Getting lots of help after the fall

COEUR d’ALENE — Tom Torgerson is lucky to be alive.

He knows that and his wife KJ knows that.

It’s been three months since Tom fell from a 12-foot ladder while hanging weatherstripping in his shop on Fernan Hill Road, landing head first on the concrete floor, shattering the back of his skull, and swallowing the three two-and-three-quarter-inch nails he’d been holding in his mouth.

It was Oct. 20, around 10:15 p.m., and KJ, in the bedroom, could hear the hammer thumping away, and a few minutes later, when it stopped.

“I figured he’d found one more thing to do,” she said from the couple’s home last Monday, with Tom and daughters Riley, 7, and Taylor, 5. “He’s always finding one more thing to do.”

Tom remembers leaning back, “instead of moving the ladder a couple of inches,” to nail in the last of it, and the moment his balance went.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’ve fallen from a ladder before,’” Tom said. “I don’t think I even let go of the hammer.”

After that, it’s a blur.

But to hear his story, he and his family want to say thanks first.

Thanks for all the small things — every tidbit and routine families take for granted when their lives are not in crises, but become overwhelming when they wake up one day and they are.

It’s a home-cooked meal, a winterized home, plowed snow and chopped firewood.

It’s months of packing the girls’ lunches and shuttling the girls to school. It’s “prayers, prayers, and prayers,” KJ said.

“We had a lot of people we didn’t even know help us,” KJ said, remembering one man who showed up at the Torgerson home to help. “And when I asked him why, he said that he had a 2-year old in the hospital for six months.”

Humbling, Tom said.

“I was absolutely overwhelmed,” he said. “I had no idea.”

One minute you’re hammering, and days later hundreds of people have logged online to help out, to cook your family meals. Humbling, when you didn’t know if you knew hundreds of people in town in the first place.

“I know Tom would do the same for anybody else,” said Greg Prado, Century 21 real estate agent who works with Tom.

Prado, a self-described “competition barbecue guy,” set up a dinner donation site for the Torgersons at www.takethemameal.com. Not only weeks of donated dinners filled up in days, the menu got more and more fancy as it did.

“It kind of became a competition, people were trying to do better and better,” he said. “After it filled up people even called and said, I don’t live there, I can’t bring him a meal, but can I help in some other way?”

After the fall, Tom doesn’t remember walking into the bedroom to get KJ, unable to speak, bleeding from the ears. KJ drove him to the hospital, in “crisis management mode,” fixated on solving the problem rather them dwelling on it. She’d thought he’d had a stroke. It wasn’t until days later, when her girlfriends came to help out, did the severity sink in and KJ cried.

Tom remembers pieces of his six nights at Kootenai Medical Center, and the three weeks of 24-hour supervision and hours of physical and speech therapy still.

But there are humorous moments the couple can share, now that he’s on the mend.

“Funny at my expense,” Tom joked.

Suffering perforated eardrums, bi-frontal lobe contusion, cranial nerve damage and subdural hematoma along with the fractures, Tom’s impulse control was lost during the recovery’s beginning.

He would grab the keys to the car and get ready to go boating at the drop of a hat. He likes ice cream now. He never did before, but he’d wander off at the oddest hours to go find some, in the middle of the night, or across the street from the hospital before a follow-up appointment.

He’d fixate too. He’d be convinced of something, and not let it go. He heard a symphony under his hospital bed, and naysayers couldn’t say otherwise until they double, triple checked. He was convinced his buddies had blown off a planned steelhead fishing weekend with him — when they’d gone the weekend before.

“Too bad that fishing trip never happened,” he told KJ on the car ride home from KMC.

Doctors expect a nearly full recovery, but there are small tortures along the way, too.

Tom’s lost half the hearing in his right ear. His head feels congested, like he’s in an airplane. He has had to learn to pronounce ‘sp’ again, something he doesn’t quite feel he’s mastered enough. And he’s lost taste.

“You just don’t realize how much you appreciate things,” he said.

So thank you, the couple said. Tom is mending, he’s back at work, and they want to thank everybody for each small piece of help, each chore, routine and prayer. Thanks for making the unbearable, beatable.

“I never want to live anywhere else,” Tom said.