Life Testimony Part 1

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone.

It's good to be here with you all. We're Josh and Carrie Woodcock from Somersville, Missouri. It's just a little town kind of south-central Missouri. If you draw a line from St. Louis to Branson kind of a diagonal line, we're about in the middle just south of that a little bit, right? Kind of in the middle of the Ozarks.

I see there's some children in the middle in the back. Could all the Sunday school and school children, if you'd raise your hands, I'd like to just kind of see how many children are here.

Okay, a bunch of hands back there. Good. Glad you're all here. This isn't my normal wheelchair. Usually I use a manual wheelchair and I sit a lot lower. And I like talking to children. They're a little bit more on my level and they ask neat questions and it's just fun. And it's a little intimidating being up here in front of so many cool people, so glad the children are here.

Yeah, my accident happened when I was at Bible school. I just turned 19 and so whenever I talk to Bible school students, it brings back a lot of memories. And it always pulls a little bit when I tell my story because God was good to me in spite of my foolishness and just doing something really dumb.

My medical records call me a C5 quadriplegic. My spinal cord was damaged at the fifth cervical vertebra. A quadriplegic is simply basically someone with all four of their limbs impaired or paralyzed in some way.

For your children, if you feel on the back of your neck those bumps on the back of your neck there, if you count down from your skull, it's the fifth one down from your head. That's the fifth vertebra that I broke when I had my accident.

And I'll kind of show you what does and doesn't work in my arms and hands so you can kind of understand why my gestures are a little bit different. I have pretty good gross shoulder movement and I have pretty good biceps. My triceps, the muscles on the backs of my arms don't work. So when I put my arms up like this, I can't straighten them out. When I reach up over my head, if I reach up too far, my arm will just fall back in on top of my head. I can raise my wrists this way. When I turn my hands over, I can't move them. I can't lift them up. I can't move any of my fingers or thumbs individually.

It kind of looks like I can, but basically the only grip I have is just for my wrist movement. When I let my wrist down, my fingers kind of open and when I lift my wrist up, they kind of close that way. So it's just basic leverage is about the only use I have in my hands.

Carrie's going to read some verses out of Isaiah 40. They'll be verses 11 to 18. And they kind of give a picture of God. Okay. It says, "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd. He shall gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom and shall gently lead those that are with young. Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and meted out heaven with a span and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the spirit of the Lord or being his counselor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel and who instructed him and taught him in the path of judgment and taught him knowledge and showed to him the way of understanding?

Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket and are counted as the small dust of the balance. Behold, he taketh up the aisles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing and they are counted to him less than nothing in vanity. To whom then will ye liken God or what likeness will ye compare unto him?"

Okay. It kind of gives you the picture of this big, almighty, magnificent God. He can weigh the mountains and the hills in a balance, kind of like on a scales. He can hold them in his hands. It says, "All the nations are as a drop of a bucket." You can imagine all the landmass in the entire world.

In God's eyes, it's like one drop of water in the bottom of a five-gallon bucket. Yet that same big, magnificent, all-powerful God can lead us like a shepherd does a new lamb or even like a mother ewe would. There's kind of sheep around here, I've noticed, more than in Missouri.

And God does that when we go through hard times. And even sometimes when some foolish things we do of ourselves, God's there to pick us up and carry us along and help us out. Like I mentioned, an accident happened when I was attending Bible school.

I was going to the Bethel Bible School in Seymour, Missouri. And this was on a Friday afternoon during volleyball time.

I was driving a BMW to Bible school. My dad had kind of bought it as a project for us boys. It had a blown head gasket and bad head and we did some work on it and fixed it up. And I headed to Bible school. And one Friday afternoon, I went into town to wash the car.

My cousin was there visiting. He was with me. He was 16. And on our way back out to the Bible school, we got this dumb idea to just take it out for a run and see how fast it would go down this one hill that was close to the Bible school. We thought just a little bit of high speed would be okay.

This hill was out on the four lane. It was about a half mile down the one side and a half mile up the other. I thought we'd just see what it does from top to bottom and we'll slow down going up the other side.

There shouldn't be any police. Everything should be fine. And so that's what we did.

And I got headed down the hill and I was almost to the bottom. Then we'd gotten up. We were doing 118 mile an hour, which is tremendously fast. And one of the rear tires blew out. And I was in the passing lane and when I went to pull over into the driving lane and slow down, the car just kind of started losing control. I ended up going back over down into the median. And it was wintertime. It was kind of muddy.

