A year ago today Jerry Scheibmeir died several times over. ON THAT DAY, Scheibmeir and three buddies embarked on a day of fishing along the Neosho — his house is yards from the bank — and were returning upstream that afternoon. THE FUNNY thing about having life-threatening injuries — to the point that doctors would pay a visit to his hospital room in the ensuing days and weeks, “just to shake my hand,” he said — was that he was never in pain. EVEN after the incident, Scheibmeir was itching to get back on the river. THE INCIDENT also gave Scheibmeir a clear glimpse of how just many friends he has. SCHEIBMEIR plans to spend plenty of time fishing over the summer.
“But the doctors kept bringing me back,” he said.
Scheibmeir, 60, recalled Monday afternoon the events of a horrific boating accident in which he was impaled by a 4-inch limb through his midsection.
Nowadays, Scheibmeir, rural Iola, has no recollection of the accident.
“Physically, the doctors have told me, I’ll never be what I call normal,” he said. “My belly is always going to be tight. I’m not supposed to lift over 10 pounds. I’m watching myself, I have people helping me instead of doing it myself.”
Mentally, he’s fine. In fact, he’s better than that.
You see, May 19, 2014, was also the day Scheibmeir quit drinking and chewing tobacco.
When physicians at the University of Kansas Medical Center treated him, his heart was beating at 15 percent capacity due to a lifetime of the bad habits.
Today, they put it at 65 percent.
“The wreck was somewhat of a blessing in disguise, if you want to look at it that way,” he said. “What I’m saying, I guess, is if I hadn’t had that wreck, there was a big chance I would have died of a heart attack or a stroke or whatever.”
Having traversed that portion of the river hundreds of times, they knew of one submerged log in particular. When the river was low enough, he’d bump it with the bottom of his boat.
And the river was down that day.
With four occupants — one or two more than usual — Scheibmeir’s 17-foot, flat-bottom fishing boat sat just low enough in the water that the submerged log did a bit more than bump the boat this time.
Instead, the log snared the bottom of the motor, sending the boat skidding around — much like skipping a rock across the water surface.
The inertia from going about 25 mph to a dead stop, propelled Scheibmeir and another occupant out of the boat.
The other landed safely in the water.
Scheibmeir, however, struck a nearby log whose limb tore through his torso.
The limb was high enough — about 5 feet out of the water — that the other occupants had to hold the boat in place, with a cooler on a seat, for support.
“Otherwise I probably would have been dangling there,” he said.
Scheibmeir credits one of the occupants, Junior Burke of Yates Center, for providing emergency crews with accurate directions to the crash site.
“He knows the river, too, and he was able to tell them exactly what roads to take, and how to get there.”
Emergency responders converged upon the scene, and were able to use a boom to lift him to shore — after using a chain saw to cut the limb.
It wasn’t until he was at KU Med that surgeons removed the limb from his abdomen; infection was a constant worry.
“Or that’s what they tell me,” said Scheibmeir, who has no recollection of the event, even though he was conscious the entire time.
Once at KU, doctors administered drugs to keep Scheibmeir sedated, “so I wouldn’t fight them,” he said. “We called it ‘amnesia medicine,’ because it completely wiped my memory of the crash.”
It wasn’t until he fully awakened 2 1/2 weeks later that Scheibmeir realized what had happened.
“I woke up and I saw my belly laid open while the nurse was changing bandages,” he said. “I saw my intestines and everything inside me, and I said, ‘Jerry, I don’t know what you did, but you really done it up good this time.’”
“People don’t believe this, but he only thing that really hurt was when the nurses would change the bandages, and they’d have to remove tape,” he said. “Nothing else really hurt.”
But there was still misery involved.
Scheibmeir had to wear a colostomy bag for months afterward until his intestinal tract recovered.
“If you ever see that anti-smoking ad on TV, you’ll see a lady talking about wearing one,” he said. “She tells it right. That is the worst thing that can happen to anybody. I guess the only thing worse than that is to be dead.”
He finally did so earlier this spring, even with anxious friends and loved ones worried about his mental well-being.
No worry, he said.
With no mental scars, and no real physical pain, he assures all that he is perfectly content on the river.
“I practiced having a mental breakdown, if some of my friends were around, where I’d flop around, maybe fall out of the boat,” he said with a laugh. “That would have been just to mess with them.”
He wisely decided otherwise.
“Water was too cold to fall out of the boat,” he laughed.
Scheibmeir recalled attending a benefit in his honor at Piqua’s Knights of Columbus Hall after he was dismissed from the hospital.
“I must have thousands of friends, and they all showed up,” he said. “It was humbling. They wanted me to give a speech. There was no way I could talk.”
“I made an oath, and I’ve stood by it,” he said. “I’ll never be mad at anyone again. You can’t make me mad. Maybe for five seconds, I might walk away, but I’ll never dwell on it. Life is too short.”
Scheibmeir and his friends also have repaired his old fishing boat. He planned to launch it this week.
The launch had nothing to do with the anniversary, he stressed.
“We just got around to getting it fixed now,” he said.
Unable to work because of the accident, he needs something to fill his spare time. He tinkers with lawn mowers and other objects on his property.
“But the river is where I want to be,” he said. “It’s part of me.”
Staying grateful for life’s second chances
