Colby Hall (7:14)
Well, when someone said, get a tourniquet. Fourth of July weekend up in Vermont, doubles, tennis, foothills of the Green Mountains, barbecues, beer, lake. It was perfect in every single way. And we just said, let's go water skiing. So we load up the boat with towels and, you know, we all get on there sort of excited to, you know, kill an hour and a half on a beautiful lake on just a gorgeous, gorgeous day. And just as we're sort of loading up the boat, a canoe comes up to the dock. And in the canoe is this family, this mother and father and their two little children, and they were staying in the house. And so we said, well, do you guys want to join us? Sure. So the two little kids get in the boat and the father gets in the boat and we pull out from the dock and we get about 30 yards away from the dock, and the boat driver stops. I have my little water ski safety devices belt on, and it's kind of old school type, and I jump off the side of the boat and the force of me getting in the water, the. The water ski belt falls off of me. No big deal. I'm just going to swim over. And I look up and the boat is closer to me than I had thought and was actually moving towards me. I guess what the driver had done is he may have thought he put it in neutral, but in fact he put it in very slight reverse and he didn't know that I was behind it. He was dealing with the rope. And so I'm in the water, buckling the water belt. And I look up and I notice, and it's about 10ft away from me. So I yell, hey, stop the boat. But it's a big boat, and, you know, the wind is blowing, and, you know, your head is, like, sort of level of the water. So no one really heard me. I couldn't move out of the way, and it literally just came right up to me. So I put my hands out to, you know, protect myself, and immediately, like, I feel like these punches on my legs, which was the boat propeller. People say, living in the moment like you. It's amazing to me how many complex thoughts you have in a split second. Wait, is this happening? Oh, my God, it's happening. Wow. This is cutting my legs. I'm trapped. I need to get out of this situation. I'm going to push up. I'm going to go under the boat and let it go over me. Like, that all happened in a split second. And at the same time, you're thinking, like, maybe this will just be a bad injury, or maybe I'll lose the use of one leg. There's all these sort of weird deals that you make in your head. Like, I don't want to die, so I'll just, you know, be in a wheelchair, or maybe I'll just be really, really injured, or maybe I'll never be able to play basketball again. Maybe I'll just always walk with a limp. You know, the other side to this. This all happened one month to the day of my wedding. He had planned this, really. I mean, it was small, but beautiful wedding upstate. And, you know, I wanted to walk down the aisle. I wanted to have the first dance. And it sounds odd to explain that you're having all those thoughts in that time, but you are. So I come up on the other side of the boat and sort of gasped for air, and I say, I'm hurt. It doesn't really hurt. Like you would think that was the weird thing. Like, it didn't hurt. It just. I mean, I feel it treading water, and my legs are kind of numb. I look up and my fiance is on the boat. And she gets up and she sees me, and she can see the ring of blood surrounding me. And the water up there is so clear that she could see through the water. She could see deep red tissue on my legs and big flaps of skin sort of hanging off my legs, floating with the motion of the water. And it was at that point that she. You know, the look on her face. And it's funny, like, Sometimes you don't recognize, like, how bad something is until you see it in the eyes of someone next to you. And so when she freaked out and had the look of absolute terror in her eyes, I kind of just took over the situation because I was 10 seconds ahead of everyone else. So I yelled to the wife of the boat operator, whose name is Maureen. I said in a very stern, serious, calm voice like, maureen, turn off the boat. She turned the boat off. And I realized that there were two little kids on the boat. And the first thought that came to my mind was, this is something that those kids shouldn't see. Before I came up, I said, maureen, these kids should not see this. You should hide their eyes. You should distract them. So she took the kids to the front of the boat. And I'm not a real strong person. I don't know how I got, like, sudden upper body strength, but I was able to just pull my full body weight. I weigh, like, 210, 15 pounds. And I just pulled myself up into the back of the boat, and there were my legs, layers of fat. I see muscle tissue. I mean, it's hard to sort of describe. Like, my legs were wide open. There were big hunks of sort of hanging off my leg, and the muscles just sort of there exposed to the air. The cuts went down to my bone. It's like you're at a fish market, and you see someone cut into a fish. You just see the insides, like, very, very clearly. And that's when John says, like, get a tourniquet. Because the injuries on my legs really looked like it warranted a tourniquet. And, you know, if I were to ask you to make a tourniquet right now, what would you do?