It rained a lot. And the tires started sinking in. And they think maybe one of them caught a rock or something. But the car started to flip end for end. Another foolish thing. I wasn't wearing my seat belt, thankfully. My cousin James was.

And I was thrown out of the car. They figure that I went out through the passenger's door. The door latch was broken and the door was wrapped around the front fender. James says he remembers feeling me sliding out across his lap over his legs while the car was in the air.

And I kind of pulled his legs out with me, I guess, but he remembers just pulling them back into the car. And it landed on its wheels again. And he got out right away. He came back looking for me. He found me. I was laying face down kind of in the mud. My face was down in the mud. I'm not sure if he rolled me over or if it was somebody that stopped by. But within minutes, people just started showing up.

And some of the first ones there were medical personnel. There was a flight nurse from the Lifeline helicopter. He was on his way through, on his way to coach a basketball game. And he said he usually stopped at a town beyond the scene of my accident. He'd always stop and grab something to eat. He said, "But just for some reason, this time he decided to stop at the town before the scene of the accident. He stopped there and got something to stop at McDonald's, got something to eat there."

But he stopped. And there was also a pediatrics nurse from the pediatrics ICU at the hospital I ended up going to. She stopped in. And they tried doing a CPR on me, doing mouth to mouth, and my eyes were rolled back. My teeth were clenched. I wasn't responding. And they couldn't get any air in through my mouth.

And so they knew they needed to do an emergency airway or kind of like an emergency trach.

That nurse had a all she had was a hunting knife in her car. And so the flight nurse, he said, "He's used to using just a little scalpel." And he said, "And this knife seemed this big in comparison to what he was used to using." And it was kind of a dull knife. He said he was trying to make a little cut right beside my Adam's apple. And he said he would push in with that knife and it would just my throat would just go in. He was afraid it would all of a sudden go in too deep and make too big of a hole.

And about that time, another lady walked up and she said, "I'm a surgeon's assistant." And said, "If I help you put the correct tension on the skin, it might work." So she kind of pulled the skin tight across my throat. And he said he was able to make just the perfect size hole. He tried using his McDonald's straw, push it in the hole, try to breathe, but it wasn't strong enough. And so somebody had a pen in their car. It was just one of those clear-tubed ballpoint pens with a grippy rubber on the end. They took that apart, took the filler out, and they just used that pen case. They put it in the hole in the skin.

They just pushed it right through into my windpipe. And then he could just lean over and he could breathe through that pen right down into my lungs. It was really slow breathing. He said he could only get about four breaths per minute. And during the accident, my lungs had got battered up pretty good. And the one had collapsed and others were getting fluid in them. And he said the pen tube started filling up with blood and he was he said he figured I probably only had about two breaths left maybe. And he was pretty sure I was going to die if someone didn't show up right away. And just about within the last couple just in the last maybe 30 seconds that I had left, the ambulance showed up.

And they put me in the ambulance, put it in a breathing tube, and stabilized me until the helicopter got there to fly me to the hospital. The ambulance crew also, they said later that they were actually on their way back from another call. They were on their way back right past the scene of the accident. And they said had they been at their station when they got the call, there's no way they would have made it in time.

We lived about two hours away from the hospital. And my dad and brothers were logging another hour on beyond that. Of course, they came into the hospital as soon as they could. My sister had also been visiting me at Bible school that day. And the last memory I have of walking or standing was giving her a hug in the entry of the church after chorus there before volleyball. And she was the first one that was in there at the hospital with me. And they put me on sedation drugs, put a ventilator in, put a feeding tube in. I had a lot of tubes down my throat.

I wasn't very responsive for the next few days. The following Wednesday was the first day that I could remember anything they had told me the previous day.

And I would kind of drift in and out of sleep or consciousness. And I would wake up and ask my family or ask the people around me what happened. I knew I'd been in an accident. I knew I was driving fast. There was someone with me. Then they would tell me what happened and I would fall back to sleep. I'd wake up and I would ask the same questions over and over again. And I started getting worried because I knew something was really wrong. Because at that point, I was paralyzed from the neck down. I could not move anything. I could wiggle my one wrist just a little bit, but my hands were stuck down by my sides.

