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EAU CLAIRE, Wis. – A year ago, UW-Eau Claire professor Don Parker fell from a tree stand while hunting, severely injured his spinal cord, and laid in the woods 17 hours until rescuers found him 500 yards from his house with a body temperature of 84 degrees.
Parker was lucky. He lived.
Typically every year in Wisconsin, at least one hunter dies after a fall from a tree stand and many more receive life-changing injuries. Although Wisconsin and other states do not track how many people fall from tree stands or other elevated platforms, it’s a common problem. A 1995 national survey of deer hunters found that one third of the respondents had fallen from a tree stand during their hunting career, says Tim Lawhern, Wisconsin’s hunter education administrator.
Parker, an assistant kinesiology professor and longtime coach of the university’s wrestling team, had gone hunting Oct. 1, 1998, on a neighbor’s property, in a section he normally didn’t hunt. By 4:30 p.m., he was sitting in a seat attached to a tree, about 12 feet above the hillside a few miles south of Eau Claire. He wasn’t wearing a safety strap – a piece of equipment he now believes is crucial. "I had used the seat in the three years before and hadn’t had a problem. You get kind of confident," Parker said.
He checked his watch at 5:15 p.m., and the next thing he knew, his wristwatch alarm awoke him at 7 p.m. and he was lying on the ground on top of the seat. " I looked up and knew right away I broke my back or neck," Parker recalls. "I could feel my feet but I couldn’t move them and I couldn’t move my right arm."
At 10 p.m., he heard his wife toot the car horn, a signal he was supposed to come in. His wife had never seen where his tree stands were, and didn’t know he was hunting a section of land he normally didn’t hunt. Sheriff’s deputies and volunteer firefighters searched for him until 3 a.m., and then called the search off until daylight.
The temperature dropped down to 28 degrees that night, and Parker tried to keep warm by first using his good hand to cover his injured hand with leaves, and then putting his good hand into his pocket. He credits his physical fitness conditioning, and the experience that being a two-time national collegiate wrestling champion had given him in handling stressful situations, with helping him survive the night.
Finally, at 10:15 a.m., rescuers found him and airlifted him to a local hospital, where doctors found that Parker’s fourth, fifth, and sixth vertebras were out of place. He had an operation to put titanium plates between the vertebras, and then fuse the bones together.
Parker spent 24 days in a hospital in Eau Claire, and another two months at a rehabilitation institute in Minneapolis. His two grown daughters moved home to help his wife and teen-aged daughter help him continue to relearn the typical skills and movements of daily living.
"It was really helpful having all three of them at home," Parker says. "It was a big transition. I couldn’t even transfer from the bed to the wheelchair. I could hardly hold a spoon and knife." Now, he is learning to do those things with his left hand.
Parker has also received "great support" from neighbors, colleagues at UW, his wrestling student-athletes, and physical therapists. His athletes, for example, helped lift him into a colleague’s indoor pool so he could continue his rehabilitation there, and colleagues also helped line up students who are training to be physical therapists to work with him.
That help has enabled him to teach one course this semester, to return to coaching, and to make progress in his quest to walk again. "Just in the last two weeks I’ve been using a walker and walk 30 feet," Parker says. "It’s a great feeling."
The progress comes little by little, in short steps. "But if you look back at where you’ve come from, you see you’ve come a far way," he says. "And you can look at {others’ experience in falling from tree stands) and you consider yourself pretty lucky."
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Tim Lawhern (608) 266-1317
Uploaded: 10/27/1999
Uploaded: 10/27/1999