How falling off a roof while cleaning the gutters showed me humans at their best

Résumé détaillé

The November light was clear and silver, the breeze, cool. The emptiness of winter had begun — a perfect time for cleaning gutters. It was a task I’d done for 32 years: Position…

The November light was clear and silver, the breeze, cool. The emptiness of winter had begun — a perfect time for cleaning gutters.

It was a task I’d done for 32 years: Position the ladder against the garage, climb up to that roof, and from there, continue onto the roof of our two-story house.

But on that day, when I got to the top of the ladder and put my hands on the edge of the roof to step over, I lost my balance and fell. About 25 feet. On the way down, I hit my head on the Weber grill, denting the dome, then crashed into a wheelbarrow and collapsed the struts. I landed facedown, stunned but not unconscious.

I got up and went into the house. In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. Blood crisscrossed my face. My ear was near my cheek. I put a towel against my head and called 911. I said I’d wait in the driveway.

The EMTs strapped me to a board and hooked up an IV. “You’re a lucky guy,” said one of the firefighters, staring at my wounds. Because I’d fallen so far, they decided to medevac me to the UMass Memorial Medical Center’s trauma center in Worcester. “You really got yourself good,” one of the EMTs said.

The helicopter was waiting at the town’s Haskell Field, where my daughter had pitched games when she was little. The gurney bumped along across the grass. The EMTs lifted me into the helicopter. When we got to the hospital, I was wheeled to the MRI machine, then to an operating room. I heard the doctors discuss placing a breathing tube. “I need to know if the vertebrae are OK,” someone said. They weren’t; I had cracked one.

I came to in the recovery room, a bandage wrapped around my head like a turban. My ear had been sewn in place and other wounds had been stapled closed. The scars are barely noticeable now, a tribute to the surgeons who repaired me.

I couldn’t help but think that I’d made it through Vietnam without injury, standing guard through the night at a helipad as medevacs came in and out, a machine gun on the bunker, rifle and claymore mine detonators…

Ho…

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