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Sunday, February 12, 2006
By HOWARD BUCK, Columbian staff writer
Almost dark, a few minutes past 5, on a damp Friday evening in January 2005.
Robert Holcomb joins the rush-hour crowd streaming north on Interstate 5, headed for Woodland.
He's spent the day laying carpet in a St. Johns rental unit. A licensed flooring specialist the past dozen years, he has worked contract jobs all over Clark County. Tomorrow he's bound for Reno and a seminar on slicing and sealing a new generation of linoleum.
Now, staring into the taillights, he just wants to cruise comfortably with the heavy traffic and get home. Alone in his two-year-old Dodge Ram Quad Cab pickup, he travels the far-left lane as he passes Northeast 134th Street, near where Interstate 205 merges. The truck's radio is tuned to his usual country music station. He flicks on his turn signal, looking to slide to the right. There are 13 miles to go on a trip he's made countless times.
Holcomb, 46, has no warning how his life will change before he makes it home, however. No clue it's about to become anything but routine.
A driver half his age, Rogelio Camerena, shoots onto I-5 from the 179th Street on-ramp, bearing south in his cousin's 1990 Honda Accord. Just leaving his landscaping job at the Clark County Fairgrounds, the Vancouver man shows little patience for slower cars. He guns the accelerator, cutting across the freeway lanes and passing other vehicles at a speed witnesses estimate is 20 mph above the 60 mph posted limit.
Near Milepost 8, Camerena loses control, his car sliding off the pavement and into a grassy median. The low-slung sedan shoots across a shallow ditch, straight for a steel cable barrier installed by highway crews a few years before. Designed to snag vehicles and prevent deadly head-on collisions, the waist-high fencing has been added to Oregon and Washington stretches of I-5 that had seen horrific accidents. Law officers praise its worth.
This wreck proves to be a spectacular fluke.
Holcomb sees a flash of light, a gray blur emerge on his left. Somehow, inexplicably, the small Honda has sheared through the cables and is hurtling right at him.
There's no chance to react. The white Dodge barrels over the snout of the Accord, which strikes the truck on the driver's side. The smaller car tears a jagged strip along the truck's frame and rips into its undercarriage. In surreal slow motion, Holcomb feels and hears the blow, sees the safety air bag burst into his face and just as quickly deflate.
The truck spins three times, and comes to rest facing north again. Both left-side wheels are missing. Badly mangled but still intact, the Honda also sits upright. Miraculously, Camerena is not badly injured. With one exception, other vehicles have braked and swerved to avoid the collision and debris.
Inside his cab, a stunned Holcomb takes stock. No fire. No blood from his face or torso. Both his feet, though, are in searing pain. It's as if a bulldozer has run them over. He stays seated, immobile. Outside his windows, he catches ghostly images of bystanders, maybe his rescuers, who initially approach within several feet, then back away.
"They thought they were looking to see who was dead," Holcomb recalls later.
A police officer leans in and gropes around his waist, trying to grab his wallet for identification. Holcomb shoos him away. Finally, firefighters lift him out, carefully tugging his flopping feet from a mash of warped pedals and crumpled floorboard. He's loaded onto a stretcher, then into an ambulance, as freeway traffic backs up behind the crash scene.
The trip can't pass quickly enough. "I was dying of thirst so bad. I couldn't swallow," he says.
Holcomb has been caught up in one of 388 nonfatal injury accidents that Washington State Patrol troopers will respond to in Clark County during 2005.
* * * * *
Through a second-floor window at Southwest Washington Medical Center, Holcomb sees wintry sunlight veiled by a drug-induced haze.
His eyes mostly linger on the large wall clock mounted beyond the foot of his bed, however. Next to it, the mirror is scrawled with a "we love ya" message in black marker pen.
For 14 days now, he's groggily watched family members and nurses come and go. He's switched rooms, endured a raging roommate and bland hospital food. Stabbing pain, worse at night, has ruined his sleep, leaving him exhausted. Electrical-type nerve spasms periodically jolt him smaller aftershocks from the original trauma.
With a toggle switch, Holcomb can release a blissful 1 or 2 milligrams of morphine into an intravenous tube. But not on his schedule. Rather, the device is programmed to work only once each 15 minutes.
A soft-spoken, rugged man at 6 feet 4 inches and pushing 250 pounds, Holcomb has suffered before. He broke his right ankle the first time he tried snow skiing, badly sliced a finger with a power saw and has weathered frequent cuts and gashes on the job, all without making much of a fuss.
This is another story. Asked by his new caregivers to rate his greatest pain at a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10, he reports near-instant relief from the morphine: down to about an "8," he figures.
For about four minutes.
Then, the slow draw of the minute hand toward the next quarter-hour mark becomes his obsession, the pain ramping up again.
"Those last minutes," Holcomb tells visitors, "are like waiting for the earth to open up."
* * * * *
Beckoned from a subdued waiting room at the hospital, Holcomb warily steers his wheelchair around sharp corners and down a short, narrow hallway, pumping his sturdy arms and wrists to propel himself.
His two legs are stretched flat, his feet heavily swaddled. A sand-colored windbreaker, emblazoned with "Clark County 2002 Tournament Winner" and bowling icons, covers his broad shoulders.
He enters an exam room lined with tables, whirlpool and soaking tubs, and several stoic patients. Saddled with gimpy, stiff or newly repaired limbs or joints, they quietly submit to the probing hands of their physicians and attendants. He joins them, sitting calmly through his own check-up.
Minutes later, cast technician Daryl Ford carefully wraps Holcomb's feet and ankles in new gauze. He's replaced the old cloth stained by seeping blood, and gently cleansed and dried the puffy feet. Despite black, purple and yellow blotches, a few jagged stitch lines and tips of two protruding pins, the feet are doing well. There's no sign of infection, the greatest worry right now.
