BRECKENRIDGE, Minn. – One uneven turn and a life can change forever. James “Jim” Jawaski, 59, knew this, but on Sept. 27, 2023, he met that reality in a near-fatal way.
It was a celebratory week. Just four days earlier, the Jawaski family had gathered for the wedding of his foster son, Darian Clark, and his bride, Samantha, at Crooked Lane Farm in Colfax, North Dakota.
That Wednesday morning, Jim’s wife, Kari, was busily cleaning out their home of 36 years, readying to move into their dream home. Jim had taken the day off work at their business, Jawaski Glass in Wahpeton, North Dakota, to help with the new place.
On the site of that new house, the contractors had asked Jim if he could help put up the final walls, and he gladly agreed, proceeding to successfully maneuver the telehandler forklift. “It was easy-peasy,” he says, noting that he then began driving the 20,000-pound rig to the front of the house.
But as Jim turned the vehicle toward the driveway, he could feel the vehicle tipping. “The dirt had gotten soft with the (recent) rain, and the back tire dropped in two feet, pulling the front tire across the machine, and it laid over on its side,” he recalls. The door opened, and he lost his footing. “My feet went out the door, and the pile drove my legs into the ground.”
Gushing blood alerted him that he needed immediate help. One of the contractor’s sons had run over to where he was, and he told him to call 9-1-1. “There was a heavy pain on my legs, and I couldn’t get them out of the ground.”
Soon, the other contractors were there, and though his legs were pinned into the earth, and time was critical, Jim was clear-headed. “I basically orchestrated my own recovery out of the machine.”
They first tried using his Bobcat parked nearby, but its 3,000-pound capacity wasn’t enough. Later, Jim would be grateful for that. “I had torn the one muscle right off my leg, and the pressure of the machine was holding the blood in,” acting as a tourniquet.
Jim also noticed his legs were bent. “Bones do not bend,” he says. “They break.”
He then told the workers to call the city to get a payloader over. By then the first responders had begun arriving and working to free him, eventually cutting out the windshield and side window. As his legs were released, blood began pouring out, and it was clear a real tourniquet was needed. “As soon as I could get up, I flew out onto their cot,” he says, and a second tourniquet was applied.
After a short time at the hospital, Jim was transported to Fargo by air to begin a series of surgeries to save his life—and his legs.
A praying granddaughter
Shortly after the accident, Jim’s granddaughter, Cambri Christensen, 6, was with her kindergarten class at St. Mary’s School. Hearing an ambulance whizzing past the school, the teacher had her students stop to pray for the person needing help. “She didn’t know it was going to be me,” Jim says.
Jacie, Cambri’s mother, was home with her younger two children when a friend texted her, having learned from a prayer chain that her father had been in an accident at his house and needed prayers.
“People were fighting for him from the start,” Jacie says, even before knowing any details. And when Cambri learned later that day that the ambulance had been called for her “Papa,” “She couldn’t wait to tell me,” Jim says.
Meanwhile, as the emergency sirens blared, Kari was furiously working to clean the couple’s now-former home for its new owners. “Jim was going to come back and help me finish and clean the garage,” she says. “I heard the sirens, but just said a little prayer.”
About a half hour later, she heard a knock on the door. “I had just started cleaning a window. It was a policeman.” Before he could speak, Kari was apologizing for the semi parked across the street, promising it would be moved soon. “I’m so sorry, Kari, but that’s not why I’m here,” he responded. Soon, she was in his car on the way to the hospital.
She would never finish cleaning. Family and friends took up the charge, including their daughter, Allie, who stayed back to direct the volunteer crew.
Kari believes the fast-acting prayer chain is how she stayed surprisingly calm. “I just knew my life was covered in prayer, because this is not how I usually react” (to emergencies),” she says.
But tears did eventually come. After talking to Jim briefly in the ambulance garage, Kari watched him being wheeled to the helicopter and airlifted to Fargo, and then, while alone in the cop car, she says, it finally happened. “I remember putting my head in my hands and saying, ‘Dear God!’ It was so scary.”
Their daughter Karli’s husband, Josh Hitt, volunteered to drive to Fargo to be there for Jim while he underwent his first surgery, with Jacie and Kari following a few hours later.
Worrisome days, dying legs
Jacie says seeing her dad, usually the most joyful person in the room, in such a weakened, sad state was difficult, but the prayers were already moving. “By that point, he’d found out he hadn’t broken any bones,” she says. “There was miracle after miracle, honestly.”
The second surgery involved repairing a muscle that had blown out and was shredded, Jim says. Doctors began suggesting possible amputation of part of each leg due to concern blood flow might not return.
That night, Jim experienced excruciating pain and begged for more pain medication but was told he’d gotten the maximum. He began relenting to life, asking God to let him die. “I’m ready,” he recalls praying. “I can’t tolerate this pain anymore.”
But just then he heard “a still, small voice,” saying it wasn’t time. “And my legs felt like they lifted off the bed,” he says. “The pain went away!”
Much to his and the medical team’s shock, he says, it never returned. “The next morning, I woke up, praising God,” he says, later learning the intolerable pain was blood trying to make its way back into his muscles. “The doctors were in awe!”
It’s way beyond luck. (Jim Jawaski)
Jim has proof of the miracle, he says, mentioning photos of his shredded muscle, and another four days later, another image showing the same muscle “toned in the tendons.” “Five days in, I’m back on my feet and made 10 steps,” he says. He ultimately endured seven surgeries over his 15-day stay, with an eighth surgery a week later.
Three months later, he’s back to work and back to normal, he says, except for one thing. “I can’t do a headstand.” Up until recently, Jim was known as a grandpa who would stand on his head to impress his grandchildren.
It has not been easy; he had to learn to walk again, he says, noting that muscle memory is a real thing. “When you have a torn muscle, your mind has to work with your muscle,” he adds, noting that while he quickly learned to walk forward, walking sideways and backwards has been challenging. “You don’t think about those little things you’re used to, like stepping around a puddle,” until you can’t.
‘A walking miracle’
Jacie calls her father “a walking miracle,” adding that it’s not the first time God has responded so lovingly. He also survived a serious stroke five years ago, and as a boy, he recovered after falling down some stairs and breaking open a vein in his arm.
Another time, her dad reached out to God in a desperate time. “He was on his knees with his Bible open, crying out for a miracle,” she says, and it was given.
Though he has a special bond with all his grandkids, Jacie says, the recent memory of her father and youngest, Carsten, 1, learning to walk together is one of her favorites. “That was a really special moment.”
Shortly after the accident, she sang, “Such an awesome God” at church, thinking of her dad. “It talks about how God is so mighty, so holy, so wonderful,” Jacie says. “And even if we don’t always see miracles or experience them firsthand, do we still look at God like this?”
Her sister Amber Jawaski of Texas couldn’t be here during her father’s recovery, but played a song she wrote, “ Run and Not Grow Weary ,” for him, which he says hastened his healing.
“My legs were black—there was no life there. That’s what happens to us when we don’t have Christ in our lives,” Jim says, noting the symbolism of the Resurrection that, after three days without blood flow, his legs came back to life. “I felt the hand of God. I have no earthly explanation for what happened,” he adds. “It’s way beyond luck.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Feb. 25, 2024.]
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