I made a comment on a recommended diary on faith by Vetswife that included an incident that happened to me. Her diary already had so many comments, I figured mine would be overlooked, but it wasn’t. It generated enough of a thread that I decided it was worthwhile to expand it into a diary of my own.
As I’ve stated in other diaries, I’ve either raised my own crop of tobacco or worked in others’ tobacco crops from the time I was big enough to do work up until the present. I also have a small herd of beef cattle. In April of 1988, after disking the ground for that year’s upcoming crop, the cows spotted me opening the gate to drive out of the tobacco ground and thought they saw an opportunity to venture into a fresh pasture. They wouldn’t have found any fresh grass except along the narrow, temporary electric fence margin, but they would have had a good time pawing and rubbing their heads in the worked up soil. Though little harm would have been done, I tend to react to cows rushing toward an opening I don’t want them to go through by rushing to head them off.
A freshly set tobacco patch. Temporary electric fence along edge keeps cows out.
In my haste to dismount the tractor, I failed in my intent to pull it out of gear. By the time I realized it was still in motion, I was too far along with my own dismount motion to regain my balance and sit back down. Instead, I used my right arm to vault off the fender far enough be sure I was out of the path of the trailing disk. When I landed hard on my left foot, my leg gave way. Not able to put any weight on it, I hopped to the gate on my right foot and shut it. Although the tractor was only moving at ordinary walking speed, and could be stopped with a hand on the clutch by walking along beside it, hopping on one foot to catch it was out of the question. I turned from closing the gate to see it heading for the fence bordering the road. The cows would surely walk over a flattened fence.
This picture taken at tobacco cutting time in August of 2016. Tobacco patch in 1988 was in field just beyond barn. Gate I drove through is left of barn, Gate I hopped to for switching cows is right of barn. Foreground in this picture was meadow at that time.
I hopped around to the other side of the barn and opened a gate to let the cows into a different pasture. They obliged, settling the immediate emergency of the road fence being flattened. I then hopped to the house to telephone my brother. By then the tractor was beyond my horizon but I could tell about where it was from a plume of black smoke.
My brother only lived a mile away and got down pretty quick. The tractor had entered a woods and been stopped by a tree. Only damage to it was some fraying of the tread of one tire where it had sat in place and spun against a tree root.
When my brother took me to my GP, he first told me to keep my weight off it for a while and wrap some damp towels around it. When I pointed out that the issue wasn’t pain, it simply wouldn’t accept any weight at all, he sent me on to Bowling Green, where the diagnosis was a multi-fragmented shattering of my left tibial plateau. The orthopedic surgeon who fixed it told me I might be able to go back to work within a year and would likely never regain full range of motion in that leg.
I didn’t even entirely miss that crop year. By topping time I was able to carry a backpack sprayer and the only thing I couldn't do by cutting time was climb up in the barn and straddle a tier.
Me straddling the bottom tier in my tobacco barn. Crop year 2008.
That leg didn’t regain a full range of motion, but enough not to prevent me from most sorts of normal activity. Then twenty some years later, it began going gimpy on me, but only during the winter months, including the winter of 2015. Lots of birders came out that winter to see a Harris’s Sparrow I was hosting. Harris’s Sparrows seldom winter this far east, so my bird became a celebrity. One of my visitors expressed notice of my limp. I said it would get better in the spring. I still remember his retort, “Will you be younger in the spring?” My distinct recollection of that conversation tells me my knee must have gone gimpy at least one previous winter, then improved in the spring.
It went gimpy again the following winter, and hadn’t recovered by the time my wife participated in a book fair at the Knicely Conference Center in Bowling Green, April 22 & 23 of 2016. After I walked by each exhibiter’s titles, I spent some time walking around the grounds of the conference center and the adjoining green way. Hardly any other people were walking around outside that day, but I did encounter one guy accompanied by a female and a couple of kids. He noticed my limp and asked me if I would mind if he prayed on it.
The limp wasn’t all that bad and I don’t think my face indicated any pain from it, but I thought it so odd that a stranger would notice it and ask to pray about it that I simply replied, “Help yourself.”
I don’t remember any specifics of what he said in his prayer, but from the unfazed expressions on those with him, I took it that he may have done this sort of thing before. In telling wife Alison about it, I reported that I had encountered Jesus Christ himself.
It was spring, so my knee was due to get better soon anyway. I thought nothing about it when it did. Then the winter of 2017 came and went, then the winters of 2018 and ‘19. It’s now well into what will be winter of 2020. No winter return of my limp.
After a much more abbreviated account of this in a comment, most agreed that it was random chance, but one guy thought I should consider it a miracle.
I quit attending church more than 40 years ago and seldom give much thought to faith or especially to organized religion one way or another. Even so, this incident stands out as something I don’t care to completely dismiss as random chance, if for no other reason, completely dismissing it might result in a negative placebo effect on me.