The Port Arthur News
May 08, 2008 08:36 pm
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Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on May 1, 1987.
Todd Dodge, quite frankly, figured the scars of those long, demeaning Saturday afternoons in Memorial Stadium, the ones where booing Texas fans designated him as the scapegoat for a sputtering offense would never go away.
His memories of wearing No. 13 in burnt orange, for good reason, just seemed destined to fluctuate between cynicism and bitterness.
Crank phone calls, sick letters, the rage at knowing loves ones in the stands were suffering from the verbal degradation would test the heart of the most forgiving Christian. Indeed, Dodge’s father, a Methodist minister, once confessed to seeking forgiveness from the Lord for things he wished upon the boo birds.
Less than two years later, however, the former schoolboy All-America quarterback at Thomas Jefferson can visualize the UT experience as somewhat of a day at the beach. After living to tell about what it’s like to go one-on-one with 450 volts of electricity, Dodge’s perspective has undergone considerable rearranging.
“I’m lucky to be able to see, fortunate to be alive,” he said. “When you go through something like that, a lot of things that seemed major become minor. I’m just thankful to be here, to know that I’m going to be able to live a normal life.
“It could have been so much worse. And, honestly, I think the football adversity helped prepare me to deal with the pain.”
Pain, both physical and mental, have been Dodge’s constant companion for nearly a month. He went home last week, after 18 days in a hospital. But he’s months from being back to normal.
Flashbacks of the accident are frequent. He’ll have to wear special gloves for a year to prevent scaring on his hands. Miraculously, except for singed eyebrows, his face is almost unscathed.
“You’d have had to see me right after the accident to fully understand how lucky I am,” said Dodge. “My first days in the hospital they thought I was going to lose three fingers on each hand. They told me I’d be needing a lot of skin grafts. Now it looks like there won’t be any grafts at all.”
Dodge’s world became an inferno when he tried to activate a commercial meter in his job with the city of Austin. Instead of instant electricity, he triggered a roaring ball of fire that knocked him to the ground, caused third degree burns and literally left skin peeling off his arms and hands.
The hours following the accident are an experience Dodge wishes he could somehow blot out of his mind. Unfortunately, he remembers it all too well because of haunting nightmares while in the hospital, and flashbacks in his waking hours. It’s the kind of personal anguish only a burn victim could understand.
“The first thing I noticed when I got off the floor was my skin melting,” he recalled. “I ran into the parking lot and some people out there got a hose and started spraying me. Somebody else got some ice. Then the Emergency Medical Service team arrived.”
On the ride to the hospital, Dodge began to worry about how badly he was disfigured. His face felt like his hands and arms, and he know how they looked. Several times he asked the ambulance attendance about his face. The eventual response was chilling.
“The guy said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re alive and we’re going to get you to the hospital alive.’ At that point, I started expecting the worst. I was glad to be alive, but . . . ”
Nobody is quite sure why Dodge is alive, why he wasn’t electrocuted, why his face received only first degree burns. He was told the cap he was wearing save his eyes. When the cap was found, its bill was completely burned off. Remarkably, his vision is still 20-20.
Burn recovery and burn therapy, as Dodge came to know, is he kind of living hell you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. In the beginning, he recalls being hooked to a special machine that went into an IV. By pressing a button, he could give himself a shot of Demerol every 15 minutes to ease the pain.
Elizabeth, his wife of a few months, and close friends helped him cope with the rigors of therapy. Ronnie Thompson, his high school coach in Port Arthur and soon to be his boss at Rockwall, flew down to help talk him through the first session. TJ and UT teammate Brent Duhon lent moral support in another.
“Having somebody with me in therapy made so much difference,” said Dodge. “The pain was terrible. Once Coach Thompson went through therapy with me, they let me have somebody every day. When you have a need like that, you find out who your friends are. I’m sure going through that was difficult on them.”
Dodge hopes to be on the job with Thompson in June. If possible, he’s even more excited about being Thompson’s quarterback coach now than when the job was offered a couple of months ago. But he frets about how the problem with his hands is going to hamper working with quarterbacks.
“I know Coach Thompson was counting on me to be able to demonstrate, as well as coach. I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to handle a football wearing those gloves,” Dodge said. “It’s just something I’ll have to deal with when the time comes. When I consider the alternatives, reflect on what might have been, the gloves don’t seem so bad.”
No, in that context, not so bad at all. Sort of like the man who complained about having no shoes until he met a man who had no feet, Todd Dodge can appreciate so many of the little things most of us take for granted.
Sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net. His Sportsrap radio show airs Mondays at 8:05 p.m. on KLVI (560-AM).
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