100m crawl with a broken neck
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 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 Marakopa, south of Kawhia township.
The retired plasterer lives alone on the 270 acres, running 500 sheep and 80-odd cows off Moana Quay. His Hamilton-based family regularly come to visit and had just spent the weekend with the grandfather of four. Bell loaded a couple of buckets of feed on his 500cc quad bike to tend to his 13 chickens.
‘‘I had a couple of buckets on the front of the bike, more or less between my legs, and they slipped down and jammed the accelerator on. It just took off. It was a straight-out plain accident.’’
The bike shot out from under Bell, mounted a bank and flipped, throwing Bell into the air.
‘‘I must’ve gone straight up in the air and come down on my head.’’
He hit the ground head first. He woke to find the bike lying on its side an arm’s length away. A few centimetres closer and he’d have been ‘‘buggered’’.
‘‘There was blood everywhere. It wasn’t excruciating pain, but I knew I was pretty crook. I was bloody sore. I couldn’t have been out for long, because I had the chook tucker on the bike and the chooks were still eating it when I woke up.’’
Bell’s neck was fractured and his jaw was broken, along with a couple of ribs and a shoulder blade. Gravel had torn chunks of his scalp from his head and the crawl tore some ‘‘bark from his hands’’.
He’d already lost one leg – he has a prosthetic – from an infection following an operation in his foot around 13 years ago.
Bell clawed his way over the bumpy ground and found a stick to prop himself on to one knee.
Clutching the wire fence, he edged his way along the paddock, dragging himself about 100 metres to the nearest road.
‘‘It took me a while, but I managed to climb up. It wasn’t easy.
‘‘I semi-crawled, plodded along the fence. My [prosthetic] leg was still on. If it had fallen off, it wouldn’t have been too good.’’
He flung himself over the gate and waited for the next car to come along.
‘‘I knew someone would come along before long.’’
A couple were the first to stop. Then people appeared from everywhere, Bell said.
‘‘They laid me down by the gate and waited for the helicopter.’’
In a statement at the time, the Waikato Westpac Rescue helicopter said it was dispatched to the Marakopa farm at 11.30am. Rescuers carried Bell from the farm gate to the paddock, where he was loaded into the chopper and flown to Waikato Hospital with serious head injuries.
He doesn’t remember much after that except a nagging concern for the fate of his Redband gumboots, purchased a week or two before. He’s since been reassured his gumboots are safe.
‘‘I can’t afford a new pair. Gotta buy new tyres for the bike.’’
This is the first major accident Bell’s had on a quad bike.
‘‘The only thing that would have stopped it would be turning the key off, but you don’t have time, eh?’’
In the last month, two people have died and at least three others have been injured in quad bike accidents in the Waikato.
Nine-year-old Demitrus Wilson was killed when the adult-size quad bike he was riding rolled while he was rounding up cows on a Kihikihi farm on February 1.
And on February 15, Scott Keith Beal, 34, died in a quad bike crash on Mangati Road near Otorohanga.
Dr Grant Christey, clinical director of the Midland Trauma System, said three people have been admitted with quad bike injuries in the last two weeks.
‘‘Data is showing an increasing trend in quad bike injuries.’’ Farmers aged 50 plus seemed to be higher risk, he said.
In the meantime, Bell plans to be back on the bike soon, although this time he’ll be more careful.
‘‘Life goes on, eh?’’