I couldn't do nothing. And I was afraid I had a brain injury or something was wrong with my mind. I kept asking them if I was okay.

They couldn't do surgery on my neck right away to fuse my broken vertebrae because of the hole in my throat. They were afraid if they would do surgery and put hardware in there that infection could adhere to the metal and they would have to take it out or something. And so they put me in traction for two weeks until my throat could heal up a little bit. And for those of you not familiar with traction, they had this U or C-shaped metal bracket that would just go over the top of my head. And they had screws that would go in each side into my skull, into my temple on either side. And they had a loop on the top.

They hooked a cable to it, went through a pulley on the end of my bed, and they hung 15 pounds of weight on it. And so they would just pull my neck straight and hold it where it couldn't move while my throat was healing up. So of course, I couldn't sit up or anything. I was laying completely flat. And it felt really weird because it pulled my head way back where my chin was kind of sticking up. I couldn't really see anybody when they would come in to visit. They'd have to come right in close over my bed for me to see who was visiting.

And whenever they would move my bed around, to be real careful, some of the nurses weren't very careful when they'd take me down the hall or take me for scans or tests and stuff because that weight just hung free. And if they weren't careful, that thing would get to swinging and bang on the bed and it would go right into my head.

And also, they had to periodically come in and tighten up the screws in the traction mechanism. And it was really gross because when they would do that, I could hear them just creaking in my bone there. And it was just tremendous pressure on my head. It really was extremely uncomfortable. And one time I remember distinctly when they came in to tighten them up, they sent these two young guys in there. And they did not look like medical personnel at all. I mean, they looked like janitorial, groundskeepers, something. And they were kind of joking and laughing and talking about something they were going to do when they were off work. And they had this little toolkit, just kind of a tray of just random tools and wrenches that looked like something you'd find on the clearance rack at Harbor Freight or something.

And they were still visiting while they attempted to tighten it up. It's a pretty straightforward job, just two bolts tightening them up. But they started trying different wrenches on there. And I started realizing they must not have the right wrench. And they kind of said something about this one should work. And before I could say anything, they started tightening it down. And they either had a metric on a standard or a standard on a metric or something like that. Because they got the first side tight and then they couldn't get the wrench back off. It was stuck on there. And I was like, "Man, this just can't be happening." I thought I looked bad enough already but with the wrench off my head yet too.

And they weren't quite sure what to do. They started kind of wiggling the wrench and I was wiggling with it. But it wouldn't come off. So they just started thumping on it with the palm of their hand. And they got it off. But anyway, I thought I was going to start walking right then.

Another thing that happened to do a lot was suction my lungs. I had a lot of drainage fluid on my lungs. And it would build up in there and I'd have a really hard time breathing. When I would start filling up in there when I would try and breathe very deep, it would just kind of gurgle down there and it'd feel like I was choking. And if I'd try and say anything or talk, I'd start choking.

And the way they would suction my lungs is they had this surgical tubing, just really small, real little clear hose. And they would feed it up, stick it up my nose, feed it up my nose, and it would go down the back behind my throat, down in my lungs. And then they would put suction to it and they'd just vacuum the stuff out. And this tubing came in packages where it was coiled up, where it was in a round package. And if they didn't straighten it out properly before they fed it up in there, it would just come out in my mouth. And it was disgusting because it goes finger to nose into your mouth and that's bad enough.

But then when they put suction to it, any air that I did have was just gone. And I was there just yopping for air.

I'd been on a ventilator to start with. They'd wean me off. I could breathe, but I didn't have control of my diaphragm or only partial. So my breathing was real shallow at best. And I couldn't really gesture or do anything. So I would tell them that if I start blinking both eyes, just pull the thing out. Well, they wouldn't be watching. They'd feed it in there sometimes and they'd be watching their monitor or the suction or something. I'd be there just blinking away. And my brothers or family would have to tell them to pull it out or I think we saved a piece of it or found a package anyway. My brothers got pretty good at just suctioning me themselves.

Over that time, I was in the intensive care, in the ICU unit there. And this was typical one. It was just partitioned off with curtains. And the faculty, the staff there, they were really nice because they kind of let us bend the rules a little bit on how many people could be in there visiting me at a certain time.

They said that depending who had family, who didn't, or how serious the condition was, they'd let more people in.

