There’s big catfish growing down the Colorado river, and they’re calling me.
Bob Albrecht takes great pleasure selling Brazilian rosewood, coco bolo and other woods to enthusiastic amateur woodworkers and cabinetmakers in Northridge. In September his daily routine was shockingly interrupted by an accident on the street in front of his hardwood store. Albrecht and his wife, Lois, live in Northridge.
I never knew what hit me. There was no sensation. I was walking across the street, and then, the next moment of consciousness, I was opening my eyes and I was lying on the street. Somebody was holding a piece of cardboard over my face to keep the sun out of it. A policeman was interviewing me. He asked me if I knew my name, and so on. There was no pain of any kind. That all came afterward. Nature has a way of compensating for those emergency things.
It happened just six months ago. I was walking across Parthenia Street to deliver some tools. Before I got to the other side, a drunk hit me and broke both legs, and multiple fractures, and various and other sundry lacerations. In spite of all of that, I think I came out rather lucky. I had no head injuries and no internal injuries.
My wife, who helps here at the store, happened to be here when the accident happened, and she always carries a camera with her. She took pictures of me lying on the blacktop out there. And in the emergency room of the hospital with all the blood and the bandages. All the gory details. As a matter of fact, I have quite a photographic record of life in the hospital and in the rehabilitation program and all that sort of thing. My wife is a retired nurse, and she has seen even more gory situations than mine was, although it was new to her as a personal experience.
If I had my druthers, I’d prefer that it had not happened. But I have a lot of things I still want to do. There’s big catfish growing down the Colorado river, and they’re calling me. I’m trying to look at it from that point of view. I spent 12 weeks and five days in the hospital as an in-patient, and since then I’ve been, and still am, an out-patient three times a week, learning how to walk again.
The physical therapy is coming along, I guess as fast as it is able to. One of the remaining problems is a main nerve in my right leg, which was completely destroyed. That will repair itself, but it’s a very slow process. About one inch a month, and I guess there are several inches of that to repair.
I have another major event to look forward to, and that is, all of the hardware that’s planted inside of me, which consists of a steel rod in the femur of my right leg all the way from the knee to the hip, and a plate in my left leg, all of that has to come out. So that’s on toward August or September. I hope by that time I’ll be a little closer to the catfish.
In the hospital I was known as Big Bob. I’m 6-3. I can remember the first time I was able to stand up I felt like I was at least three or four times taller than I really am. I’d been sitting in a wheelchair so long, down at this level. Even the smallest people are standing above you when they’re walking by. My main therapist was a little girl, she was only about 5 feet tall. Her head came way below my chin, and here she was wrestling around with a big 230-pound moose. She did a good job of it too.
The walker is the first step after the wheelchair. I’m also using crutches a little bit, and starting to practice with the cane. It’s been an awfully long, tedious, slow process, but I guess I don’t have anything to say about how fast it goes.
While I was in the hospital, my wife was here at the store almost full time, but as I’m able to I try to spell her as much as I can and give her some relief. She has done a remarkable job. She was instantly dropped in a situation that she really knew very little about as far as the details were concerned. How to measure wood, how to calculate the cost of wood and even where it is and what it looks like. Tools as well. She learned tremendously fast. Remarkable. So I’m going to take her out to lunch when it is all over.
