Injured with a broken neck, Mike Bell crawled his way to safety
Mike Bell had broken his neck, but he didn’t know that. All he knew, when he regained consciousness, was he could move his legs and that there was blood everywhere. And he was alone.
The 78-year-old clawed his way to a wire fence and hauled himself across the paddock of his Waikato farm. It probably took him a couple of hours to drag himself that 100m to safety, but the great-grandfather can’t quite recall how long.
“I knew I’d done a bit of damage. I’ve seen a few dead things in my time,” he said from his hospital room at Waikato Hospital a month after he was thrown from his quad bike.
But he remembers worrying about his brand new $80 Redband gumboots that trailed behind him across the grassy gravel.
“That’s life, isn’t it? I’ve had a few knocks in my time. But I’m still alive.”
It was a Tuesday around 7am and Bell was doing his morning chores at the woolshed on the family-owned farm in Marokopa, south of Kawhia township. Continue reading…
Source: Stuff