And I'd stabilized kind of by then. They'd said the first night that I only had like a 30% chance of making it and they had opened the doors for anyone to come in and see me if they wanted to. But some of the other families that had family members there in the ICU, they started getting a little bit jealous, I guess, because they would start counting feet that were sticking out below the curtain there. And there was way too many feet for the people that were allowed in there.

And so they started complaining. And the nursing staff, they gave me a room that was just inside the ICU doors. And it had glass doors that they could slide in to close it off. They were kind of stained glass doors so you couldn't really see in and see who all was in there.

And they would let me they would let more people in there during visiting hours. But there were still times between visiting hours where I was in there by myself. And I couldn't push a call button. I don't think I even had one. I'm not exactly sure why they didn't give me something to notify the nurses. But sometimes they would pull those doors all the way shut even when I was by myself. And it was really hard to get someone's attention when I needed to be suctioned. But Carrie has a story about one of those times.

That was one of my favorite stories about Josh when he was in the hospital. One night, he was alone in the room with the glass doors in the ICU. And his lungs needed to be suctioned again. And he woke up. He just hardly breathed. He still wasn't able to push a call button. And he tried calling for help numerous times, but none of the nurses could hear him. And he couldn't call very loud without choking on the fluid in his lungs. And every time a nurse would walk past the doors, he would just feel a little closer to suffocating.

Suddenly, he could just see himself laying in the hospital bed. And he could see the screws in the side of his head and the traction mechanism. And Josh felt like he was up in the corner of his room.

And as he looked around, he realized a large hand was holding him. And he could see the creases in the palm. And he was looking down between big fingers. And he could breathe fine. And then within a few minutes, he was back in his body on the hospital bed. And a nurse was there ready to suction his lungs. And Josh says he knows without a doubt it was the hand of God.

Another thing that I dealt with a lot, probably monopolized most of my time, was just regret and shame and embarrassment, fear of what people were thinking and saying. The hospital was only like 30 minutes from the Bible school. So it was real easy for people to come in and visit. And they would do some of the prayer groups, some of the prayer time, people would take turns, groups coming in.

And I knew that I was messing up the Bible school schedule. And it was similar to this one. It was a little bit bigger. There was about 100 students there. And

obviously, everybody knew what I had done. I mean, it was easy. It was in the paper. I mean, it was a report. The police estimated how fast I was going. And I just wondered what everyone was thinking. I didn't feel like a very cool guy to start with. I mean, I had friends. People were nice to me. Felt fairly well accepted, but I wasn't the cool group in my mind anyway.

And I was just wondering what they think. And I was afraid of when people would come in. I didn't want people to ask questions. And I figured people probably thought that I got what I deserved for. I got what I deserved and what I was asking for.

I just kept thinking, here I was. I was driving like an idiot and had a wreck and got myself paralyzed. There was nobody to blame except me and myself.

And I didn't like being seen that way. My friends would come in in a hospital bed laying flat, wearing these hospital gowns that they're the farthest thing from cool that you can imagine.

And not being able to do anything. And sometimes they would come in for a while, be there over mealtime. And I couldn't feed myself. It was somewhere within the first week that they pulled all the tubes out and I was able to start I could communicate somewhat. I could eat regular food.

And my family members, someone there would have to feed me. I'd rather just wait, try to go without food until people left. But it wasn't an option. It seemed like there was always somebody there. I had so many visitors. There was just almost always somebody there.

And I didn't realize what a blessing it was, how fortunate I was to just have people there all the time. My family saw it more, other people there that just did not have family members. Or if they were there, they would soon disappear.

I had a really good neurosurgeon. He's a really talented surgeon. But it had seemed like somewhere in his medical training, he'd kind of traded in all his personal skills for his surgical skills and all his people skills in personal relations. He was just really blunt, kind of brusque, and kind of rude. And he had come out and told my family pretty early on that I was paralyzed from the neck down. There was no chance of me ever walking again or ever really doing anything ever again. And that my spinal cord looked like a frayed cable and that there was bone chips all through it and that I'd have to wear a halo instead of a neck brace.

And so we were pretty scared and worried about surgery. He had told us how to modify my clothes. The halo is just this big bracket around your head that makes it look kind of like an astronaut instead of a regular neck brace.

