| kccrow |
04-22-2025 09:31 PM |
I worked with my father the summer I graduated from high school at a foundry that produced transmission parts for Allison and CAT. Nearly the entire summer had passed, and I was set to start my first year of school for mechanical engineering. We were working, primarily, 7 days a week, 10-hour days. One day he asked me to drive home because he was tired. I didn't think much of it and said yes. I fell asleep at the wheel 3 miles from home and rolled the truck. That accident left him a quadriplegic and me relatively unscathed. I do wish I could go back in time and not drive that day.
As a consequence of that accident, he ended up dying from septicemia 7 years later because the nurses at the University of Michigan hospital didn't change his catheter for 4 days because they "didn't have the correct one to fit him." Meanwhile, my mother was his primary caregiver at home and had a suitcase full of the correct ones in the van we traveled in. Never once did they ask her if she had one, and we'd assumed they were properly changing them. One day he was feeling warm and she could sense a smell, lifted his sheet to check his bag, and could see the infection in his urine. She called the doctor herself. That trip was merely for a medical and ergonomical evaluation mandated by the insurance company to determine his needs going forward.
Not only did I have to live with the accident, keeping my father, best friend, and hunting and fishing buddy, primarily bedridden and only able to speak, but he was prematurely taken because of neglect. So if you ever wonder why I'm a bitter, aging man and hate the UofM, you have your answers.
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Would you change 1 thing about your past if you could?
(https://chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=357890)