg, but luckily he’s pretty quick and managed to jump out the way.

The guys wanted to take me to hospital but I was feeling alright by then. We patched up my arm at the van and I told them that if I stopped I’d seize up, best to keep working. Within 15 minutes we were back at it.

It was only later that night, as I lowered myself painfully into an empty bath and ran the water with me already in it, that I stopped to think about what had happened.  In the end it was a combination of my good luck and my thick leather belt I always wear that had saved me. The point of the stairs I had landed on was right on the belt and it must have spread the pressure and turned it into a nasty bruise rather than anything more serious. The bottom of my back went black with the bruise and was still there after I got home a week later.

It’s funny, in the building we always talk about health and safety gone mad, but when you’re fitting stairs you have to have the safety rail removed, it simply can’t be done with it still in place. In hindsight we should have cut a few props and wedged it in place, and I'm sure we will in future, but then we didn't know they’d slip like that in the first place. I was always told I was born lucky and this was one of the days when I realise its true!


Then Ricky nearly killed us all on the way back but that’s a story for another time…. 

27 comments:

  1. Sounds like you were very lucky indeed.

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    1. Like I said. I sometimes think I was born lucky! (I know I shouldn't tempt fate!)

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  2. A near miss indeed, but you must have a lot of courage as well because someone else in your place would not have got up on their feet and carried on working, and the fact that you did must have stopped the injury from being much worse.

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    1. I think I knew that if I stopped I would have had to gone home as I know I would have seized up. I was very sore for a few days though!

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  3. some-one somewhere had other plans for you, hopefully there was no lasting damage, your trip reminds me of Auf Weidersehen.

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    1. I hope there's nothing lasting from it as well! It was a funny trip. One filled with laughter other than that point!

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  4. Crikey, you were really lucky. I fell down stairs when I was younger and a few years ago started to suffer badly with my back. Hubby was in a car accident then 17 years later woke up one morning suffering from the injuries it caused.

    As we were talking about it's always worth looking after your body so keep up those swimming sessions xx

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    1. This waqs falling with stairs! Maybe I should still get my back looked at now just to make sure, but I always put it off and never get round to it!

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  5. Somebody was watching over you that day, Kev. I once got crushed with a wardrobe sliding down a stairs. That's about fourteen years a go and I still suffer back pain from it. I look forward to reading your adventures Kev.

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    1. Cheers Dave, It was lucky, it was on to a tiled floor so if my head had hit first it probably would have killed me!

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  6. I've always said that if the Lord watches over fools and children, then I must still be a KID at heart, since I've kept Him pretty busy over the years. lol

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  7. Take care of that back,mister,that injury may take it's toll as you get older.
    So, did you buy a lottery ticket that day,or did you think you'd already pushed your luck far enough?
    Jane x

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    1. I think that was more than my luck for that day!

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  8. Frightening account. Things like that happen so quickly. All you can do is proceed slowly and attempt as best you can to foresee all possibilities and try your best to leave yourself a way out. And even so they still get you. Nearly 30 yrs ago I had a two story fall when a roof rafter being used as a staging plank broke under my feet as my boss stepped on to it. Broke both my ankles. Still paying the price for that one.

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    1. That's made me cringe! You poor bugger that must have hurt like hell and I bet in the US that was an expensive thing to have to put right as well? I really can't imagine that much pain.

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    2. I still have the hammer I chewed on all the way to the hospital. Clearly visible are the teeth marks in the rubber handle. As I was on payroll working for someone, medical expenses were covered by whats called "workmans comp" here. Its a mandated insurance that employers carry. They pay in to it and some gets deducted from employe salary to pay in to this insurance. You even get 80% of your salary for your down time. Which wasn't much given I was making under 10$ an hour at the time, but it kept me going. The double knee high casts were good for getting free beers at the bar.

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  9. Blimey a gripping account but gave me goosebumps. A proper near miss

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    1. Glad you liked it! I sometimes think you have to write these things down (good or bad) or else you'd forget them.

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  10. You should have joined the Army instead of being a carpenter. It would have been safer.

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  11. I I worked on spinal injuries for 18 years
    I have heard this sorry so any times

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    1. It's a common thing in the building industry. We have to be careful but sometimes things just happen, either through an accident or not thinking. I was lucky

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  12. Kev - thank you for stopping by our blog (FramboiseManor) and for following us - i have done the same here and am now following you. would you like to exchange links and add each other's blogs to our blogrolls?

    as for this story of nearly breaking your back - yuhikes! that is scary stuff indeed! i am glad that you were not injured badly.

    i have scanned a few of your blog posts, i intend to go back and read them all, but i like your description of your life and your goals and i love that you share recipes - woohoo - i love finding new recipes.

    again, thanks for leaving such a nice comment on our blog and i am glad to see several commenters here that i already consider friends. so now i consider you one, too.

    kymber

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    1. Thanks Kymber, That sounds like a great idea. And what a lovely comment, I'll look forward to going over to your blog.

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  13. Oh God .... I went cold all over reading that.

    You're a lucky guy!! xx

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