GAH!!!
too bad he wasn't found first
After a 66-hour struggle to survive, a Saskatchewan farmer freed himself from a farm implement by cutting off two fingers with a pocket knife, then drove his tractor back home as the shock of the ordeal began to set in.
Neighbours in the Abernethy area, about 90 kilometres east of Regina, were oblivious to Bruce Osiowy's distress, which began when the 53-year-old caught his hand in a rock picker Thursday around 7 p.m. Wearing only a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans, Osiowy passed the days in the company of his dog, Gopher, who also kept him warm during the cold nights.
Osiowy, who is divorced and lives alone, was pinned beneath the machine but could hear his cell phone ringing from inside the tractor.
Desperate to get someone's attention and only about a kilometre away from the road, he used a wrench to bang loudly against the stonepicker.
While the desperate pleas were faintly heard by two farmers, they simply thought he was fixing machinery, said Beverley Kanciruk, a family friend and retired farmer who lives nearby.
"He braced his feet against the stonepicker and tried to pull his hand out, but it didn't come out so he cut his fingers off," she said he told her later in hospital.
On Sunday, around 1 p.m., Osiowy broke free and drove back home. Kanciruk and her husband found him shortly after in the farm house slumped over a chair talking to a medical dispatcher.
The Kanciruks decided to go check on him after receiving a desperate phone call from Osiowy's worried daughter-in-law.
"He was just a helluva mess," she recalled. "It was a shock. It was just like a little old man sitting there, hunched over with dirt all over his face. It didn't even look like him."
Osiowy's hand, which hung limply, was wrapped in a bloody paper towel, she said.
At the time, he wasn't lucid enough to give them details about what happened, she added.
But despite his shock, Osiowy was sufficiently aware to remove a very burnt roast from the oven, where he had put it to bake on Thursday, said Kanciruk.
Osiowy was recovering in a Regina hospital Wednesday where his condition was listed as stable and good.
Kanciruk said he's in good spirits but is also sad that his pleas for help weren't understood.
"I was talking to Bruce and he said, 'You know if they had come maybe I would've had a hand left.' "
Osiowy is president of Pro West Rally Group, a farm lobby group.
too bad he wasn't found first