The surgery, thankfully, after two weeks when my throat was healed up enough, went a lot better than what they'd expected. There was no bone chips. My spinal cord was not frayed. The C5 had just slid forward on C6 and pinched it down. I think it was like 50% compression. And I was able to wear a regular neck brace. And after that, sometimes when we'd talk about it, we kind of wondered sometimes if he had a frayed cable somewhere the way he treated people.

It was after I was able to have surgery and get out of traction, get a neck brace on that I was able to start doing some therapy and range of motion. I'm not exactly sure why they didn't really do any with my arms and legs, lower extremities while I was in traction. But my arms had gotten really stiff kind of and I'd lost a lot of muscle tone.

One of the things I started doing is trying to get movement, range of motion back in my shoulders and arms and also just being able to sit up a little bit without passing out.

And those were the three main first things that I did, was trying to stretch my arms, try to sit up without passing out, and try to start feeding myself.

And I had to wear these wrist splints. My wrists would just hang down. I couldn't lift them at all. And so they had these splints that would hold my wrist straight. And to feed myself, they'd stick a spoon, just stick it into the splint there. They'd kind of support my elbow. They had this spring-loaded device that would kind of hold my elbow level like this. They'd set my plate real close where I could just kind of use mostly bicep muscle to feed myself. And I could just do a few bites at a time before I was exhausted.

I started trying to do bicep curls. I had this really fun therapist. He was great at making me laugh and telling jokes and lightening up the situation. He tried a pound weight and I couldn't lift it. He tried eight ounces. I couldn't lift it. So they went down in the really light, like a quarter pound or something. And he would measure how much I could lift in the grams or how many paper clips he figured I was curling at a time.

And when they would take me out and put me on like a therapy mat and stretch me out, he would try and raise my arms up away from my sides and lay them out kind of just out, kind of spread eagle. And my arms would just curl back in. I couldn't hold them there. I didn't have any muscle tone. So he would lay heavy weights, just put them on my wrists, down by my sides. Then he would just slowly slide them out. And they just stretched tremendously. It hurt really bad. I thought I could kind of envision what some of those anabaptists went through when they put them on the racks and the wheels and stuff.

Another thing, like I mentioned, trying to sit up without passing out, since I was laying flat, my blood pressure was just used to being really low. And anytime I would sit up a little bit, I would just faint really easily. And it would just take like 30 minutes in the morning to slowly get me set up enough to sit in a wheelchair. And I remember the first time that I sat in a wheelchair, the reality just seemed to really sink in. When I was laying in bed, I knew I was paralyzed. I knew I couldn't move anything. But it didn't feel like it as much. It felt like the swelling in my spinal cord should go down and I should be able to start moving sometime.

But they brought in this power wheelchair. And they made this bracket on the joystick where my hand could just rest on it. And I had a little bit of I could twist, move my wrist a little bit. I could just drive myself a little bit. But I'd have to recline way back. And I would still just I would faint really easily. And I remember the first time I sat in that wheelchair and I went out of the room there, it was just a lot of embarrassment. I just really did not like for people to be the identity of being in a wheelchair. And I'd try and get past the nurse's station without seeing anyone or looking at them.

And it was kind of foolish. They were used to seeing people in wheelchairs all the time. But it was just the identity, just knowing that I was that this is really me. I really have to use a wheelchair.

I remember being just so anxious to go home. I wanted to go home so badly. I was in the hospital about a total of two months. And I was kind of caught in this dilemma that I wanted to go home so badly, but I was afraid to go home and come around in a wheelchair.

Having people see me in the hospital in a wheelchair, that was bad enough. But being at home and at the house or going to church or going places, I knew my family would want to be taking me places.

I'm kind of in the middle of us siblings. I have two that were older and three that were younger. So I had both my older siblings and the one younger than me. They were just going to youth functions. So I knew there was no way I'd escape going to youth functions when I got home.

And I remember the first time that I did go to a youth function.

When they sent me home, they had told me that they wouldn't let me go home until they had a power wheelchair. And then we had a ramp on the house to get me up in there. And I didn't want to wait for them to build a ramp. And I wanted to see if I could use a manual wheelchair anyway. And so I told them I didn't want that. And somebody donated or loaned us a wheelchair for me to use until we could get one of our own. And this was just an old stainless steel and blue canvas-looking wheelchair like what you see at Walmart.

