Lee has written slice-of-life columns for the Deseret News since 1998.
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He knew he’d defied the odds. He was aware that “good luck” didn’t begin to describe what he’d gone through. He realized a dizzying series of miracles had brought him to the point where he could now leave the hospital
But it wasn’t until Joey Wood asked his doctor — whose discharge instructions basically amounted to “don’t lift anything heavy and take it easy” — to be more specific about his recovery protocol that he realized he positively, absolutely shouldn’t be alive
Because the doctor looked at him and said, “To be honest, there is no protocol. Nobody makes it this far
“People die before they get here, they die when they get here, they die on the operating table, they die right after, or they die three days later.”
Joey did none of the above
It was a Friday and he was on an early morning mountain bike ride with his dad, Scott, and his brothers — a weekly event they called FWD: Fridays With Dad — when his pedal struck a root to the side of the trail, a not unusual occurrence for a mountain biker. Joey flew over the handlebars — also not unusual — and landed in a pile of brush and rocks on the other side of the trail
No one would have been surprised if Joey had hopped up and said, “I’m OK.”
But he didn’t do that. He just lay there. He tried to breathe. A strange gurgling sound was coming out of his chest. It was something he’d heard before. Months earlier, in a macabre coincidence, he had been on a group road bike ride in Big Cottonwood Canyon when one of the cyclists turned a corner and ran smack into the back of a bus. The man slid under the bus and Joey, right behind, jumped off his bike and crawled under the bus to help. That’s when he heard the gurgling noise that came from deep in the rider’s chest. Life flight came quickly, but the man died before he got to the hospital.
That’s what was going through Joey’s mind when Max, his younger brother, jumped off his bike to help
Max could see something was wrong. There was blood oozing from a wound in his brother’s chest that looked like a bullet hole. He felt prompted to hold Joey’s hand and put his other hand on his head and promise he would make it out of there to find help
“He didn’t promise I’d get better, he promised I’d get help,” Joey remembers
It was the first of what some would call coincidences and others would call miracles
Miracle two: The crash happened at the end of the ride, just two minutes from the Mueller Park trailhead. Not only had Max’s 911 call already alerted paramedics, there also happened to be a firefighter in the parking lot getting ready for a bike ride of his own who helped expedite the process. Within no more than a dozen minutes, Joey had made it from the crash site to the ambulance
Miracle three: When Joey’s wife, Kari, had been notified they were taking her husband to Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, she asked them to instead take him to the University of Utah Hospital. Kari worked at the University of Utah Hospital and, to be on the safe side, she felt Joey should go to a Trauma 1 facility, which the University of Utah was and Lakeview was not
Miracle four: After an operation in the OR where surgeons used a scope to clean out a cracked sternum and inflate a collapsed lung, Joey, given a clean bill of health, was on his way to a recovery bed two floors down in the ICU. But there were no ICU beds available, so he was temporarily put in a room right next door to the OR. It was there that, a short while later, a nurse happened to see that his blood pressure had plummeted and he had almost no pulse
Miracle five: In a Code Blue scene straight out of “The Pitt” — the kind you think “nah, that couldn’t happen” — the nurse alerted the anesthesiologist, who alerted the head trauma surgeon, who was in the OR scrubbing up for another surgery (and still answered his phone), who dropped everything and suddenly, there were no less than seven doctors intubating and compressing and rushing Joey back into the OR. His chest was sawed open in five seconds. A tiny sternum shard had penetrated the heart wall, creating two small holes. Joey’s chest cavity was filled with so much blood the heart couldn’t open or close. The doctors vacuumed out the blood, closed the holes and the heart went back to work.
Eight days later is when Joey was finally able to leave the hospital and ask the doctor about how best to heal
Lacking a proper medical protocol, the doctor did have some nonmedical advice
“Keep doing what you’ve been doing,” he said. “Because your physical fitness was a big factor in you still being here.”
Miracle six?
A year and a half earlier, Joey and Kari had joined a gym, Burn Boot Camp, near their home in South Jordan. After seeing a friend’s post, Kari had enrolled on a four-week promo. She liked it so much she signed up Joey, even though “he was not a gym guy.” He biked and skied and did a lot of cardio, but no strength training
Soon, both were regulars, big fans of the intense but relatively short 45-minute workouts that involved a lot of interaction with other gym members. “It’s a gym for normal people, as silly as that sounds,” says Kari. “There’s a lot of high-fiving, and there are no mirrors, because it’s not necessarily how you look, it’s how you feel.”
After the crash, the camaraderie went beyond the gym
In addition to family, friends and their local Latter-day Saint church community, “people from the gym just showed up,” remembers Kari. “They raised money for us, they brought us meals, they did chores around the house. The (gym) community is huge. It’s easy to miss your workout, but it’s hard to miss the people.”
No one was surprised when Joey got back to his workouts as soon as possible. (Kari never stopped; she credits exercise for helping her juggle work, raising three kids and caretaking for Joey.)
Nor was anyone surprised when the Burn Boot Camp franchise in South Jordan went up for sale this year and Joey and Kari bought it
They’ve kept their day jobs (she still works for the University of Utah Hospital, but at the Daybreak location; he’s working in technology), but in their off hours, they’re running the gym that helped saved Joey’s life
“We’ve always talked about owning a business,” says Kari, “and if we’re going to buy one, why not one we want to go to every day?”
“It’s personal as much as it’s a business,” confesses Joey, who freely admits that after all he’s been given, he’s trying his best to learn how to give back
“I don’t know why I made it,” he says. “Why did he pick me? Is there a reason? You look back on all those crazy miracles and you can just see the hand of the Lord in your life and you can’t help but feel lucky and grateful for people, for faith, for family — for everybody and everything that keeps you alive.”
