A little over five years ago he was big, strong, and seemed as nothing could hurt him. Then the end began; first the car wreck, then the surgeries, and then an additional accident. My grandpa was one of the strongest men I knew. He was also one of the biggest influences in my life, the man that made me who I am today. He taught me almost everything I know. We had been working on and restoring tractors together since I was just big enough to bring him tools. I had gone to work and rode on equipment with him from about the time I was a year old.
I was with him almost every day till I started school and pretty live with him and my grandma in the summers. My grandpa had a really bad truck accident almost five years ago driving back from Persal in his company truck loaded down with tools and fuel, when the left front tire blew out and sent him across the rode into the ditch. He hit the ditch ding almost doing close to seventy miles per hour sending the truck on its side. The truck slid down the ditch until it hit a massive mesquite tree finally stopped it.
Soon after the entire truck was engulfed in flames, making it out just as the truck went up in flames he made it out. Luckily an off duty EMT and his wife happened to stop when they saw the flames and him on the side of the rode. Taking the shirt of his back to put pressure on the deep gashes that ran across my grandpa’s head, his wife call nine-one-one and requested life flight, where they flew him to University Hospital in San Antonio. While at the hospital he spent the next six weeks in ICU, and another 4 months in the hospital and rehab.
About six months after than he was back in the hospital with a staph infection in his lower intestine. Cause him great pain and once again hospitalizing him the doctors could not fight the infecting off. As the last and on resort his lower intestine had to be removed, where he had to go back to rehab. He just built he strength back up and was getting healthy another time my dad, a couple of my really good friends, and I were loading scrap iron on a trailer with a backhoe to haul off for my grandpa.
We were putting the last piece on the trailer, it was a tool bar from an old piece of farm equipment weighting about a thousand pounds. While loading the tool bar it slipped out of the bucket and was hung on the arm of the backhoe, so my grandpa and I were going to push it on. We just couldn’t hold it, before my dad and friends could get to us it had fallen and landed on the back of my grandpa’s neck. With pure adrenaline my dad picked the tool bar off of him.
Thirty minutes had past when the ambulance, fire department and police got there. He could not feel his feet when they put him on the stretcher preparing him for life flight for the second time they pushed him to the rode, on blocked off by the police and fire department they waited for the chopper. Ten minutes later they had arrived loading him on they took off. Again he spent several weeks in ICU with a broken neck and four, five months in the hospital and another two months in rehab.
But through everything he never gave up, he was always strong and positive, he was an inspiration to many people, he was an inspiration to me more than anything else. He was a great man, a hard worker, and if you needed it, he would give you the shirt off his back. He is the best man I know, and on September seventeenth this year he joined up with the Lord to end his suffering and pain. He will always be remembered by the ones he love, and by some he didn’t, and you knew which one you were. But all his pain is gone now and we will always have his memories, we will never forget.
