by J. Scott Davis
29 MAY 2008

My information below is a prime example of the benefits of maintaining your physical fitness, as well as, what your body can do if you set your mind to it.  It’s my story of recovery from a injury so severe, it nearly cost me my life.  It was God’s will that I be spared.

During the time that I was in high school, but during summer vacation, I was employed as a construction worker.  Simultaneously, I was training for my senior year of high school and the possibility of being our school’s starting shooting guard on the varsity basketball team.  One eventful day while we were returning from the worksite in a dump trunk that I was a passenger in, the driver failed to navigate a left turn and drove the truck into a telephone pole.  The point of impact was directly were I was sitting in the cab.  With my left hand crossed over and resting on the window, the telephone pole crushed,  ripped and severed off my hand and fingers.  It was dangling by the skin in a mangled mess.  The crash also broke my neck (C5 vertabrae) and in a  more serious injury than various other victims that are paralyzed.  I was fortunate that the broken bone fragments in my neck didn’t penetrate my spine to cause paralysis.  Other injuries included a head concussion and a blow to the right elbow that made it swell up enormously (but rapidly shrunk and was never a further issue).

The story is just beginning!  My left hand was so severely injured, that doctors rushed me into emergency surgery to amputate it.  The first miracle here occurred and somehow the surgeons were able to return the blood flow to the hand and saved it from amputation.  They inserted pins into the fingers as they pieced my hand back together like a puzzle (I’ll be forever grateful to the doctors who risked their own safety by placing their own hands under radiation to perform this task).  I eventually lost only the very tip of my index finger and the nail of my middle finger.  A brace was placed around my neck.  In addition, they performed a second surgery approximately one week after the accident.

At around the time that I was discharged from the hospital 2 weeks later (another miracle in itself), the doctor informed me that I would never move my hand again and that it would remain in it’s curled position.  While Doc was correct in his prognosis under normal circumstances, I would not accept that.  When I unwrapped the hand at home, there was nothing there, but a shriveled, stitched together mess that one would think would never heal.   I worked diligently at home rehabilitating the injury and paid regular visits to a physical therapist.  Submitting to the pain was not an option and I even refused to take the painkillers that I was prescribed.

In a situation where a physician, who is a hand specialist (and a former military doctor), informs you that you have the worst hand injury that he’s ever seen, that means something.  Well, to keep a long story short, my recovery was beyond belief and imagination.  I got the hand moving again to almost complete use AND WAS IN THE OPENING DAY LINE-UP FOR THE SEASON OPENER OF MY HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL TEAM only 3 1/2 months later.  UNBELIEVABLE!  I even scored late game clutch free throws to ice the victory.

I played the entire season through some pain and was the 4th highest scorer on the team.  I learned later during the following summer that 2 locations on the hand of my middle finger had not healed completely.  Shortly over one year after the accident and of course after basketball season, I had the 3rd and final of my surgeries in where they fused the bones together with bone fragments from my left hip.

Since then down through the years, I’ve participated in athletics fully, spent 6 years as an ocean beach lifeguard and served a hitch in the United States Navy as a Gunner’s Mate and  Rescue Swimmer (to include participating in the Persian Gulf War).  My superior physical conditioning enabled me to hold military leadership positions where I trained both enlisted and commissioned personnel.  

What is the moral of the story?  If you maintain a consistent training routine supplemented with a healthy diet, your body will do things that you never believed possible!  It’s like “mind over matter!”