Truck Driving Dilemma During my first five years of living in U.S.A, I was an interstate semi truck driver. With great passion for seeing places, the profession was a perfect match for me. After driving for the first two and half years and gaining some skills, I decided to upgrade my profession to an “owner operator” status. Owner operators buy or lease a semi, and drive as a sub contractor for a trucking companies. This comes with overheads and extra responsibilities such as truck and insurance payments, but at the end of the day when compared to a company driver, one walks away with a better pay by doing the same job in a given time frame. Semi trucks basically comes in two categories either a van or flatbed. Van is the type that conceals the freight being hauled until you open the trailer doors, in contrast to flatbed, which the fright is exposed until the driver covers it with a tarpaulin. I happened to be working for a flatbed company and hauling flatbeds comes with extra work. In one fine summer morning, I picked freight from Los Angeles CA terminal, to Laredo TX. Long distance commercial drivers have safety rules that prohibit them not to drive continuously for more than fourteen hours a day, so for the distance of only 1420 miles, I arrived in Laredo TX the second day with the load. Two days after arriving in Laredo, I was in my truck at the terminal when a dispatcher sent me a message to pick a loaded trailer destined for Ontario Canada. I started the engine drove to the docks, hooked up the trailer to the tractor head, pulled it to an open space which happened to be a concrete floor, with the cargo on a flatbed trailer, I begun securing the load by strapping it to the bed. Afterwards came the moment of covering the cargo with tarpaulin to protect it from the weather, right around the time of covering the freight, the wind started picking up, clouds started forming within minutes the wind grew stronger and stronger.
Flatbed with nothing on it is four feet from the ground, and the load was about three feet, so the load and the truck trailer together were already seven feet from the concrete, and I am only Five feet seven inches, weighing about 180 lbs. Added together, my head was about thirteen and half feet from the ground. It was my responsibility to protect the load, so I was performing my task when suddenly I was cut up in the wind, within seconds, the intensity of the wind became so strong that it blew the tarpaulin which I was tying down together with me from the top of the load. The next thing I realized was falling from the peak of the load with my head towards the concrete floor, instinctively with an attempt to protect my head from striking the concrete, I stretched my arms and fortunately my left arm was the first part of my body that touched the concrete, the impact was absorbed by my left elbow. Initially, I under estimated the injury, but seconds after the pains set in, it became extremely severe and within minutes my hand started swollen.
Luckily one of the drivers saw what was going on with me from a distance and called 911 to my rescue.
After X-Rays and initial assessment by orthopedic doctor at the emergency, I was told “the radial head bone of my left elbow had broken”. To me, that was a good trade off; still in pains, I told myself I prefer losing my hand than my head. After two initial surgeries I was released the third day. I was told on my first follow-up visit to the doctor that, healing process would be between one and two years. A month after the injury I returned the leased truck to the owners, and at that moment, I found myself walking away from my dreams. Within the first year of the occurrence I had a total of four surgeries and luckily the healing has been incredible. Eighteen months after the mishap I was visiting the orthopedic doctor for a follow-up, after the examination, he looked me in the eyes and “he said,” “Son, find a career that will require using your head more than your hands.” The last visit to the doctor gave me food for thought, more than twenty years after finishing high school, I found myself at DeVry now, with almost two years behind me pursuing a college degree, looking back I achieved the aim of discovering U.S.A by road, but had to give up the truck driving for a better future.