NEW CASTLE — Prepare yourself to be amazed and mesmerized by the utter pain and agony of da-feet (you'll get that joke later).

Brace yourself for a tale of a dastardly accident that has ingrained itself into my memory with blazing technicolor and amazingly high-definition clarity. It's one of those events that replays over and over in your head in slow motion with such brilliance that you can nearly feel it happening all over again.

It all began on a hot August afternoon. I was tasked with digging potatoes out of my family’s garden, but it had been a very hot and humid day. Besides, Dad was at work all day and I had spent the entire week at football camp sweating, running, and working out in the hot, sticky summer weather. I felt I deserved a little break, so I let the menial task slide until the early evening hours when Dad returned home from work and voiced his objection to my not having finished, let alone begun, digging up the potatoes.

I marched up to the shop where we kept all the gardening tools and grabbed the heavy duty, 4-tine pitchfork. This particular one was well used and had the wide tines that were perfect for loosening a good amount of soil, given the appropriate amount of effort and strength behind it. I also picked up one of the old, wooden milk crates that we always stored vegetables in.

I didn't bother putting on any shoes even though I had to cross the gravel driveway. My feet were tough from nearly a whole summer of running barefoot. That, coupled with Native American blood in my veins, made shoes merely an inconvenience.

I started at the end of one of the rows. I thrust the pitchfork into the ground at just the right spot to avoid the precious potatoes that lay beneath the ground, but with enough force to plunge the tines deep into the ground to lift all the potatoes to the surface of the sun-baked soil. I repeated this over and over again, working my way down the first of many rows. I had filled the crate about halfway when it happened.

I thrust the pitchfork downward again and felt it hit something hard. Was it a rock? Maybe a stick or tool that had gotten left behind? Nope. It was my bare foot. I felt the piercing pain as the tine went straight through my foot and broke the surface on the opposite side. I stood there, half in shock and half afraid to look. The loose soil that covered my feet up to my ankles was hiding my gruesome surprise. I tried to pull back the pitchfork, but my entire foot came with it as I jerked it upward. My wounded foot rose from the dirt like a zombie in a George Romero film with the dirt rolling off of it.

As it fully emerged I could see the tine protruding from the underside of my foot by at least three inches.

I balanced my weight on my other foot and guided my injured appendage to the ground like an amateur puppeteer. I stood calmly and took a deep breath. I tried to pull the fork from my foot again, to no avail. It was wedged in there. Each time I pulled upward, my foot came along with it. I was hopelessly stuck in the garden.

Nothing left to do but call, “MOM!!!!!”

From across the yard she answered, “What?”  

“Come here,” I said.

She followed with, “Why? What is it?”

I believe she thought I had found something in the garden, and she calmly walked over. As she got closer she again asked, “What?”

“My foot,” I said as I lifted it off the ground for her to see.

She took a step forward and uttered, “Oh, my God!”

She yelled for my dad: “DAVE, DAVE, DAVE!”

 My dad appeared from around the corner of the shop. “What?”

“His foot,” said my mother. “Come here! We have to take him to the hospital.”

My dad quickened his pace from a walk, to a jog, to a run.

As he got close enough to see, I lifted my foot again to show him my handy work as I firmly said, “Don’t pull it out.”

My mom ran into the house, got the car keys, and pulled the car out of the garage, backing it over to the garden. We had a little Subaru wagon at the time. She pushed the back seat down and opened the back hatch so I could ease myself and my extra parts into the back.

My dad hopped into the driver's seat and we sped out the driveway to the hospital. I could feel every agonizing bump on the road. The slightest change of direction or pothole altered the position of the tine in my foot and served to emphasize the pain that was shooting through my foot.

When we arrived at the hospital, my dad went inside to get a wheelchair for me. He returned with a chair and a nurse. As she turned the corner and saw the pitchfork sticking out of both sides of my foot, she gasped. Not the most reassuring thing you can hear when you arrive at the hospital. She quickly apologized and helped me into the wheelchair. She also draped a blanket over my feet and legs in an effort to prevent any onlookers from having the exact response that she had just had.  

The staff quickly ushered me into an x-ray room where they attempted to photograph my foot from every imaginable position with a half-inch thick piece of steel running through it. They were checking to see if I had hit any bones and exactly what the position was of the foreign object. But, as you might have guessed, there was not much information attained from these x-rays due to the intense reflective nature of the steel in my foot.

They took me back to the emergency room and informed me that they had decided to simply pull it out the way it went in. They sterilized the protruding end in preparation for its return trip through my foot and shot me full of local anesthetics. I believe they gave me a total of five shots in the surrounding flesh.

It took two male nurses holding my foot tightly and two other nurses pulling on the handle end to pull the pitchfork out. It looked like some bad parody of “The Sorcerer and the Stone.”  As the pitchfork began to slide out, I could feel every inch of it pass back through my foot. Once it reached that point where my foot no longed had a grip on it, the two nurses doing the pulling did a couple of backward stutter-steps to counteract the energy generated from the release of the pitchfork.

They then irrigated the entire wounded as best they could and neatly wrapped it up. I had a second series of x-rays that showed I had miraculously missed every bone, major artery, and vein.

I spent the next few weeks on crutches and taking some sort of pain medication. I also missed a week or so of football practice and was left with a nasty looking scar and another great story.

Lessons learned? Yep. Girls love to talk to guys on crutches, and never let your dad drive you to the hospital with a pitchfork in your foot.