Bill

One of those days, I think it was when my oldest daughter was about six and at that time, she was shooting with us, she had her own firearm by that age. My youngest daughter hadn’t been with us on that trip. I went out shooting with my father-in-law and a good friend at work at HP. We had taken four or five firearms out shooting trap, off of an old logging road. There’s a lot of places around here to go. 

I guess I should point out I’m a hunter as well. But not since the gunsmithing has really taken over, because during hunting season I tend to be fixing everybody else’s rifles and shotguns, so I don’t get out that often anymore. 

But after returning from that day trip on Memorial Day 22 years ago I came home and put the required piece of wood down on the coffee table so I wouldn’t get thrashed for it by my wife and started cleaning guns so I could sit there and watch TV with her and the kids. I had gotten through I think it was four or five firearms that I had taken and my oldest daughter had taken them back to the gun safe and locked them up for me. 

And the one firearm that I had left out was a five shot snub-nosed .38 special revolver that my wife at the time often carried in her purse—she has a concealed carry license—if she was going out to the store after dark or anything else like that. And as such, I had reloaded it so that I could put that in the bedroom up where the kids couldn’t get it and she could reach it later. I happened to glance down at it and noticed an oily thumbprint on a highly polished blue beautiful flawless five shot cylinder and said, “we can’t have that oily print.” 

So, I reached down, and I picked up the pistol with all due safety in mind. I guess I should have had a pistol here for an example. My finger was not on the trigger. It was a double action revolver. It was not cocked. And I wiped the hammer with a rag, or not the hammer. I wiped the cylinder with a rag and somehow it snagged on the hammer. I don’t even remember exactly how it happened. Pulled the hammer partway back and then released it while my hand was right here. 

And it blew a hole. You can see the scar right here and especially right here. Blew a hole through my hand. On the backside you could have dropped a silver dollar in it. And I was looking right through my hand instantly. I looked over at my wife kind of surprised and she looked at me kind of surprised and she goes, “What the hell did you just do?” I said, “I don’t know, get me a towel.” And she said … it’s funny now in hindsight. And she said, “But your finger wasn’t on the trigger and I said, “I know.” 

So yeah, the aftereffects. The immediate aftereffects of the injury obviously were worse than anything. I mean when that type of injury happens, first of all, the first immediate impact is, “holy hell that hurts.” I don’t care how small of a bone gets hit by the smallest bullet, a .38 is not a high-powered firearm and the fifth metacarpal in your right hand is not a very big bone. If you didn’t know already, Hollywood is full of bull. It does not take much to throw you into shock. I have been severely injured in my life before then and after then. But I can tell you, that amount of energy going through your body is enough to shut you down really quick. 

I was very fortunate my neighbor across the street at the time was a Navy ROTC OSU student and he was about twice my size and we used to throw the Navy and Marine Corps jokes around, but I have the utmost respect for him especially now today because when he saw me collapse on my way out to my Suburban in the driveway while my wife was getting the kids rounded up, he picked me up and put me in there and just … I don’t know how much time passed but I can tell you it was probably only 20 or 30 seconds from the time I wrapped a clean dishtowel around my hand and said I’ll see you in the Suburban and I don’t remember a whole lot from then. In fact, my wife at the time told me that I passed out some three or four different times between our house and Albany General Hospital. We lived in Albany at that time when that happened and that’s not even a mile-and-a-half. 

I still have the pins that were in my hand. I still have the plate, the screws, the bullet. I still have the empty shell. One of my kids trying to be nice for me for Father’s Day one year, washed that rag so there’s no blood on it anymore, but I never told her that I was disappointed. But when you look at that rag, you can clearly see where the muzzle was. It blew a big old hole in it. And just the right distance away, you can also see a very defined snag where the checkering on the top of the hammer, to keep your thumb from slipping off of it, had actually been pulled by the rag. I still have all that stuff. Emotionally I’m not embarrassed about it. But like I said, I’m kind of a unique case where I wasn’t really violating one of the cardinal rules of gun safety. But you can’t cover everything anyway because if you have too many cardinal rules of gun safety, people will only focus on the top two. So, you can’t say, “Oh and by the way, with revolvers and clothing and cloth and rags and gloves, there’s this danger too.”

