THANKFUL FOR A HAPPY ENDING

A couple of Friday's ago, I was tied up with an inventory in Houston. What should have taken us 4 hours ended up taking 12 hours which made for a very LONG and FRUSTRATING day! After 11.5 hours, as I was keying in the last bit of data, Wes called. I ignored. He called again. I ignored. He called again and everyone around me said "I think you better answer it". So I did. On the other end of the phone was a very calm but serious Wes saying "Stephanie you need to come home right now. Colson got in a 4 wheeler accident. He's not hurt bad but he's scared and he wants you to come home."

I hung up the phone, quickly gathered my things, made arrangements for the lady who rode with me who couldn't leave to get a ride home and headed out the door. Part of me was thinking 'could this be a joke? What if Wes did this because he knew how frustrated I was'. Well of course it wasn't. As I headed out of the parking lot I called Wes back to get more details. You could hear Colson in the background with fearful tears saying he was not okay as Wes insisted to me he was. It turns out that the fence guy at our new place had put up two posts on one of our fences and run a single strand of barbwire across the entire width of the property. Noone saw the strand...not even Wes...and not Colson as he wheeled around on his 4 wheeler that afternoon. He came up from the bottom of a small ditch and the barbwire said "HELLO!" as he basically clotheslined him flipping him off the back. Running into the barbwire in and of itself is an accident. Being flipped off the 4 wheeler is a whole nother accident. Both of which could have been really bad if not deadly.

The barbwire punctured him once in the chest, once in the neck and once in the arm. And then he had scratches on his arms and neck and a few bruises. The one in the chest had the most bleeding. Every time his heart would beat, the blood would squirt out. Colson kept screaming "I'm not going to make it Daddy. I'm going to die". Wes' goal was to make him calm down so he could press on the wound and make it stop bleeding. Then Colson would be able to see that he was going to be all right.

By the time I got home, Mary had doctored him all up and Wes had calmed him down and he was lying on the couch watching some TV. Dr. Caperton made a house call later that evening and determined everything would be ok. I just needed to take him in to get a tetnus Monday, which I did.

The week prior, our Pastor had gotten into a dirt bike accident riding the trails in the National Forest. He had broken 13 ribs and broken his shoulder bone. So Sunday was his first Sunday back and he preached. Colson was a little subconscience about his war wounds so I let him sit with us during the service instead of going to his class. Pastor Ron used several illustrations from his accident. After church Colson came home and went outside to hit golf balls. As I passed him in the yard he was swinging the club like he was stretching. He told me he guess he needed to man up like Pastor Ron. "Man up?" I asked. "Yes, I can't let my accident get me down. I gotta keep going"

So today I'm thankful that he didn't have the strength to hold on. Had he been able to hold on, the barbwire could have severly cut his neck severing it badly. Today I'm thankful that his fall off the 4 wheeler was uneventful. Today I'm thankful for a happy ending.