Patrick
The air ambulance program that flew a four year old to a trauma center in 1985 was only months old. The man who built it is the reason there is anybody here to play.
I was four and a half in August of 1985. An industrial shelf came down toward my younger brother and I got in the way of it.
My lungs failed, my ears bled, and my voice was silenced.
A helicopter took me from Monticello to a trauma center in the Twin Cities. I have told that part before. What I did not understand for most of my life is how new that helicopter was.
The program was months old
The air ambulance program that came for me had just been built, and Patrick is the one who built it. He is the reason there was a helicopter at all, and the reason there was a crew on board who knew what to do with a four year old who had stopped breathing.
If it had happened a year earlier I do not know how the night ends. I am not going to dramatize that. I just know the answer is not the same one.
Forty years is a long time to say thank you
I made a short film about this. It took much longer than it should have, and what it really is underneath is a letter to Patrick, saying the thing that does not fit in a card.
He does not need me to explain his own career to him. What I wanted him to hear is what the thing he built did to one family he has no particular reason to remember.
Where this one gives
It goes to the program that flew me, and it goes there directly. Nothing comes through me.