Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993 TAG: 9307220218
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. RUANE KNIGHT-RIDDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Things were busy, and Huber, 43, thought, "Well, if he needs to see me, why doesn't he come over and see me?" Outside, Huber found an agitated man sitting in a brown pickup truck. Huber thought he might be drunk, and paused.
Then the man held up his left leg. It was all bloody. There was a tourniquet around it. And from just below the knee, it was gone. "Help me," the man said, "I'm bleeding to death."
The man was Donald Wyman, 37, a construction worker, and he had just been forced to carve off half his leg with the 7-inch blade of a pocket knife when the limb was crushed and pinned by a tree trunk.
He had made a tourniquet from a shoelace and a power-saw wrench. He had dragged himself back up a hill to his bulldozer - leaving a trail like a wounded deer, rescue workers would say later. He had somehow maneuvered the bulldozer several hundred yards to his pickup, which he had then driven 1\ miles to Huber's farm.
When Wyman sat pleading for help about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday in Huber's rural Jefferson County driveway, about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, he still was only part way through his extraordinary ordeal.
What followed was a frantic, life-and-death scramble involving Huber; the hemorrhaging Wyman, who drew firefighters a map back to the accident site; and a race to retrieve the limb, which remained pinned beneath the tree, still clad in a length of ragged blue jeans and a laced-up, steel-toed work boot.
In the end, Wyman, of New Bethlehem, Pa., would survive. He was upgraded from serious to fair condition Wednesday in Punxsutawney Area Hospital. Leg reattachments are rare, and hospital spokesman Hank Wilson said that for the time being, Wyman's family wanted no information released on whether the leg had been saved.
But Huber, a deeply religious man who wept in a telephone interview Wednesday in recounting the story, said one thing was certain: "It was a miracle before my eyes. The man should have been dead."
The incident apparently began sometime around 4 p.m. when Wyman was clearing land near a strip mine in a remote area about 10 miles northwest of Punxsutawney. Huber said Wyman told him he was trying to cut free a large, uprooted tree when somehow the trunk suddenly lurched, smashing and trapping his leg.
The injury appeared to have been a compound fracture, a fire official said later, in which there was bleeding and pierced skin. Wyman told Huber that he tried unsuccessfully to dig his leg out and screamed in vain for help for about an hour.
"He said he lay there and yelled and yelled and no one heard him," Huber said.
Finally, fearing he would bleed to death, he fashioned a tourniquet and began to amputate his leg with his pocket knife. And though the bone already was broken, Wyman still had to cut through skin, muscle, tendon, nerve and blood vessels.
"I can hardly believe it," said Randall W. Culp, a microvascular surgeon at the Hand Rehabilitation Center of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. Wyman ought to have passed out, Culp said, although he may have been helped by numbness from the tourniquet or from damage caused by the injury.
Once free, Wyman still had to go for help.
Holding the tourniquet tight with one hand, he told Huber he crawled 40 yards up a hill to his bulldozer and dragged himself inside.
He drove the bulldozer to the truck and then, despite the manual transmission, managed to drive the truck down a rutted road to Huber's farm.
Huber said he spoke briefly with Wyman and rushed inside to call an ambulance. "While I was in here, I could hear him still screaming with the door shut on the house," Huber said.
Wyman was in such bad shape that it was arranged to meet the ambulance, rather than wait for it. Huber went to the truck, and Wyman slid into the passenger's seat. "There was blood all over the floor," Huber said. "It was running out of the floorboards onto the ground."
As Huber raced away, he asked Wyman, "How good are the brakes on your truck?" Wyman replied: "Sometimes you have to stand on them." Huber apparently did not use the brakes enough, for at one point Wyman asked him to slow down.
"A lot of fear tried to step in on me," Huber said. "I am a Christian. I just handed it over to God and I said, `God, you have to take control.' "
As they raced for the ambulance rendezvous, Wyman said, "I think I'm going to pass out." Huber said he thought: "Dear Lord, not now."
Then Wyman said: "I'm going to tell you a story. I have to talk to you because I don't want to pass out."
Wyman then told all that had happened to him in the accident. When he finished, Huber got worried. "I can't let this man quit talking or he is going into shock," he thought. So Huber asked about his family and Wyman talked about his 17-year-old son, who was interested in law school, until finally they met the rescue crews.
As the ambulance prepared to take Wyman to the hospital, rescuers wanted to retrieve the leg for possible reattachment. But how would they find it?
Wyman, in a further remarkable deed, sat in the pickup and, with paper and pencil, drew a detailed map that led back to the accident scene.
"His description was perfect," said Oliver Township volunteer firefighter Shawn Palmer, 18, who helped lead a party back to the site. "I could tell where everything was."
Palmer said he, Huber and Assistant Fire Chief Christopher Lento found the tree and freed the leg. Palmer said he removed what remained of the jeans and packed the limb in a plastic bag with gauze, saline solution and some ice he believed had come from someone's refrigerator.
He said he then sprinted from the woods to their car, holding the limb before him with both hands: "I have to get this damn thing out of there if the guy's going to have a chance to have his leg back," he said he thought.
Palmer said he rushed the leg to the hospital and handed it over to waiting doctors.
When it was over, people were sobered and amazed.
"Incredible," said Culp, the Jefferson hospital physician. "I have heard of animals doing this, of chewing their legs off to get out of a trap. But I haven't heard of humans doing it."
Said Huber: "The man should have literally been dead. He should have bled to death. He should have gone into shock."
But Donald Wyman didn't.
"I think," Huber said, "God's hand was on him."
by CNB