By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
AMSTERDAM, Mo. | Dylan Fink is trying to describe the moment a combine blade sliced through both his feet. He pauses. This is hard. How do you describe the most gruesome three seconds of your life?
Maybe someday, when he has curious grandkids, Dylan will have the right words. But not yet, not as an 18-year-old high school senior.
“It was just a womp-womp,” he says. “You know when you’re falling and your heart stops for a second? That’s what it felt like.”
The whole thing is kind of a blur. Dylan remembers slipping on the combine, then hearing that horrible sound and screaming for help. His father says his heart “didn’t beat but twice” before he shut the machine off. They both remember the blood. The pain came later, blocked by adrenaline until Dylan saw the shocking result of what had happened.
He was life-flighted to Kansas City for emergency surgery. Doctors could save only the pinky and fourth toe on his left foot. They folded the empty skin from two toes on his right foot to help cover the combine’s damage. Skin grafts from Dylan’s hip cover the rest of what are still raw and discolored wounds.
Dylan doesn’t mind showing you. He’ll even joke about it, which is easier now that he’s quarterbacked the Miami High Eagles into the Missouri eight-man football semifinals tonight against St. Joseph Christian.
And here is where this story begins to turn from tragedy to inspiration.
“Every set of refs we get now,” says Miami tailback Ryan Good, “I’m like, ‘See No.13 over there, the big guy? Yeah, that’s our quarterback. He’s only got two toes.’”
•••
JoDee Fink screamed in horror the first time she saw her son after the June 23rd accident. Actually, she didn’t see Dylan, just his feet. She didn’t mean to scream. She couldn’t help it.
“Mom?” called out the familiar voice. “Is that you?”
Dylan wants to major in business next year in college, and his dream is to work at the Federal Reserve bank in Kansas City. He got hooked on a field trip there, when he saw a room with $40 million in cash.
But those are dreams for tomorrow. Right now, all Dylan wants to do is play football with his friends.
•••
Allen Fink is a hard-working man with a thousand acres of farmland about 65 miles south of Kansas City, where he raises wheat, soybeans and milo. There is pride in his voice as he says the combine blade may have taken a chunk of his son’s feet, but Dylan never cried.
“Not once,” he says.
JoDee Fink is a loving woman who works as a bank teller. She’ll never forget the tears in her son’s eyes after missing the season opener.
“I can’t stand not playing,” Dylan told his mother.
“He’s going to come back and play this season,” JoDee told her husband later that night.
•••
Before he could walk, before he could run — and certainly before he could play football again — Dylan needed to make peace with a life-altering injury that he sees as some combination of bad luck and his own carelessness.
This seems to have come remarkably fast, especially when you consider we’re talking about a teenager.
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” he says. “I’m not feeling, ‘Why is God doing this to me?’ I’m feeling, ‘Thank God I’m not dead.’ It could’ve been way worse.”
Dylan spent 15 days in the hospital. He didn’t even try to stand until a week or so into it, and even then, he lasted only a few seconds before he felt nauseated and lay back down.
Forty-two text messages came up the morning after Dylan’s first surgery, quite a lot when you consider that Miami’s senior class is Dylan and 13 other kids.
Doctors told Dylan he’d start school in a wheelchair, crutches at best, but when he walked through the doors on his own two feet the first day of class this fall, he thinks he got an atta-boy from every student and teacher he saw. It’s nice to know when people care.
This is when Dylan started to seriously think about playing football with just two toes.
•••
Dylan talked his way into the starting lineup for Miami’s first district game. The Eagles hadn’t won all year, an 0-5 team stumbling into the playoffs, so it’s not like they risked much. Nobody could’ve expected what’s happened since.
Dylan made a 20-yard touchdown run early in that first game. It was an option play. Dylan will be the first to say he was never very fast even with 10 toes, and maybe the defenders played off him not expecting the two-toed quarterback to take it to the house. But that’s exactly what he did.
In the six games since Dylan returned, a previously winless team hasn’t lost. The Eagles averaged 26 points without Dylan, and 58 with him. Dylan is doing his share — he’s accounted for nine touchdowns — but there’s more to the story.
The Eagles got several other key players back from injury around the same time as Dylan, and there’s something about a quarterback coming back from such a grisly accident that gets inside the rest of the team — and now we’re getting closer to the point of all this.
Sports are hard to hug sometimes. Players cheat. Coaches lie. Too many use success for ego and entitlement and greed. Profit is prioritized over fun, every stadium is a TV studio, every message comes with an agenda.
Sometimes the whole thing can suppress character as much as cultivate it, but then you meet an 18-year-old kid who lost parts of his feet to a combine blade and then stayed weeks ahead of the recovery timeline because he wanted to play football with his friends, and you’re reminded why so many of us care so much about meaningless games.
It’s because they’re not meaningless at all.
“I mean, yeah, it’s kind of limiting now,” Dylan says. “But being out there with my team, I feel like I’m accomplishing a lot.”
To reach Sam Mellinger, call 816-234-4365 or send e-mail to smellinger@kcstar.com or follow twitter.com/mellinger. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/11/11/2423598/high-school-qb-doesnt-let-accident.html#ixzz1553QlOhZ
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