When the tractor ran over Bob Futh, he ended up with his lung poking through five broken ribs, along with a broken breastbone.
At 81, he’s doing fine, back on the tractor at 45-acre Starberry Farm in Washington Depot, tending to his apples, apricots, berries and other fruit.
One “sore subject”: The peaches didn’t come in this year.
And he credits a case of polio at 9 years old with teaching him how to cope with pain and immobility. Futh and his wife, Sally, are in good spirits these days.
“Thanks goes to the doctors and nurses and everybody in the trauma room” at Hartford Hospital, Futh said. “I just made a dumb mistake.”
Back on Nov. 18, 2021, his mistake was to think, once he realized his John Deere tractor was rolling, that he could climb aboard and reset the brake.
“It was one of the few times when Sally and I are not working together, and I wanted to get the sprayer ready for winter and give it one last clear water wash, and I drove into a horse pasture that had a hydrant where I could do that,” Futh said.
“I pulled up on the handbrake, and when I turned around I saw the tractor moving, so … I tried to jump up on the step, climb up on the tractor and I missed,” he said. “And right behind the step on the tractor is a big 1,000-pound wheel, and my feet dropped down and got caught onto that wheel immediately because it was rolling. So I was just stuck there with the tractor going over from toes to head.”
Surprisingly, he said, Futh didn’t feel much pain. “It was probably shock,” he said. “The first thing I could think of is, I need some help. And I got my cell phone out and I guess I was just crazily punching any buttons.”
That set off the alarm at the dispatching service. “He asked where I was calling from and I was able to give them all that information,” he said. “It wasn’t more than a few minutes and some of our local friends showed up already.”
So did one of his horses.
“One of our retired broodmares that was in the field came over and was licking the dirt and blood off my ear when the rest of the crew got there,” Futh said. “A few people were alarmed about me not minding a 1,200-pound horse standing with their hoofs only inches from my head. But she knew there was a problem.”
Futh never lost consciousness. He credits wet soil that sank a bit under the weight of the tractor for his not being crushed. “But the smartest thing I did that whole day, I guess, I told them to put the bird in the air. They know what that means,” he said.
What it means is to summon Life Star, which airlifted him to Hartford Hospital. Unfortunately, Sally Futh had fallen and cut her leg and was brought to New Milford Hospital, so she couldn’t join her husband.
“I was up in the orchard working to prepare an order of apples,” Sally Futh said. “And fortunately one of our neighbors had a pager and heard the call. … And my first question to the ambulance was, ‘Is he alive?’ and they said, ‘Oh yes.’”
Still, she was “distraught, to say the least.”
“I was shocked and I didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Sally Futh said. “Bob was in amazingly good spirits. I could see that he had gotten badly damaged. We had no idea of the extent of it.”
“We were dealing with a lot of chest trauma,” said Dr. Daniel Ricaurte, a trauma surgeon with Hartford Hospital’s Chest Wall Injury Center, who was concerned about whether he could keep Futh from needing a ventilator, because once on the machine it’s difficult to come off, especially at an advanced age.
“So first off, as always, is identifying all the injuries, trying to put the puzzle pieces together and figure out what the next best step is,” Ricaurte said.
“In Bob’s case, the images showed that he essentially had a significant number of rib fractures. His sternum, the breastbone, was broken as well,” he said. “He had collapsed lungs on both sides. He had fluid around his lungs, which was blood, essentially, and so the first 24 hours was trying to stabilize Bob.”
Once he was stabilized, Ricaurte realized that Futh’s lung was protruding out of his chest like a small balloon, just under the skin.
“He unfortunately was one of the unlucky few,” Ricaurte said. “His lung managed to find a way through the break in the ribs. And though that wasn’t apparent from day one, when he came in, it became more obvious and it tends to happen as the ribs get more displaced and he struggles to breathe and cough.”
Before he could undergo surgery to reduce the lung and put it back inside his chest, Futh needed an operation to repair his breastbone. Both bones — the manubrium at the top and the sternum — were broken, displaced and putting pressure on his heart, Ricaurte said. A plate was placed on the breastbone.
The second surgery repositioned Futh’s lung and put plates on his ribs, which required thoracic, trauma and plastic surgeons from the Chest Wall Injury Center. “He does have hardware in his chest that Bob keeps as a souvenir from the time he spent with us at Hartford Hospital,” Ricaurte said.
But because the injury was so traumatic, Futh had to go on a ventilator for a couple of days.
“The good news was, obviously, Bob was a fighter and he was able to get through this, and he eventually came off the breathing machine, spend a few days in our intensive care unit under a lot of sedation and a lot of trying to maintain his blood pressure where it needed to be, make sure his heart was beating as it should be,” Ricaurte said.
He emphasized how devastating Futh’s injuries were.
“We always say that mortality increases significantly by every rib fracture an elderly patient has,” Ricaurte said. “And so by the number of rib fractures and the severity of his trauma, a great number of patients, unfortunately, would have succumbed to his injuries.”
Futh said when he had polio, “I learned then what it was like to have pain, what it was like to not be able to move around, not be able to walk, be able to play the way kids that age could. And I really think that that experience helped me along with this one. Not as as much as our friends up in Hartford.”
Now, Futh said, “The end of the day comes up in a hurry. But I can still get up at 5 o’clock and stay awake until 8:30 or 9 (p.m.).”
“He won’t admit that age has a little more to do with what happened to him, I guess,” Sally Futh said.
“It’s very moving to see and hear Bob and his story because, unfortunately, with what we do we don’t always see the side of the good ending,” Ricaurte said.
“And so to see someone like Bob fight through his injuries, to motivate himself, his family, to keep pushing … it’s warming to know that we were able to help him,” he said.
Ed Stannard can be reached at [email protected].
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