Nov. 14--EVANSVILLE -- After a serious auto accident in August and a round of surgeries, 46-year-old Joey Goebel is still in the recovery process and awaiting more operations to repair the trauma caused by the wreck. He's permanently lost the vision in his left eye, had parts of his face reconstructed, had his jaw wired shut and just recently had a feeding tube removed from his stomach.
While worse for the wear, emergency doctors agree that without a surgical cricothyrotomy by a quick-thinking, veteran paramedic while he was en route to Deaconess Hospital, Goebel would be dead.
At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20, Goebel was eastbound on the Lloyd Expressway after coming off a night shift at SABIC Innovative Plastics in Mount Vernon, Ind. He had gotten off the phone with his wife probably 10 minutes before the wreck.
The next thing he remembers is being at Deaconess Hospital three days later. The rest isn't there, he said.
What had happened, according to an Evansville Police Department accident report, is that Goebel failed to stop his 1994 Ford Ranger while eastbound on the Lloyd. At what witnesses said was a full rate of speed, he glanced off the rear of a vehicle stopped in the right hand lane at the St. Joseph Avenue intersection.
His truck ramped off that vehicle into the rear of a flatbed trailer, according to the report. The trailer had gone straight through Goebel's windshield, hitting him in the face, breaking his check bones, nose, jaw and palate.
"I don't know if I fell asleep. Or I was needing to do the brakes on my truck, I don't know if the brakes gave out on my truck ... we really don't know what happened," said Goebel in his Newburgh home more than two months after the accident.
Terry Gaddis, a 58-year-old American Medical Response paramedic with a military background and 20 years of paramedic experience, was on scene with his partner within a minute of the accident.
The accident was bad, Gaddis could tell, and there was blood everywhere, but Goebel was conscious and talking. After a quick extrication, Goebel was loaded into the ambulance. He complained he couldn't breath.
"I told him when we were loading him that we would take care of that," Gaddis said.
After being unable to get Goebel air through other means, Gaddis looked at a firefighter in the ambulance with him and said, "'Let's go. I'm going to do a surgical (cricothyrotomy).' The firefighter kind of gasped."
A cricothyrotomy, according to Gaddis, is a procedure to open a patient's airway by making an incision in the cricothyroid membrane in the neck. It's often a measure of last resort. The procedure took less than a minute, and Gaddis said the scene was like "controlled chaos."
"Everything happened so fast, and I realized we had only been en route to the hospital for under three minutes," he said.
Of the 3 million AMR runs over the last two years in America, there were only 38 successful cricothyrotomies. Even rarer, is a person living from their other trauma after the procedure. It was Gaddis' second cricothyrotomy this year and of his career.
"The first thing the trauma doctor said was it saved his life," said April Goebel, Joey's wife.
Goebel, seriously injured, had his first rounds of surgery the same day of the accident.
Since Aug. 20, Goebel has had metal plates put in both check bones, and another near his left eye, had his jaw wired shut for six weeks and had a feeding tube in his stomach until two weeks ago. He still has more surgeries to go, he said.
After going over his list of medical ailments, Goebel, in the living room of his home as two of his six children played video games, smiled and said, "Other than that I'm just happy to be alive."
With six kids and three grandchildren between him and his wife, the accident has brought his family closer together, he said.
He feels God has something else planned for him.
"This thing made a lot more religious than I was before," said Goebel, who wears a cross around his neck. "Even the doctors, the EMT doctors, all the doctors said, 'Well, God had another plan for you because people in your situation are either brain dead or dead.'"
Happy to be alive, Goebel is now looking forward to returning to his normal daily routine, especially getting back to work at SABIC, where he's been an operator for nearly 20 years. He also hopes to get back into bodybuilding, and has his sights set on a bodybuilding competition in March.
Copyright 2013 - Evansville Courier & Press, Ind.
