“I was still entangled with the bike, laying here face up,” Stout said Thursday, Sept. 3, on his second pilgrimage to the formerly dangerous bridge. “The sky was just like it is today. It was a little bluer, just a cloud or two. It was kind of weird. It was peaceful.”
Except for the fact that he couldn’t breathe.
“Apparently I’d just knocked the wind out of me,” he said, standing on the spot where it happened about two miles southwest of Xenia. “So I’m lying there trying to say, ‘OK, at exactly what level did I break my neck at. If it’s too high, you’re toast.”
Once the doctor in him figured out he was probably going to live, all Stout could do was look at the sky and wait. Eventually, another rider came along, fished the cell phone out of his pocket and called 911.
Then she helped him call his wife.
“I said, ‘Honey, I screwed up.’ ”
Stout said he wasn’t feeling teary or emotional — except for one thing.
“I felt guilty that I’d let the family down,” he said. “Because there are all these things that you need to do and you want to do. You’re supposed to send the kids to school, pay the bills, et cetera. And I’m lying here, unable to move, and it was like, ‘OK, now what are we going to do.’ ”
The road back
For the next year, what he had to do was relearn how to do things we all take for granted. Things like move an arm or a leg, pick up a pencil, make a phone call, take a step. In fact, Stout said, his life became all about taking the next step.
And now, although doctors initially told his wife, Pam, that he was unlikely to walk again, he’s training to walk a half marathon next month. He’s back at work as the medical director for Procter & Gamble, and he’s driving.
But it hasn’t been easy.
He praises the Miami Valley Hospital staff for their patience, kindness and occasional tough insistence that he work to do what seemed impossible.
“One of the reasons we’re talking here today is they gave the right therapy at the right time,” he said.
On the first day in the hospital, they had him up in a suspension system moving his limbs and telling him: This is your left arm. This is your right arm.
“I was like, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ They told me, ‘We’re trying to remind your brain that your arms and legs are there.”
Soon after, the staff wheeled him up to the parallel bars in occupational therapy. The idea of somehow getting out of his wheelchair and taking steps seemed impossible, and the good doctor, admittedly never the most patient man, was about to give the staff a piece of his mind. Then he saw a young man coming toward him on the bars.
“He had tubes coming in and out of him just like I did,” Stout said. “And he was coming toward me, just pouring with sweat, all over his body. Except he was coming toward me one hop at a time” (on his one remaining leg.)
So Stout kept his mouth shut and walked four steps — with four therapists helping on each foot and shoulder.
Later, when they’d get him up to “walk” without the bars, he said, it was scary.
“The ground was a very long way away,” Stout said. “It took me weeks just to feel comfortable walking without someone holding me. And then months before I was walking without a walker.”
The lessons learned
People ask him what the experience has meant to him, what it means in the big picture of life.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, walking back toward Spring Valley with a slight limp. “For me, it means we’re designed to take one step at a time. Wherever you’re at, take the next step. I haven’t had some great metaphysical experience. It just seemed natural to every day try to do just a little bit more.”
But he’s learned other things as well: for instance, what is really important.
He is occasionally asked to speak to groups, and one thing he likes to do is bring up on stage the most important person in the room and ask them to tell the audience who they are in three sentences or less. It’s usually about where they work and what position they hold and what they’ve achieved.
Then he asks them to lie down, pretend they’re paralyzed from the neck down and say who they are.
“Then you’re all about family, friends and faith,” Stout said. “You’re Ron Stout, the husband of Pam, the father of Johnny, a second-year architecture student at Miami University and Elle, a senior in Spring Valley Academy.
“That’s been really beneficial for me. I’m not my job. I’m not how fast I can ride my bike. I’m part of a family, a group of friends and a faith. It took me 50 years to learn it, but it was worth it.”
Along this road of many small steps, Stout said, the high points have been amazingly mundane.
His first was sending a text message to his son, who had just gone to school a week before the accident.
“It took me 15 minutes to say, ‘Hi Johnny. I did this myself.’ ”
Another milestone was picking up a cherry tomato and putting it in his mouth. And then, months later, there was the day he snuck out of the house and drove a truck around the pasture of his farm.
Through it all, he said, his wife, Pam, has been a “rock.” She suddenly had to do everything, both for him and their family. To make matters worse, a week after the accident, she was rear-ended by a drunk driver. Then Hurricane Ike came through and took down a number of their trees, including one on their barn. Then their daughter’s school, Spring Valley Academy, burned.
“We were looking at Job in the Bible to see what was going to happen next,” he said.
Overall, incredibly, Stout says he has a sense of gratitude for his experience.
“The one thing it’s really done for me is really given me a sense of value, of what to value, what to worry about,” Stout said. “It’s different for everyone. But I kind of like that landing on my head and busting up my neck kind of quieted a lot of those things that I used to worry about.”
Contact Ken McCall at (937) 225-2393 or kmccall@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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