The pain was utterly excruciating. The problem is the human body is a great transmitter of energy. And even having only impacted that small bone and what I know about internal and external ballistics and firearms, I probably only transferred maybe 15% of the total energy and velocity of the bullet to that bone before it just broke through and continued on. We found it under the carpet days later. I still have it. It’s a reminder, what happened. But that energy travels through all your tissues. And my entire arm was aching like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I felt like I was holding it out on the freeway when an 18-wheeler came by. That’s what it felt like. 
 
The physical aspects of it are very obvious. Mine were, for the most part, short-term not long-term. I don’t really have a lot of pain in that hand. I do in another hand that was injured in service. I’ve got them both now. Does it affect me in my daily work at HP? No. Probably not so much in gunsmithing. It’s subtle enough now, after recovery, that after many surgeries by some really, really great medical professionals, that I’m really not hampered by it much. But I expect to have a lot of arthritis in it in another 10 or 15 years. There’s a timeframe after a severe injury like that. You can almost predict when the winter joint pain especially in Oregon is going to start to get you.   

And it was so absolutely painful having that bone graft taken from the rim of my pelvis. Apparently, there’s a lot of nerves in that bone. And I don’t think that’s anything they taught me in biology in high school, that was the last course in biology I had. Nerves in bones? Who would have known? Well, I know. I couldn’t drive I think for three or four months. I had to walk with a cane because it was so painful because those muscles and tendons and ligaments are constantly moving across there. The reason I couldn’t drive is because if I sneezed or coughed, that compression caused so much pain, I would pass out while I was driving. So, I was actually restricted from… yeah, it was pretty bad, I can tell you.

And this plays into the story pretty interesting because one of my favorite things were the jalapeño poppers at Arby’s. And they have the Bronco berry sauce which his awesome for a commercial sauce. I’d rather make my own. But hey, when you're just getting out of the hospital for a couple days and your hand is completely useless and wrapped up, you take what you can get.  

But I was so proud I wouldn’t even ask my wife to open… how you gonna do that? Right. And I actually had a complete and utter mental collapse, a meltdown in Arby’s because I couldn’t do something so simple. So stupidly simple. I don’t think I was really in a place in my head where I was thinking ahead going, “Oh my god, am I ever going to be able to work in my woodshop again? Am I ever going to be able to weld again?” No. I was totally focused on the stupid Bronco berry sauce. 

As far as where I think the danger to a person can come in is more the emotional and mental aftereffects depending on what that injury was like. And that was something I really wanted to mention and focus on because this was not life-threatening. Not with modern healthcare and I had good healthcare insurance when it happened and even if I didn’t, I would have been well cared for. I wasn’t under VA care at the time. I wasn’t going to die from this. I was probably going to continue on in my job at HP and I was going to have to learn a new way of typing, you know, missing one digit.  

The real danger I think is in that realization that your life has just changed because of something stupid that should not have happened. And if I had been in a different situation or different environment or different place in my life when that mental breakdown at Arby’s over the Bronco berry sauce lid that I couldn’t peel off, it could have been a lot more dangerous for me and for somebody else.  

The biggest thing not to overlook. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. The physical injury is very easy to focus on. But the mental affect, especially if you put in a little bit of embarrassment, if it was an accident that could have been prevented, it can really send you into a dark place. Now I have to hide this for the rest of my life. Who do I admit this to? Who do I tell … you know just get past that.  

A lot of people don’t ever consider the fact that there’s going to be emotional consequences for an injury like that. And that's what you have to be watching for. And I think that’s a… again I’m going to say this lest I repeat myself. That’s a part of this that I think really needs to be focused on. No matter how minor the injury is, there's an emotional aspect to that recovery. And when you look at things in terms of minor injuries, the x-ray I showed you, it’s a pretty damn minor injury. But it had huge consequences, potentially to me and my emotional health, because of how much I rely on my hands.

