Worker on road to recovery after accident that nearly took his life.
Doug Dove has a very clear memory from the moment he first opened his eyes in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Patrick Hospital.
“I woke up laying in bed, looking at the ceiling – which was kind of like this one here,” he recalled, gesturing with one hand toward the panel ceiling in a conference room at Community Bridges, a rehabilitation center run by Community Medical Center. “And I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s wrong. There is no ceiling where I should be that looks like that.’ ”
There is no ceiling in any building that looks like the place where doctors expected Doug Dove to be today.
Less than four months ago, Doug was crushed, bleeding, pretty much dead. Now, he is walking, talking, pretty much fine.
On 3 January, Doug was working on a demolition project at the former Smurfit-Stone Container mill in Frenchtown. Nobody knows exactly what happened that day. One minute, Doug was cutting down a 300-pound vertical slab of sheet metal with an oxy-acetylene torch. The next minute, a co-worker turned around to find Doug unconscious, lying on his side, pinned and blue-faced beneath the 4-by-11-foot panel.
By sheer fortune, a team of firefighters from Frenchtown Rural Fire District was at the mill when the accident happened. It took five men to extricate Doug. When he was pulled free, he had no pulse.
An ambulance was called, and rescuers performed CPR. Doug’s heart sputtered feebly back to life.
“They got my heart rate all the way back up to 30 beats per minute,” said Doug with a wry grin. “Then, on the way to the hospital, I had the first of what turned into 10 continuous days of seizures. I’m told that in the brain world, that’s not a good place to be.”
Twenty-one days after the accident, doctors came to Doug’s wife Tammy with a choice. They could send Doug to a long-term acute care facility in Post Falls, Idaho, or they could pull his feeding tube and let him die.
Tammy agonized over the decision into the evening. Then, as if on cue, Doug began to respond. He even laughed at a joke. The following morning, he opened his eyes, locking them on his wife with what she described as “total recognition.” “Everybody was dumbfounded, and they have been ever since at his progress,” said Tammy. “I think I’m the only one who wasn’t surprised.”
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