David Carroll of Bensenville was a rising triathlete with Olympic aspirations when a car driven by a drunken driver slammed into his bicycle on Sayer Road in Bartlett last year.
As fast as speeding metal severs skin and bone, Carroll`s racing dreams were shattered.
His left leg was crushed between the knee and the ankle. Emergency room doctors were preparing him for the worst when a faint pulse in the limb was detected. They ruled out immediate amputation and instead performed the first of four operations to rebuild the leg. They told the 26-year-old athlete that, with luck, he might be able to walk in 18 months.
Carroll surprised them. Four months later, he competed in Leon`s Triathlon in Hammond, Ind., a race he calls ”one of my favorite`s.” His preaccident time for Leon`s had been 2 hours, 4 minutes; in that first race after the accident he was clocked at 3 hours and 10 minutes. This summer, he took on Leon`s again and finished in 2 hours flat. He had beaten his own best record.
Such an outcome was far from the thoughts of the surgeons who examined Carroll when he was brought to Humana Hospital in Hoffman Estates that April evening.
”When they brought Dave in,” said Dr. Irwin Carson, ”his leg looked horrible. The fact that he was a triathlete, well, it didn`t appear that that would be in the future for him.” Carson is an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine.
Triathlon races combine swimming, bicycling and running for varying distances. The sport is not yet on the Olympic roster, but Carroll said,
”Most of us are hoping it will be soon.”
Shortly before he was injured, Carroll had qualified for the top national tier of triathletes and had become licensed as an elite/amateur by Tri-Fed, the national sanctioning committee for the sport. This arrangement permitted him to retain his amateur status while racing with professionals.
Carroll carries 165 pounds on a 5-foot-11-inch frame, and at the time of the accident, he was in peak form. Carson said, ”This was a guy who was super strength before he was injured, and that helps (in recovery).”
Carroll needed all the help he could get during those first bleak hours following the crash. The car had struck him head-on, its bumper smashing into his leg. ”It first broke me in half and then it broke my bike in half,” he said.
”He had an open fracture of the left tibia,” his doctor explained.
”When he came to the emergency room, the bone was sticking out in two places. It was in a number of pieces, malaligned and all that. That kind of injury has a 10 to 20 percent rate of requiring amputation. There was a lot of dirt and foreign material in the wound. Even if the blood vessels do not go into spasm and cut off circulation, you have a relatively high risk of infection.”
Carroll was fitted with an external fixation device, a kind of bar, instead of a cast, to permit the open wound to heal. Within four weeks, he was swimming, bar and all.
”I had to use a pull buoy between the legs to support them,” Carroll said. ”Then you can concentrate on swimming with the upper body and let the legs follow along. That provided a lot of comfort. I felt the best, pain-wise, when I was in the water, and it did a lot of good, too.”
Carroll planned his own rehabilitation at Gottlieb Health and Fitness Center in Melrose Park.
”I had a good doctor, and I was always one step ahead of him. He`d say,
`What are you doing now?`, and when I`d tell him, he`d either say, `Don`t do that,` or `Go ahead if you can do it.”`
Carson said, ”He`d always push me. I`d let him push a little, but not too much. He was smart enough to understand that he shouldn`t go too fast and then have problems, but I watched him carefully.”
From swimming, Carroll graduated to weight-lifting, moving only his right leg. Next, he tried to mimic the right-leg movements with his injured left leg.
”I could barely bend it, but I kept trying to stretch it out, making it work as much as I could,” he said.
Next he was riding his mountain bike on the asphalt trails of the forest preserve. ”It`s funny,” he said, ”Before, I used to ride 30 or 40 miles at a time. At first I`d be lucky to make eight miles at an easy pace. It was almost like starting over again.”
Finally, in August of 1989, one week after the bar was removed from his leg, he was racing again in Leon`s Triathlon. More races followed, and the old skills returned, gradually, unevenly, painfully.
”It`s been good and bad since then,” he said. ”There have been times when I`ve thought: I`m going to have to give this up; it hurts too much. But I`d think, I`ll keep going, I gotta keep going, and then it`s been really good.”
How good? Carroll won the 1990 Gottlieb Health and Fitness Triathlon,
”much to my surprise and everyone else`s,” he said. He placed third in his age division in a 10K run sponsored by the Bartlett Park District and third in the Mid-Ohio Challenge Triathlon in his age group.
On Aug. 26 he competed for the first time in the Budweiser Ironman Canada, held in Penticton, British Columbia.
”It starts with a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, which is a full marathon run to the finish. I finished in 11 hours, 20 minutes. That placed me in the top third,” he said.
But he insisted he is most proud of his showing in the 1990 Leon`s Triathlon, where he didn`t place.
”It was the best race of my life,” he said. ”It was sanctioned as the national amateur championship, the qualifier for the U.S. national amateur team and the world championship coming up in the fall. There were teams from all over the world and the best competition I`ve ever seen in a race. It was great to be there. It helped push me to get my best time.”
That kind of grit, Carroll`s surgeon said, is what helped put him back in the game. Carson said, ”He had a lot of things going for him: He was young, he was not just athletic but a highly skilled athlete in tremendous shape, and he was determined to get back.”
”I also got lots of support from my wife and parents and my friends,”
said Carroll, who is a sales engineer for a manufacturer in Elk Grove Village. His wife, Betty, gave birth to their first child the day after Carroll raced in the Canadian Ironman.
”We weren`t due until Sept. 23,” he said. ”That`s one reason I picked the Canadian in August over the Hawaiian in early October. The day after the race I was recovering, and when I got back from the awards dinner that night, I go the phone call that she was in the hospital. So I had to do what I call another Ironman just to get home: drive 370 miles in the middle of the night to get to the airport, get on the first plane back, and head for the hospital.”
Baby beat Dad in that race; new daughter Doris was on hand to greet Carroll when he arrived.
With a new baby and two good legs, Carroll is looking ahead.
”I`d like to see some good come out of this,” he said, ”to show people that when bad things happen, you can overcome them. And to get drunk drivers off the road.”
The man who was driving the car that struck Carroll was arrested after leaving the scene of the accident, refused to take a breath test and was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. After a court hearing, he failed to pay his fine. Bartlett police said there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
Carroll plans to race in the U.S. Triathlon Series national championship in Las Vegas in October, and he expects to do well.
”I wouldn`t say getting hit by a drunk driver improved my game, but it improved my drive. Before, my attitude was, There`s always the next race. Now, there`s a lot more motivation, more mental drive to win this one.”
Whatever the outcome of that race, Carroll will lead the pack. As his doctor said, ”I`ve given up predicting what David is going to do.”