The only two guns in the house at that time was his old rifle from WWII which he was able to bring home and that he used for deer and pig hunting and his service pistol. The rifle he didn’t keep locked up but he didn’t have any ammo around so as a young kid I had discovered it and never told him. And he had shown me his pistol and let me shoot it a couple times when we were out in the woods. Other than that, I didn’t really grow up around guns. I knew families that did. But it wasn’t really the ultimate evil as I was growing up either. 

We did do target shooting when I was a boy scout. So, you know maybe once or twice a year I would go do something and I think when I got older into my mid-teens, I had some friends that used to go trap shooting, you know shooting clay pigeons, and I would go with them once or twice a year. So, it was infrequent, but I wouldn’t say to the point where I grew up around guns, you know. There weren’t five or six guns in a safe in the house you know, kind of thing. But I knew people that did.  

Yeah. I spent four years active duty in the Marine Corps during the Cold War, in the mid-80s, and then four years in the reserves. I’ve always been an active shooter even when I was in the Marine Corps. I owned personal firearms and some of the guys in my unit, we would go out to the high desert in southern California and go shooting. See who could get through an engine block of an old, abandoned car or whatever.  
 
I think I gained a little bit more interest in firearms and realized just how fun they were. Going to qualify at the range all day long was a pain in the butt. But you kind of miss it after a while. It’s kind of hard to explain. And I think that’s what drew me out to the first gun store while I was on active duty, and I think by the time I got off active duty I probably owned four or five handguns. And that just carried on. And I think that was probably part of what kind of formed me and my interest in life around firearms. 

I think for me, and I would say my wife as well, I think what we enjoy the most about firearms today is not necessarily so much the recreational or hunting aspect or the second amendment aspect or anything else like that, I think those are all smaller factors in various sizes. For me and my wife today, and it’s probably evidence of our age, I think the historic aspect of firearms and holding a piece of history in your hand like that, wishing it could tell a story and, you know, you have scenes of Saving Private Ryan or whatever war movie in your head as you're holding onto and M1, or something like that. 
 
For me the opportunity, when I come across a historic firearm opportunity, the chance to save that piece of history and pass that on to my kids is not only important to myself and my wife but also our four children. They all have an interest in that. They all know the history of these things. And it’s just incredibly satisfying to be able to take something like that out to the range and don’t relegate it to history, you know let it continue to live in our time

As I had kids, I wanted to introduce them to firearms at a very early age, my two girls, because my experience had shown me that children that are not taught that they’re evil from day one and stay away, stay away, they’re scary, tend to have that curiosity that’s driven by something they don’t even understand. So, my girls started shooting at least going out with us when we went recreational shooting at a very young age so that they would understand the destructive power, the scary noise and all that. Not to customize them to it but to teach them to respect it.

I have never been personally faced with a healthcare provider asking that question. I think in general it’s wrong. You’re prying into somebody’s personal life. And in most cases, it has no bearing on their healthcare, the reason they’re in there for that reason. But there’s always going to be those cases, always going to be those cases where there’s going to be a person that’s at risk, that they’re having some kind of mental crisis for whatever reason and that might be important information.

I also have to give a great deal of credit to my hand surgeon and my physical therapist. They were very encouraging. They did so in a manner that was not just clinical. You know I wasn’t just a patient. I wasn’t just a paycheck, you know. And I think they both appreciated my progress because a lot of people don’t put that much effort into their own recovery.

But let this be a message to anybody in the medical field, doctors, nurses, therapists, pharmacists, if you treat that person like a person and they actually understand that you do have a lot of positive thoughts towards their wellbeing and that it matters, I think that means as much for recovery. I think after my first surgery, I probably would have recovered with some disability and a lot of pain for the rest of my life, but I was going to go on. I was encouraged to go farther and to push farther and to even just desire more. And it was in large part by those absolutely great human beings that also just happen to be a physical therapist and a great hand surgeon.