Colorado woman, 75, crawled across remote landscape for 14 hours with broken leg after accident
Charlene Kirby, 75, had been working alone on her property in the rural town of McCoy on June 7 in preparation for her grandson's wedding at the ranch, when she found herself in a life-threatening situation, Denver 7 reports.
She had loaded weeds and tree limbs from the property into a trailer with a side-by-side utility vehicle, and was pulling it up a gulley when the rig suddenly jackknifed.
'I was standing right behind the side-by-side and I was pulling straight, the trailer to straighten it out. And the side-by-side started running backwards over me,' Kirby recounted.
'So I started running backwards and then I turned to run, and that's when I fell.'
As a former EMT and emergency room nurse, Kirby immediately realized she had broken her femur - which runs from the hip to the knee - and was in danger.
'You're really not supposed to move a [broken] femur because you could sever your femoral artery,' which could cause you to bleed to death, Kirby explained.
But without anyone around to help her, Kirby said she had no choice but to make her way back to her house - a quarter of a mile away, according to Vail Daily.
'In my mind, I was going to get home, I was going to drag myself in my basemen t and call 911, because I have a phone down there,' she explained.
So from 7pm on June 7 until 9am the next morning, Kirby slowly made her way across the property.
'People ask me if I did the army crawl, and I said, "No I think it was more like the inch worm,"' she joked.
The trek was not easy - and at one point it started to rain.
'I got really cold,' Kirby recounted. 'I just really start shaking hard. And I'm like, "Am I in hypothermia? Am I going into shock - because you can lose a lot of blood into that space? Or am I just in pain?"
'I'm like, "Well, I'm probably all three."'
With no other options, Kirby said she decided to pull her sweatshirt over her head and started breathing into her sweatshirt 'and it would warm me up.'
By daybreak, Kirby said she began praying her son, Rick, would arrive earlier than usual to irrigate and feed the steers - and by some miracle he showed up an hour earlier than he normally would.
At that point, Kirby was so close to her house that she could hear her dog whimpering from behind an invisible fence.
Rick then followed the drag marks until he found his mother lying in the dirt and called for an ambulance.
'I had dirt in my nose, in my ears, on my teeth, my hair - all down the front of me,' Kirby said.
When she then arrived at the hospital, Kirby found out just how bad her injury was - a complete break across her femur with multiple fragments.
She underwent surgery on her hip and the tp of the femur on June 9 and had to spend three weeks in rehab.
But during that time, her determination never wavered, even when the doctors told her she would be able to make it to her grandson's wedding but would not be able to dance.
'Watch me,' she replied.
The loving grandmother now credits her survival to her faith.
'There's no doubt in my mind, that's because God was with me the whole time,' she said, adding that she got lucky.
'I didn't hit my head, I didn't break both my arms. I'm lucky. It could have been a lot worse, especially if that side-by-side had run over me.'
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