Holcomb is assured, again, that his surgeries went well. Three of them, in just 11 days: the first, the same frantic night his wife, Patricia, his grown son, Jeff, and others rushed to the emergency room, finding him strapped to a flat board, in shock and shaking badly.
It was Holcomb's fortune to be treated by two surgeons who've repaired thousands of badly damaged feet, making sense of twisted or torn ligaments, tendons and cracked bones. Drs. Jay Crary and Scott Woll work for Rebound Orthopedics and Rebound Neurosurgery, anchored at the Vancouver hospital. Besides patching up everyday patients, they and their colleagues are entrusted with Trail Blazers basketball players and other professional athletes at Rebound's second office next to Portland's Rose Garden.
Woll took the lead on Holcomb's right foot: A compound fracture of two large heel bones had been ugly but made for a straightforward procedure. He drove in two steel pins to hold the bones together as they mend.
The left foot, Crary's baby, was something else. It absorbed the wreck's worst impact. At least a dozen bones or joints were crushed, the arch shattered. Here, the violent intersection of mass and velocity had wrought havoc. "It kind of broke the foot in half, backwards," the doctor explains.
In two separate surgeries lasting several hours, Crary inserted a square stainless steel plate and fashioned a checkerboard lattice of 15 screws and pins inside the foot to hold it together.
Now, Ford, the cast technician, banters cheerfully as he swathes the feet and ankles, still too swollen for a hard cast. "Championship bowler we've got to get you back to that," he intones.
"That's exactly right," Holcomb replies.
In the hallway outside, Crary paints a more somber view. Lanky, with a no-nonsense demeanor, he wants patients to know squarely where they stand. Or, in this case, sit: Nearly half a year will pass before Holcomb can start physical rehabilitation, he predicts, and it will be nearly a full year before he'll walk close to normally under the best of circumstances.
Holcomb will never regain full range of motion in either foot, and he is guaranteed chronic pain. He will never be quite the same.
"These are life-changing injuries," Crary says, frowning. "He's having everyone's worst nightmare: Just driving down the street, being responsible, and now he's suffering the consequences of someone's careless actions."
* * * * *
Holcomb savors rare February sunshine on the wide front porch of his Woodland home.
Then he maneuvers his wheelchair inside, where his three children, three grandchildren and more loved ones gather for a mid-week potluck.
Four weeks after the accident, it's good to celebrate a few hours' escape from its fallout even under the frozen stare of the mule deer's head mounted near the front door, a reminder that Holcomb's hunting trips with his son may be over for good. Even if shelves and cupboard tops are still cluttered with Christmas decorations that Patricia is too busy to pack away.
The family feasts on home-grilled steak and scalloped potatoes, salad, corn and, for dessert, chocolate brownies. Holcomb welcomes the home cooking, although medication still dulls his sense of taste. Afterward, his blue eyes sparkle as his grandson Austin noisily bounces around the spacious living room.
"This is what's healing, for me," he says, smiling.
Bound to his wheelchair or the sofa, the usually active bowler, husband and worker feels stir-crazy, however. He's able to sleep almost comfortably again and is quickly weaning himself from Oxycodone. To pass the time and per doctor's orders, he wiggles his toes and does leg-lift exercises as often as he can. But the itching under his hard cast is now a steady irritant. Sliding onto and off the toilet is an ordeal. He must rely on family and friends in new ways. They hastily built a new concrete walk and wooden wheelchair ramp from his gravel drive to the porch before his hospital discharge.
Bowling buddies and strangers have pitched money into two raffles and in collection jars scattered around Woodland and at AMF Timber Lanes and Hazel Dell Lanes, helping raise more than $1,700 for Robert and Patricia. The couple are touched by the response.
But the Holcombs' money woes are profound. Like many Americans, they've cut corners. They have no personal health insurance, which Robert says would have run $600 or more per month. Patricia has worked seasonal bookkeeping jobs, but not during winter. Robert, who brings home more than $50,000 a year, has no self-employment insurance to cover lost wages.
He carries full commercial insurance coverage on a 1976 Ford box van used to haul tools and heavy rolls of carpet and padding to his jobs, but a bad transmission shelved the van before the crash. His Dodge's policy offers conventional comprehensive and collision coverage, and not the commercial add-on. It's a costly distinction. "For $8 (additional premium) a month, I lost $250,000" in benefits, he laments.
What's more, Holcomb's insurer is stalling. It sought to collect from the Honda's policy. Problem is, there's no insurance on the vehicle Camerena was driving. A warrant is out for Camerena's arrest, but now he can't be found.
Jeff has jumped in to help Patricia sort unpaid bills, fend off creditors and document 18 months' prior wages to apply for state disability benefits. Jeff also is joining the couple's treks to a downtown Vancouver law office to discuss strategies and options.
But how will the Holcombs pay for Robert's follow-up surgeries? Physical rehabilitation? Home nursing care? The costs are climbing past $100,000.
With his return to work in doubt and a looming chance of bankruptcy, the Holcombs must face the fear of losing their home and the five acres where they raised their children and their grandchildren love to roam.
Howard Buck can be reached at 360-759-8015 or howard.buck@columbian.com.
How we reported this story: After Robert Holcomb's truck was struck by an uninsured motorist Jan. 14, 2005, The Columbian reported the story on its Clark County cover with the headline "Crash snarls evening commute." But the collision, one of several hundred injury accidents during 2005, had far-reaching consequences for Holcomb and his family. With Holcomb's permission, reporter Howard Buck and photographer Steven Lane followed his first year of recovery.
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