Bob Darby and his family had the best Christmas they’ve ever had this year.
Not because he found a new computer under the Christmas tree. And tools to replace his tools that were stolen.
Not even because he got a new fishing rod.
All those things are a sign of the confidence he and Trudy and their daughter, Melissa, feel about his future.
They know he’s going back to work again and that the computer will help him get ready for a new job at the same old place. And he’ll use those tools and go fishing.
But it was the best Christmas for the best reason.
Bob Darby is alive.
And a single moment last summer, he says, “made us realize how precious life is and how quick it could be gone.”
In that moment — at 5 p.m. Monday, July 10 — he says, “my whole life changed —and it’s unbelievable.”
He was on a forklift at Johnson Concrete, dismantling a hoist system inside a tall building, when the forklift tilted.
He fell 20 feet to the floor and another 6 feet inside a concrete pit where machinery had been removed, and the forklift pinned him into the hole.
No one believed he could live.
But he did.
And when the holidays got here and Trudy helped him struggle into his Santa Claus suit so he could ho-ho-ho again at Autumn Care nursing home, the miracle of life hit every one on the staff.
“When he came in, ooooh!” says Autumn Care administrator Gus Flaska, struck by the emotion of last summer all over again, “all of us were on the edge of tears.”
Trudy is office manager at Autumn Care. Melissa works in medical records. And Bob has been their Santa for five years.
The accident “sent a shiver and a shock all through our staff,” Gus says.
And when they saw him walk in as Santa, “all our hearts were racing! That’s what we prayed for. We all prayed for him when it happened.”
Prayed for him and for Trudy and Melissa during all those days when life was so uncertain, when no one knew what was going to happen.
“But one morning, we held hands and prayed that he would come and be our Santa again, and when he came ... “
Well, nothing can measure that emotion or the intensity of Bob’s own memory of the accident.
Weight shifted
Bob Darby, 42, and Neil Raymer, 19, were about 20 feet in the air, using a forklift being driven by Marshall Lindsey as a platform to take down a hoist no longer being used.
“We had taken it loose,” Bob says, “but the weight must have shifted, and the forklift and everything just laid over on its side.”
He plummeted into the pit, and the forklift pinned him in.
“If that hole hadn’t been there,” he says now, “I would’ve been dead. The forklift would have crushed me. The thing I remember is I said, ‘Lord, don’t let me die,’ and I knew I wasn’t going to die.”
“They said I was grabbing for everything. ... Finally I landed on my back. I quit breathing because I had swallowed my tongue. A boy got my tongue out and I started breathing.”
Later, he says, “I talked to my friend who pulled my tongue out. He’d been scared to do it because he thought I would bite him.”
And now Bob can laugh about it.
“I couldn’t bite him,” he says. “I didn’t have my teeth in. They were home in a cup.”
But he wasn’t laughing then. Or comprehending much. He remembers Rescue Squad people working with him while he drifted in and out of consciousness.
Where were they taking him? he asked.
To the VA Medical Center’s helicopter pad, they told him.
“I’ve been scared of flying all my life. I had never flown,” he said, so with that news, “I went out again. I remember waking up one time, but I was too scared to open my eyes. Next thing I was in the hospital, and they told my wife they didn’t think I’d make it.”
New home
She remembers it all as vividly as he does.
“We had just bought 2 acres of land and ordered a new double-wide,” she says, “and I had started vacation. It was the first day. I was at church to get set up for Bible school to start that night,” because she was in charge of it, and she planned to pack that week so they could move.
But her daughter called and told her she needed to call Johnson Concrete.
She called. There’d been an accident. Bob was involved.
“But they didn’t tell me he was being airlifted to Winston-Salem because they didn’t know.”
Longest trip ever
Getting to Salisbury, she says, was the longest trip she ever took.
“It was 5 o’clock, and I couldn’t get anyone to move.”
Now Bob can laugh at that, too.
“She was having that road rage,” he says.
But nothing was funny that night. Once she got to Baptist Medical Center, she didn’t get in to see him for four hours.
“And that was after I said, ‘You will take me back or I will go back.’ The whole waiting room was full — family, people from Johnson Concrete and a ton of people from our church, probably 18 people. Maybe more.”
“God’s been good to me,” Bob says, listening to his wife and repeating a certainty that’s become an oft-repeated refrain. “I had a lot happen to me in those few seconds.”
And after.
He was at Baptist Medical Center nine days instead of the month doctors expected, “flat on his back from Monday to Thursday,” Trudy says. “Then Saturday, they got him up.”
But on Aug. 14, after he’d been home a couple of weeks, on a Friday evening, he started having real bad pains, Trudy says, and on Monday they went to the hospital.
“We thought maybe he had moved some ribs, but we went to Rowan Regional Medical Center, and he had passed two blood clots through his heart and into the lung.
“His doctor said he had stood by the bed of people in the hospital and they threw clots, and he not been able to save them.
“Bob should not have made it through either, but someone else was looking after him.”
Back home at last
Bob lived. He stayed at Rowan Regional for two weeks and finally got home again by the end of August and was ready to start rehabilitation. That went quickly, too, considering what had happened to him.
“I had a lot of damage to my body,” he says. A big indentation in his left thigh, three broken ribs, a big gash in his right foot (“It ripped my boot off my foot and never tore my boot.”), a fractured skull and a 0.5 centimeter brain shift from left to right (“Sometimes I still have trouble with my short term memory.”), problems in both shoulders, “and I broke my back.”
