08.01.2015

Man ejected from platform

The owner of a tree and landscaping company was ejected from the lift he was using on Monday in Richmond, Virginia.

Mike Witt, 43, was trimming a tree from his bucket truck at a height of around five metres, he cut the top section off the tree and it swung back and hit the platform, causing a catapult effect which ejected him from the platform. He sustained serious injuries which may paralyse him from the waist down.

He co-owns the company – A Cut Above – with his wife, who was working with him when the incident occurred. She said that he did a back flip in the air and went down landing on his face. He was rush to hospital and underwent an operation on Tuesday. The hospital believes that he will most likely not regain control over his lower body. He has two daughters, ages 11 and 14.

Clearly he was not wearing a harness that was attached to the platform with a short lanyard. If he had this might have just been another job.
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A Cut Above in action with its bucket truck

UPDATE
The following is a story of the progress Mike Witt is making over 18 months later: It is a sobering story and one that ought to be shared with anyone using a boom type lift, especially arborists.

A chill settled into Mike Witt’s shoulders on a recent misty day, reminding him that summer was over. He never liked to see the season go.
As a boy growing up in Salem, W.Va., it brought an end to long days outdoors. Later on, after he built a tree and landscape business from little more than a pickup and a chainsaw, it signalled an end to the most lucrative time of year.
Now, going on two years after the accident, the coming winter means a cold in his bones that only the summer sun seems to penetrate.
It is a small thing, considering the enormity of it all.

In January 2015, Witt was a 43-year-old newlywed with enough work to see him through spring. Business was as good as it had ever been; he worked seven days a week, often into the evenings, and liked it that way. He’d just bought a house with a lake view in Caroline County and relished his role as provider.

“Everything was looking good,” he said. “I was happy.”
Then came the fall: 15 feet from a bucket truck while trimming a tree in Richmond. Witt knew almost the moment he hit the ground he was paralyzed, and in those early months, it was matter of survival.

He spent 10 months in the hospital and defied doctors’ grim predictions.
Now he is watching everything he spent a lifetime building slowly slip away.
He has sold off most of his equipment: trucks and trailers, a wood chipper and a stump grinder, and the tools for maintaining them. It was the only way to qualify for the nursing care he needed.

He put the house on Lake Caroline up for rent and moved into a home in Spotsylvania County with an open floor plan where he can manoeuvre his wheelchair. His marriage has ended and now, so has summer.
Witt finds himself at a crossroads.Carving out a life

Witt grew up around trees. His stepfather built log cabins out of wood he cut at his own sawmill. After high school, Witt joined the Marines, serving from 1989 to 1996. Later, he went to work in construction and picked up tree and landscaping jobs on the side. He bought and ran a NASCAR store called Trackside in Woodbridge, selling racing memorabilia and bringing in drivers for autographs and meet-and-greets with customers. He’d intended to run the business as a hobby, but by the fifth year, Trackside had far exceeded his expectations.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, put a dent in sales. People started watching their spending. When eBay, an online auction site that sold much of the same merchandise as Trackside, further cut into his profits, he sold the store. Another major disaster would soon alter the course of Witt’s life: Hurricane Isabel, which in September 2003 pummelled Virginia to the tune of almost $2 billion in damage.

“I was swamped with work,” he said, and suddenly A Cut Above landscape and tree service was a full-time venture. Isabel alone gave him enough work for two years.

By January 2015, Witt employed six people. His clients included the city of Fredericksburg—landscaping work and, since 2012, hanging its Christmas decorations, which made him a bit of a holiday fixture.
They were scheduled to come down when he headed for a job in Richmond Jan. 5, 2015. He wouldn’t make it home for 10 months.

Witt didn’t see the top of a tree he’d just removed swing around before knocking him out. But he felt the impact, felt pain unlike anything he’d ever known, shooting through his neck and shoulders. He couldn’t move.
“Call 911,” he remembers calling out to his wife. “Tell them I’m paralyzed.”
Doctors at VCU Medical Center confirmed what he already knew.
He had no feeling or movement from the neck down. He lost his ability to breathe and speak on his own. Eighty pounds fell from his 6-foot-2 frame and a lack of physical therapy left his right arm contracted so tightly against his chest he thought it might break.

“They told my wife I wasn’t going to make it. If I did make it, I’d need a breathing tube for the rest of my life,” Witt said.
But there had been a glimmer of good news early on—the fall had not severed his spinal cord—and before long, Witt proved the doctors wrong.
‘It brought me to tears’

On a holiday weekend months after the accident, Witt sat in a wheelchair under a pavilion at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, where he would stay until the leaves began to change.
He heard a far-off rumble that grew steadily louder before he spotted them: at least a dozen bikers in black vests and hats. They parked and started walking directly toward him.

