It was a rainy day in downtown Vancouver in November 2001. Klint Burton was making a “hot” delivery on his bike. The bike courier took a turn at an intersection which put him alongside a semi truck with a low flatbed trailer loaded with heavy machinery; his shoulder was mere feet away from tons of hard steel and unrelenting inertia. He sensed the truck ease to the right towards him, and he turned with the truck at the street corner. The rear tire on his bike was struck and then the flatbed trailer swallowed him.
What happened next caused him the most excruciating pain he has ever felt. He was being dragged underneath, his entire body pinned between the pavement and the steel underbelly of the trailer. He heard what sounded like gunshots, but was actually the sound of his bike tires exploding as they were crushed by the massive truck wheels. But the driver didn’t notice, and the truck kept moving.
At any moment, he thought his ribs would crumple and his pelvis would be “ground in half” as the trailer continued dipping lower and lower. His head felt like it was going to explode. Finally, shouts and screams from onlookers got the driver to stop.
“I talked to God. I felt I’d finally see Him face to face after all this time. I felt tired. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to get on my bike and ride to a safe spot and lie still and recover,” he later wrote in a personal journal recounting the event and what ensued.
Pain and suffering usually don’t come with meaning; we often ask ourselves what we have done to deserve hardship or why, of all people, does it have to happen to me? The near-fatal accident and his struggle to lead a normal life thereafter have come to define Burton’s life. Through it all, Burton is looking for meaning from the hardship he’s experienced all these years &- something to justify all the pain and suffering that has afflicted his body and his spirit &- to redeem himself as a man.
“Maybe there is a purpose to all this, like why did I have to go under a truck. Right now, I don’t care… I just hope that my life isn’t in vain, and I don’t want to become a bitter old man that’s just angry at the driver or at the person who [at first] ruled against my claim for compensation. Like flowers from the concrete, something beautiful can come from such a harsh, ugly [event].”
I have a notch on my hip bone
At the Vancouver General Hospital, the trauma team told him it was a miracle he was alive. But it was only the beginning. His injuries were first thought to be minor, as he came away with a one-inch laceration on his hip, road rash on his arm, soreness all over his body and popped blood vessels in and around his eyes from being dragged and almost crushed underneath the trailer.
Yet over the last nine years, it was his hip that affected him the most. It took four years after the accident, as mysterious aches and pains increased, before he was properly diagnosed through an MRI: it was a labral tear. The labrum is cartilage that forms a ring around the socket of the joint. He would require an arthroscopic surgery, a procedure designed to repair the tear in the cartilage.
Today, the affable and normally cheerful 31-year-old walks with a slight limp. It’s extraordinary, considering he had a major surgery on his right hip just nine weeks ago, where his entire hip joint was replaced by an artificial device a second time. In total, Burton has had three surgeries on his right hip, each giving him an overwhelming amount of pain, only to find out twice it wasn’t a complete fix.
“Being a young man [at the time], and feeling like so many things were taken away, the experience of fighting back or clawing back, or coming out of the hole but almost being taken down again to a deeper level” he thought aloud.
“Right now, I just want to walk [normally],” he said, while fighting back tears as he sat at the kitchen table of his girlfriend’s apartment.
Through his experience, he learned professional medical opinions are not infallible. The aftermath of his second surgery, a procedure called hip resurfacing, was a disaster. Feeling an abnormal amount of pain after the surgery, he went to see the surgeon to investigate. It turned out that the artificial device implanted into his hip wasn’t functioning properly.
“This new pain was indescribable. It was bad. It was a sour type of pain. At times, it took my breath away.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Burton discovered the surgeon had made a mistake when he looked at his own X-rays. There was notch on his femur &- the doctor had accidentally cut too much into the bone. Burton needed yet another surgery to replace the faulty device.
“It’s only money”
The surgeries have taken a toll on him financially as well, particularly during the periods of recovery following the accident and after each surgery. He sought compensation. According to Burton, the legal case was taken over by what was then named the Worker’s Compensation Board of British Columbia because it involved two workers on the job. It was an uphill battle from the beginning because it was ruled he was 100 per cent at fault for the collision.
“You can only deal with so much,” he said as he remembers the anger and frustration he felt.
It was hard enough to get the WCB to compensate him for the injuries that came immediately after the accident, but it was another battle to get WCB, what is now known as WorkSafe BC, to recognize his hip surgeries are related to the accident and not from a pre-existing condition. Seemingly running out of options, Burton was referenced to a workers’ claims lawyer in 2007, a professional who knew the ins and outs of the system. The lawyer’s rate was either $300 an hour, or $11,200 up front. Living off his credit cards, and being able to work only a few months before his injuries would stop him again – Burton was desperate.
“It was literally rob a bank, or that’s it,” he said.
One night he had dinner with a trusted friend and vented about his situation in tears. As he came back from the restroom and sat down, his friend, Lance Rogers, was writing out a cheque for him: $11,200. Burton remembers what Lance said: “Here’s your chance kiddo. If you win, you can pay me back. If not, it is only money.”
“I wept. A chance,” Burton wrote in his journal.
Burton and his lawyer managed to get Worksafe BC to reopen his file. He will now be compensated for all four surgeries (his left hip was also operated on), and any other operation he may need in the future. They have also offered him a pension of an undisclosed amount.
Riding it out
Despite his physical ailments, Burton was passionate about his dream of becoming a professional racing cyclist. Riding, he wrote, is “the physical expression of who I am.”
As if reliving a smaller version of the story of Lance Armstrong, the most prolific champion of the Tour de France who made a comeback after fighting testicular cancer, Burton tried to compete despite his injuries. His first race after the accident was not unlike that of Armstrong’s first after his comeback: both riders had lost their spirit to battle midway through the race. For Burton, it was the sight of a group of riders crashing at high speed and the sound of exploding bike tires &- exactly what he heard when his bike went underneath the truck tires in the accident.
“I took off my number and turned it in. I felt sick. I made eye contact with a rider sliding backwards at 90 km/h on the pavement. I drove to church, sat down at the back in my race clothes, and wept,” he wrote afterwards.
But he entered more races in Vancouver’s racing circuit and became competitive. He won two of them. He would do so with aging equipment against riders with professional gear, and with a body that was far from 100 per cent.
Feeling renewed after his last surgery this January, Burton is antsy to “get back in the saddle” again. “There’s an unknown territory about a person with an artificial hip to be competitive. My attitude is: how far can I go?” said Burton.
What it means to be a man
Coping with his physical and mental wounds has made him reflect about what it is to be a real man. He finds that a man must be able to rise above the feelings of inadequacy that come from affliction.
“It’s not about denying [the wound as a man], pretending it’s not there but it’s about examining it. But the point is not to stay there and get caught up with the wound. It’s to know that it’s okay.”
“I am more in touch with my emotions. I would like to believe that I have more compassion now than I ever did because of my experience with pain,” he said.
Burton yearns to use his experience to help those around him, though he’s not sure what he’ll do yet.
Though Burton asserts his physical and mental healing is ongoing and that it won’t be over anytime soon, he thinks he’s come a long way nevertheless.
“Time is lost, but not necessarily wasted. How I’ve grown, it’s like a tree: you can visually see where it gets hit. But it’s still growing vertically.”