And the foot plates would flip up and the backrest would lay down. And it worked very well. It was exactly what I needed. Because when my blood pressure would drop out and I'd start to faint, they'd just lay the back down flat and they'd flip my foot plates up. And sometimes I'd just have to go around that way for a little bit with my feet sticking out in front of me. It took up all kinds of room and just looked dumb as you could imagine.

And it just bothered me a lot. But this is the way I had to go home. One of my therapists, he made these projection things out of moldable plastic. And this was this white, globby-looking, ugly thing that he made all around the push rings so that I could just kind of move myself around the house a little bit. I started to get by the two months, I kind of had shoulder movement and a little bit of strength, but it was still really weak. But I could move around the house just a little bit if I was on hardwood. But any distance at all or any public place, wherever they put me, I was pretty much stuck.

And in my mind, I wasn't used to wheelchairs.

Some of the other people in the hospital, they had ones that, in my mind, looked a lot better than the one I was loaned.

And some of them had power assist where really weak people could kind of push themselves and stuff. And I thought in my mind, this chair is probably one of the oldest ones around and looks like something David would have used to push my fibbish out there on the palace or something like that. It was just my condition, I thought, was about as bad as I could get on appearance-wise.

And the first youth function I went to, it was at somebody's house that was not handicap accessible, which was fine. Everyone was willing just to help me up the steps into the house. And they'd pull me up there. And we went through the living room and then down more steps and out on the back porch. And I knew I was stuck there. And it was the first time I'd been really with the youth group since my accident. And I'd kind of gotten the habit of whenever I felt like crying, I would try and make some joke, try and make myself laugh. Because I couldn't move around. I was stuck. I couldn't go off and cry anywhere.

And I hated crying in front of the family. Because it seemed like if I started crying, the rest of them would too kind of. I have a really close, supportive family. And they just felt my pain as much as they could. And I thought, "Man, they do so much for me." The least I can do is hold myself together emotionally.

But here I was in the youth group there. And all evening long, it just seemed like everything would kind of crash down on me. And I was just on the verge of crying all evening long. But I wouldn't let myself.

I'd just keep talking, kind of making jokes. And I got good at making a lot of paralyzed and wheelchair jokes. And my mom and sisters, they didn't always think they were so funny. But it was my way of just dealing with the situation and kind of like a mind aversion thing.

For a year, I did outpatient therapy. And my sister had been teaching school. She quit. The church was real nice. The school board got a substitute for the rest of the year. And Anne would take me to therapy. I went to an outpatient facility about an hour and a half from our house. And we'd go there four days a week. And on the days I was at home, she'd work with me. And I was always the worst one there. There was a few other wheelchair guys, but most of the other people weren't in wheelchairs. And I didn't have really anyone else there like me. And I had great therapists. They did a good job. But a year later, the following January, I went to an inpatient rehab facility up in Columbia, Missouri.

It was about three hours from our house.

And it was really good for me to be there. There was a lot of other guys there that had worse injuries than I did. And about the only thing at that facility were spinal cord injury and brain injury. They had one wing that was spinal cord and one that was brain injury. But we shared the same gym. And it was a real wake-up for me.

There was about four other guys that were right about my age, but had all had spinal cord injuries. We were all in wheelchairs. Our injuries, some of us, there was a couple of us that had very same level of injuries as I did.

And they had very little church and, I mean, no church support, very little family support. Another reason I liked being there in Columbia was I knew that Bible school coming up again, we lived close enough to the Bible school that my friends from out of state would be stopping to visit me. And I did not. It was only a year out. I wasn't ready to face more strangers.

I got to where I really liked church. Church was one of my favorite places to go. Everyone was like me when we were sitting down. I wasn't so conspicuous. I just felt like part of the crowd. But I hated going new places.

And it was really strange change because usually I liked meeting new people, going new places. I was an extrovert. Another thing was girls were all of a sudden this terrifying thing to talk to. Before, it had been fun to kind of talk to them and tease them.

But all of a sudden, they're taller than me. And they know that I can't do anything. I'm dependent and I'm weak. And they were nice. The girls in our youth group were really nice. They would try and come and visit with me. And they had no idea how they just terrified me. After church, I would try to talk with my friends. They'd come back to the back of the church there. And they'd talk to me. And usually, I had a protective ring of guys around me where I was safe from the scariest ones. But after that, I would try and get out to the rig before they could talk to me. And it's just weird.