“Are you Mike?” one of them asked.
He joked that he wasn’t sure whether he should tell the truth or not.
They introduced themselves as the Old Dominion chapter of the Nam Knights of America, a motorcycle club made up largely of Vietnam vets that helped veterans, law enforcement officers and others. One of their members had heard about Witt’s accident. They’d come to present him with a check and try to raise his spirits.

“I don’t cry for anything,” Witt said, “but it brought me to tears.”
One biker who sat with him for two hours told how years before he’d been in the same place with the same injury and had recovered completely.
The story gave him hope he hadn’t had since the first day at the hospital. The visit offered more than that.

For most of his life, Witt had tried to help out others. He’d donated his services to cemeteries and churches and once answered a midnight call to get somebody’s pet parrot out of a tree. If anybody else did the same for others, he hadn’t noticed.

Until now. He saw it in the Nam Knights and the 2,500 cards and letters sent to him while was hospitalised. He saw it in Ann Black, whom he’d met just once before the fall but who made weekly visits from Spotsylvania to Richmond. She brought papers on medical advances and specialised equipment and sprinkled potato chips on his chest so he could eat them without calling for help after she left.
Later, after he went home, she arranged for someone to come give Witt a haircut when he mentioned it was time for one. When the yard work needed tending to, she brought over her grandson. And when he needed an accountant, she sent her daughter.

Black knew Witt came from a small family. She’d come a from a big, boisterous one and couldn’t imagine being in Witt’s position without them.
“I’m a woman of faith,” she explained. “I felt our paths had crossed once for a reason. I have a purpose. He has a purpose. That’s what he’s looking for now.”
Making strides

From his wheelchair, Witt uses two fingers taped together on his right hand to operate his iPad. A golden retriever puppy named Laika, a Father’s Day gift from his two teenage daughters from a previous marriage, runs laps around the living room.

This is how he spends a few minutes every morning while his nurse, Kathy Whittaker, makes breakfast in the kitchen after getting him out of bed and ready for the day.
The task once seemed impossible. But sensation in his upper body has turned into movement: Now Witt can scratch his nose and rub his head, and he no longer has to operate his wheelchair with a knob at his chin.
A handful of messages pop up on his iPad every day, mostly from friends who, two years after the accident, still check in to see whether he needs anything.
Witt mostly tells them he is fine because it isn’t in his nature to say otherwise.
Truth is, the carpet needs to come up and hardwood or laminate needs to go down to make it easier to get around in his wheelchair. Having assistive technology that the VA doesn’t cover would make his life easier. He needs a specialised mattress that will shift his position at night to avoid pressure sores and painful muscle spasms.

Black organied a fundraiser at Home Team Grill in Fredericksburg in September to help raise money for the $5,000 mattress, a price that does not include a bed frame. The funds were slowly adding up—about $1,300 from the event—when the Nam Knights paid him a visit last month.

Witt wanted to tell them thank you for visiting him in the hospital all those months ago, so he invited them over for a barbecue. They accepted under one condition: They’d provide the food. Black brought over a chocolate cake with “Thank you, Nam Knights,” spelled out in icing. Her grandson came along as host. Witt had the grill pulled out to the back patio. There was no need for even that. The motorcyclists from Purcellville and Woodbridge and Annandale and Chantilly had piled coolers on camper trailers hitched to their bikes and stopped at a barbecue joint on the way. There was beer and bottled water and soda and so much food it filled the counters in his kitchen.

They talked and ate and laughed and took pictures with their cellphones. The sun was out, the day warm. More than an hour had passed when a couple of the bikers huddled briefly in the kitchen and spoke quietly. It would be time to go soon—it would be a long drive back on a Saturday in Northern Virginia traffic—but they had one last thing they wanted to do. The five bikers in their black leather vests huddled around Witt. Their president, Bobby Sansale, spoke first.

“We we wanted to not only give you a cookout, but to help you in other ways,” he began. “Here’s a check for $1,500. Witt was silent for a moment. Then a smile flashed across his face.“That’s wonderful,” he said to the men who not long ago had been strangers but now stood in his living room, promising to come back soon.

HOW TO HELP To contribute to Mike Witt’s medical mattress fund, visit www.gofundme.com/2jve4wpw or mail a check, payable to Mike Witt, to Ann Black, 1st Choice Better Homes & Land, 1302 Bragg Road, Fredericksburg, VA 22407.
Kristin Davis: 540/374-5417