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Joy Faith Stories (Page 3)
(as written down by Rosalie Joy-one of my aunts)
Wayne and tractor: February 18, 1970. Wayne says he wasn’t living real well for the Lord at the time, but God protected him anyway. He was working on a railroad bridge for the I-70 project north of Salina. There was too much dirt on the berm, and he was pushing it down the grade. The grade was 1:1 slope. It was too steep for him to get the crawler to go back up the grade. They hooked the crawler tractor to the end of a crane. The crane operator would pull the crawler which Wayne was operating up the grade, Wayne would move the crawler over and push the dirt down. They kept doing this, with Wayne working his way across the grade. He was just moving the crawler over when the cable broke. The grade was too steep for the crawler to stay up, and because he was crosswise on the slope, the crawler started to turn over. As it turned over, Wayne ducked down as far as he could, and held onto the levers. As the tractor came over, the bracket on the back caught just enough on the cement piling that it kept the tractor from crushing Wayne completely. It flipped the tractor on over. R.K. Miller, who was Wayne’s boss, came to get me at the house, and took me to Salina. I found out later, that the workmen’s compensation department has people ready to come tell me that Wayne was dead. Wayne was afraid to lose consciousness, because he thought he might not wake up. His pelvis was broken in several places, there was internal bleeding, and his left hip was dislocated. They didn’t do surgery to stop the bleeding, which was a blessing. The Dr waited it out, and it stopped. They gave him pain killers and put the hip back in the socket. Much later, one of the Drs told us that people who were not nearly as severely hurt as Wayne was died in the hospital.
Wayne came home in 10 days on a walker. The first time we went to church, people said, “My, isn’t modern medicine wonderful?” We both thought by that time it was a GOOD thing Grandpa and Grandma Joy knew how to pray for healing, because modern medicine didn’t have anything to do with it!