BAY AREA QUAKE : Survivor of Nimitz Is Off Critical List

Buck Helm, the beefy earthquake survivor who stunned the world by living nearly 90 hours under an avalanche of concrete and steel, amazed his doctors once again Monday by signaling that he was feeling no pain despite severe injuries resulting from his ordeal.

Unable to talk because of a breathing tube down his throat, the 57-year-old Helm still managed to move his head from side to side when asked if anything hurt.

“He shook his head, and everyone was incredulous,” said Dr. Floyd Huen, medical director at Highland General Hospital. Helm has been there since Saturday, when rescue workers pried him from the squashed remains of his tiny Chevrolet Sprint in the ruins of the Nimitz Freeway.

Though suffering from broken ribs, bruised lungs, a skull fracture and kidney failure, Helm was taken off the critical list Monday. His condition was upgraded to “serious but stable.”

Huen said his kidneys, which doctors at first feared had sustained permanent damage, appear to be regaining normal function. Still, Huen said that Helm will need to spend a few more days on a respirator and that his body still shows signs of infection.

“In the next 24 to 48 hours, if he continues the way he is now, he will be out of the woods,” Huen said.

Doctors may have been surprised by Helm’s resilience, but Lorene Helm, his ex-wife and still close friend, was not. “We’ve been divorced for four years, and he hasn’t given up on me yet,” she told reporters during a brief hospital news conference. “I guess you could say that’s positive.”

Like Cecelia Cichan, the 4-year-old “miracle child” who was the lone survivor of a 1987 Northwest Airlines jet crash in Detroit that killed 156 others, Helm has become a source of inspiration for many in the Bay Area still reeling from the effects of last week’s quake.

For instance, at the New Orleans Room in the posh Fairmount Hotel on Monday, bandleader Jimmy Price premiered what he called “The Ballad of Buck Helm:”

“Hey Buck, we’re pulling for you. Your heart is pulling us through. Our hopes were down, but you opened our eyes to tomorrow.”

“They call him Lucky Bucky,” said Will Fry, another of Helm’s physicians. “It seems appropriate.”

A burly, rough-edged eccentric, Helm would seem a ready-made candidate to fill the role of folk hero.

Although he lives in Weaverville, 250 miles north of Oakland in rural Trinity County, he spends weekdays working at the docks in Oakland.

When in Oakland, he apparently slept in a rusty yellow panel truck parked at the docks and showered each morning at a nearby YMCA. The truck, with the words “Weaverville Flash” painted in orange on the side, was loaded with a mattress, a Snoopy sleeping bag, some clothes and pictures of his four children, the Associated Press reported.

When the upper deck of the Nimitz collapsed around him last Tuesday, Helm was on his way to a legal gambling parlor in Emeryville for a night of poker.

Despite his improving condition, doctors said Monday that they are monitoring Helm closely for any signs of a relapse of his kidney condition. Sometimes, they said, the kidneys of patients who suffer the kind of injuries that Helm did have trouble readjusting to solid food and water.

Although Helm was being fed through a tube on Monday, doctors said they discontinued kidney dialysis. They said he was lapsing in and out of consciousness but that he occasionally smiled and wrote notes to friends from his bed in the hospital’s fourth-floor intensive care unit.

Soble reported from Oakland and Secter from Los Angeles.