Ste. Rose DU LAC, Man. – Next time you put on an old worn pair of work gloves, take a close look at the finger where your pinky goes.
If there’s a little dangling piece of leather hanging loose, think of Eldon Schroeder.
That, and a careless moment while he was operating a p.t.o.-powered rolling mill, are the reasons that the Ochre River-area rancher lost his thumb and all the fingers on his left hand.
On Oct. 24 last year, Schroeder was rolling grain, a common fall chore.
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“I do the same thing every time I roll grain. I’ve done it thousands of times,” he said.
“After I finish, I take the magnet out of the bottom, and hit the sides of the hopper to get all the chaff down and clean it out.”
But this time was different. This time he was wearing a worn out pair of gloves. On the little finger was a flap of leather that hung down a centimetre or so.
“When I went to reach for the magnet, the rollers caught it,” he said. “If I hadn’t had that stinkin’ glove on, it would never have happened.”
When his hand went into the rollers, Schroeder said that he felt no pain at first. He just heard the sound of crunching bones.
“I heard it before I felt it. I didn’t know what happened at first,” he said.
The angle of his body and shoulder against the hopper may have stopped him from being sucked completely into the machine, and his hand stalled one of the rollers. Within seconds, he was able to use the magnet to flip the drive belt off its pulley. The other roller, direct-driven from the tractor’s p.t.o., was still spinning.
“I wasn’t going to be able to stop that thing. It was running at about 1,600-1,800 r.p.m.s.”
With his hand still trapped in the roaring machine, he managed with his one free hand to dial his wife, Nina, on the cellular phone he was carrying.
“I phoned the house, and my wife was in the house. I told her to get out here quick. She knew I was in trouble.”
As soon as his wife arrived, she stopped the tractor, and then called for help.
“After that, it was all clockwork.”
The first call went out at 5:40 p.m., and by 5:55 the ambulance had travelled the 10 kilometres from town to their yard, along with the fire truck and rescue wagon. His brother brought the wrenches that Schroeder said he would need to loosen the rollers so his hand could be freed.
Oddly enough, said Schroeder, he hardly lost any blood in the whole incident.
A doctor told him that if the friction heat from the spinning rollers hadn’t cauterized the major veins and arteries carrying blood to his hand, he likely wouldn’t have survived long enough for help to arrive.
Immediately after the accident, Schroeder didn’t look at the injury. He just took the doctor’s word for it that his hand was “badly crushed.” He only remembers seeing a pile of amputated fingers in the operating room.
“The skin was just holding the bones together, and that was about it,” he said. “They had to amputate an awful lot away.”
A week later, doctors at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre removed his big toe and attached it to his hand so he would still have an opposable digit to grasp with. They also suggested removing more toes to create a “hand,” but because of the extreme pain involved in the first operation, Schroeder is still considering whether to go through with it.
After the surgery, he was in a wheelchair for six weeks because he couldn’t put any weight on the foot where the toe had been taken off.
Although the feeling is coming back to his new thumb, and he can wiggle it a bit, Schroeder still suffers pain. A 20 cm incision scar on his arm shows where the nerve was stitched in. He still wears a sleeve over his right forearm where a large patch of skin was taken off to replace the skin on his palm.
“As the nerves regenerate, I’m getting an awful lot of shocks. Sometimes I just about yell like a dog that’s touched an electric fence,” he said.
“You know the pain when you hit your funny bone, and how it feels when your hand falls asleep? If you mix it all up together, that’s what it felt like 24 hours day. Sometimes, now, it goes away a bit.”
As for phantom pain, common when losing a limb, Schroeder said that somehow his brain has figured out that the toe has been grafted on in a new location.
His doctor was skeptical that the surgery would be successful, he said, mainly because the damage to his hand was so horrific that most of the tissue had to be amputated, leaving little to work with.
Since the accident, according to rural custom, friends and neigh-bours have come over to visit and offer their help. Now, months later, Schroeder is still recovering from the accident and the surgery. He is trying to get his old job back of driving the school bus and has passed all of the required tests.
The experience separated the true friends from mere acquaintances, he said. In the weeks after the accident, some of the people he once thought of as good friends disappeared.
Others, whom he felt he hardly knew, offered to help with chores. At times there were so many that he “nearly had to chase them away with a stick,” he said.
“One fellow, every time he came over, he had tears in his eyes. I finally asked him what the problem was,” said Schroeder.
“He said, ‘two weeks before you got caught, I was rolling grain and there were some stones caught between the rollers. I had my fingers in between the rollers, catching the stones. That should be me laying there.’ “
If any good comes from his experience, Schroeder hopes that other farmers who hear his story will slow down, take a second look at what they are doing and make sure that they and their families work in a safe manner.
“I was told after the accident that every neighbour for miles around spent I don’t know how many days putting the shields and guards back on their tractors,” he said with a laugh.
“It was a wake-up call for everybody. Nobody can say that they haven’t had a close call.”
He found the glove later in the cab of the truck, he added. It had just a spot of blood on it, about the size of a wood tick. He threw it away because it conjured up too many painful memories.
“I should have kept that glove,” he said.