Both he and Trudy can laugh when he gets to that broken back at the bottom of that incredible list.
But they don’t laugh long.
“I’m not able to work,” he says, and the question is will he ever be able to?
“Not at what he did then,” Trudy says. He was the maintenance department at Johnston Concrete, taking care of what had to be taken care of inside the building and out, as well as vehicles and anything else that needed upkeep.
He couldn’t do all that now because of his back.
“He’s got two rods and 10 steel bolts with steel plates on top of them in his back,” Trudy says. “He broke two vertebrae.”
“The surgeon who did my back surgery couldn’t believe I was walking,” Bob says, when he saw him after leaving rehab. “He thought I’d come back in a wheelchair.”
Hoping to return to work
Bob’s size — 6 foot 1 inch and 350 pounds — is just right for Santa Claus but not so good for recovery, and it’s hard to lose weight when the only exercise he can do is walk and not much of that before he tires.
Right now, he’s on Workman’s Compensation and will be as long as he’s under doctor’s orders. But Johnson Concrete hopes to have him back at work, says executive vice president Charles Newsome.
“We’ve cleared the OSHA part of it,” Newsome says, but the company is without Robert Darby, “and he’s a good employee.”
Newsome said he doesn’t expect Bob to ever be able to do exactly what he did, but modernization was taking place at the plant when the accident occurred, “and I think we have a job he can do. We think we can train him to do that.
“The company helped him with his new house, putting the shingles on the roof on his porch, giving him money, prayers, sent cards.
“We’ve been trying to follow him real close to get him back to work as soon as we can get him back. He’s a good man and we need him.”
Two citations
Ernest Jackson, manager of safety and human resources,says OSHA — Occupational Safety and Health Administration — did an inspection which took about a month last July. As a result, the company received two citations “that never amounted to much.”
One was negotiated down from an original $1,050 to $700 for four violations dealing with scaffolding problems, according to Greg Cook, spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Labor, because the OSHA supervisor is satisfied the company is addressing the problems in good faith.
The other was for $500 because Marshall Lindsey, who was operating the forklift, was not wearing a seat belt.
What happened, Jackson explains, was the piece of equipment being moved was too heavy for the forklift, so the forklift turned over when a handrail was removed.
Raymer jumped, grabbing a beam. As the forklift turned, it hit him, and he fell to the floor, spent the night in the hospital and returned to work the following Monday.
Bob went down with the forklift, falling through girders, beams and a mass of twisted metal below floor level into an open pit where machinery had already been moved, Jackson says.
But OSHA and company officials agreed, bodily injury would have been worse if the company had been in compliance. Fall protection is supposed to be attached to the basket in which Bob was riding.
“When the forklift started turning over, the basket straddled a girder,” Jackson says, “and would have thrown him head first into that girder.
“Both OSHA representatives and company officials wouldn’t put it in a report but had that old attitude: ‘You should have been doing it right, but we’re glad you didn’t.’ ”
And Jackson admits he doesn’t know who was watching over them.
“It was busy,” he says, “and late in the day, and they wanted to get this piece of equipment down,” and it happened, and they lived.
God was watching
Bob and Trudy Darby feel like they know exactly who was watching.
“We realize,” Trudy says, “that the reason he has come as far as he had the grace of God.”
Bob is sure prayer made everything go so fast.
“People from my church were there about every day,” he says. There, praying, helping.
The Rev. Clayton Palmer Jr., pastor of their church, brought his recliner from home to church, “and it stayed in the sanctuary,” Trudy says, “for about two months so Bob could have it during services.”
And Bob points to all the people who helped them.
His double-wide had that unfinished 80-foot concrete porch.
Friends from the church and from work did it for him, and the management team from Autumn Care went to the house and cooked for those doing the work.
“And they never charged me a penny,” Bob says. “They said they did it because, ‘We love you.’ ”
He chokes up when he says that.
“I cry a lot now,” he says, “because I think I could have died. One person took care of me and watched me all the way through, and that’s my wife. Without her, I don’t think I would have made it.”
Or without all the other people who visited and prayed.
One buddy at work told him he didn’t believe much in prayer, “but after seeing you, I know there’s a God.” A fireman who answered the emergency dropped to his knees and prayed after the ambulance left with Bob.
Long way to go
Maybe in another six months, he’ll be going back to work for light duty.
“I’ve got a long ways to go,” he says, “but eventually I’m going to get there.”
Trudy has not only consoled him and taken care of him, he says, “but she’s got to do a lot of things I can’t do right now.”
Going to the grocery store, they argue.
“What can I carry, honey?” he asks.
“You can’t carry nothing,” she says. “Not yet.”
And that tears him up.
But now she’s more comfortable leaving him.
He spends his time watching television, reading his Bible, playing Nintendo. And he was able to put their Christmas train village together sitting in a chair — and show it off to all the people who come to see it. And periodically, he walks to the mailbox and back.
And looks at the cards he got.
“We got cards on top of cards on top of cards, just from everybody, and I’ve heard, ‘Our church prayed for you,’ from people in four counties,” he says.
“And to look at him now compared to what I looked at that night is amazing,” Trudy says. “We know God kept him alive.”
And what could make a better Christmas gift than life itself?
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