I hated being so afraid of girls. Some of you guys may know what I'm talking about, but I had an extra dose of it.

And that was another thing. Up there in Columbia, I knew I was far enough away that nobody could get off long enough to come up and visit me. And I knew I had at least another year to get used to the wheelchair before I had to face Bible school people again.

But like I said, those other guys that were there, extremely sad situations. And there was two guys in particular that had just kind of given up, seemed like given up on life. One, he had the very same level of injury I did. And he seemed like his only thing he wanted to do was smoke and watch TV. Of course, he couldn't hold a cigarette. He had this crazy-looking bracket. He had got someone to rig up a coat hanger. They'd straighten out a coat hanger and wrap it around the armrest on his wheelchair and made a loop in the end where they could stick a cigarette in it. And he would get one of the nurses or therapists or someone to go outside with him.

They'd put his cigarette in. They'd light up for him. And then he could lean over and smoke. And there was another dude in there. He was a paraplegic. And he had basically given up on everything too. They wouldn't come down to the gym and work out. The rest of us guys would be down there doing therapy. The therapists would have to go up there and get him. And they just wouldn't want to do anything. And they didn't have any family. I thought, "Man, if I was in their situation, if I had no one to come visit me, no one that cared about me," it was so bad that the facility there said they couldn't do anything with them.

They called their families, told them to come get them. Their families wouldn't come get them. Somebody, I think a transportation agency, came and got at least one of these two, took them home. And a while later, their family brought them back and dropped them off, wouldn't come get them. It was just horrible. And they had extreme anger problems. They would just get really mad. I'm not sure whose idea it was, but they ended up it was really hard for anyone else to room with them. We'd have two guys to a room in that facility. And no one else could get along with them. So they stuck these two guys together in a room. And it seemed a little funny at the time, but it was just sad.

They would get so mad. They'd be hollering over there. One day, the therapist there was down at the gym. And he's like, "Oh, yeah. We're up there." And them two guys, they got in a wheelchair fight the other day. And they were there. I mean, I don't know how they didn't get from hurting their feet, but they were slamming into each other with their wheelchairs. They both had power wheelchairs.

And I thought, "Man, how beyond almost subhuman they were acting." And I thought, "Where would I be if I had no none of the church people who'd come visit me or cared about me, not even my family, if I had nobody?" And the others there, they were kind of jealous of me. My brothers and youth guys, sometimes in the middle of the week, they'd knock off work early. And they'd jump in a rig and drive three hours up there and hang out with me for my sister was there with me, hang out with us for a few hours, head back home, three hours back home. I used to spend six hours on the road just to be there for two hours.

Weekends, it was always full. My room always smelled like good food instead of the fake hospital stuff. And people would go by. And they'd come in. And I always left the door open. And people were in and out all the time. And it just kind of sunk in how fortunate I was with the family I had and the church that I had.

I'll stop here pretty quick. And we'll finish up tomorrow.

It was also with that facility that they hooked me up with a lot of good resources, with a place that would modify a vehicle for me. I ended up getting a truck modified so that I could drive with hand controls.

They also wanted me to go to school and get a degree and get an office job. And I just told them, "Man, I'm not an office guy." My dad and brothers and I had a logging business. And we do sawmilling too now. Back then, it was just logging.

And I told them I wanted to work in the woods. They thought I was kind of crazy. And I told them I really want to work with my family again. And so they told me about a guy that had modified an excavator. He was a quadriplegic, similar with a similar injury to mine.

And so through that, we went and visited him and kind of went off the way he had modified his excavator to modify one of our pieces of logging equipment so that I could run it. Tomorrow night, I guess, I'll talk about getting back to work and driving again and some of the lessons that God taught me through being paralyzed, how God helped me get used to and being okay with being in a wheelchair.

Maybe just to be honest, I'm hating the wheelchair, hating being in a wheelchair, but being okay with it and seeing some of the benefits or blessings or maybe things that God spared me from. And then also a few more miracles that God's done for me since then. And if you haven't got one of those brochures, there's brochures in the back. They have some pictures of the knuckle boom loader I run.

I can work in the woods processing trees and stuff with my brothers again. So I think I'll stop with that. And we'll see you all again tomorrow night, I guess. And get your questions ready tomorrow night. I'll open up for questions at the end. And don't worry. You'll get to hear more from Carrie by then. So I won't do all the talking tomorrow night, so.