Dan and I met as teenagers working at McDonald’s like many of us did in the early 80’s. On paper, we didn’t have much in common. He came up in a rough neighborhood with a troubled family that was still negatively influencing his life. I grew up in modest blue-collar neighborhood, on a single family salary of a father who worked as an air traffic controller for the FAA.
But we chased the same thing — girls, a little trouble, a lot of laughs, and each other’s company. We lived together, dated the same girl — whom he later married — threw a few punches over the same girl, hunted deer, rode motorcycles, played pickup ball down on the University of Kentucky courts until three or four in the morning, delivered pizzas, threw boxes on the midnight shift at UPS, and even worked loss prevention together, catching shoplifters at Gold Circle and McAlpin’s. Whatever our differences, the bond we built in those years never got matched again after he was gone.
Dan had a gift most people don’t possessed. Everybody liked him, instantly. Within a couple of years, he was running the busiest Domino’s Pizza store down on campus in Lexington, in the mid-1980s at the age of 22 years old. Like me, he worked two jobs so his wife could stay home and raise their two boys. He also had an unusual nose for catching thieves, on and off the clock, and it was steering him toward a real career in retail loss prevention. He’d only finished two semesters at UK, but he was talking about going back — following my lead, he said.
I’d just finished my master’s at Eastern Kentucky University in loss prevention and safety and was packing up for my first real job in Dallas. That’s when Dan called, looking for advice. He’d hurt his back at UPS, nothing dramatic, just a bad lift from one of the 3500 plus boxes he lifted every night. One doctor told him to commit to months of physical therapy. Another told him surgery was the answer.
Against my advice Dan leaned toward the surgery. Not because it was the easy way out, but because the recovery time meant weeks at home with his boys he barely saw while pulling 60 to 70 hours a week. I told him not to rush into an operation. I’d never trusted surgery as a quick fix for anything. He went ahead with it anyway.
The first surgery didn’t hold. Then came a second. Then a third. Somewhere in there, our friendship changed shape without either of us really deciding it should. If I wanted to talk about a UK basketball game or plan a trip home to go deer hunting, we didn’t have text messages back then so I learned to call Dan around dinnertime. Any later in the evening, and the opioids he’d been prescribed for the pain made it hard for him to hold up his end of a conversation.
Then came the call. It was February 10, 1996. I had just moved my family back to Lexington. I was excited and was settling in when Dan’s wife called early that morning. She’d found him that morning, lying lifeless on the floor. He was 31-years-old. The cause was an accidental overdose of the pain medication he’d been living on since 1993, medication that was supposed to drown out the pain from a decision he’d made to buy a few extra weeks with his sons.
Back injuries are among the most disabling, most painful injuries a person can sustain. And sometimes what kills you isn’t the injury itself — it’s everything that follows it — the surgery, the medication, the slow erosion of a life spent managing pain instead of living around it.
Not long after Dan’s funeral, my own father hurt his back. I watched a grown man crawl to the bathroom on his hands and knees, in tears, for days. He never touched an opioid and that image has stayed with me just as long as Dan’s. You don’t have to die from a back injury for it to take something from you.
I spent more than nine years at UPS part-time, lifting 1,000 boxes an hour, some as heavy as 75 pounds, out of the Lexington hub. I was young, strong, could bench 270 pounds, and rolled my eyes every time a supervisor told me to lift with my legs and not my back. When supervisors would try to coach me to lift with my legs, I would usually turn and say, “if he would leave me alone, then I get him 1200 boxes an hour.” I felt bulletproof. I wasn’t. I was just injuring myself a little at a time, every single lift that I did wrong.
That’s the part most people miss when I ask Dan’s question. “Can You Die From A Back Injury?” in a back injury prevention safety class. A back injury rarely comes from one dramatic lift. It comes from a thousand ordinary ones, done wrong, compounding quietly for years, until one day it’s something as small as bending over for a pen that finally puts you on the floor.
Most people who sit through a lifting class don’t want to be there, and most think they already know it all. So, I open with the question, and 98 percent of them say no, you can’t die from a simple back injury. Then I tell them about Dan. By the end, I usually have the whole room’s attention and a few people come to find me with their own version of this same story. Some of them are in tears when they tell it.
A few summers ago, back when I still had my motorcycle, I rode out to the cemetery in Versailles where Dan is buried. On the way, I stopped and bought two beers, one for me, one for him. I drank mine at his graveside and left the other behind, the same way I remind him every time that his death still serves a purpose, and that it will keep serving one as long as I’m still able to tell his story.
Luckly until today, I have never experienced a severe back injury, and I cautiously protect my back whenever I can. In fact, whenever at Home Depot or Lowes if something weighs more than 50 lbs, I’ll ask for assistance and patiently wait for help to have somebody else younger load it into my vehicle.
As a disclaimer, being safety conscious and not wanting to end up in someone else’s life-lesson story, I didn’t finish the entire beer for those of you that were wondering.
Be safe my friends.
Keven Moore works in risk management services. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky, a master’s from Eastern Kentucky University and 25-plus years of experience in the safety and insurance profession. He is also an expert witness. He lives in Lexington with his family and works out of both Lexington and Northern Kentucky. Keven can be reached at kmoore@higusa.com