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#24: My right leg, right eye, Flash & my UAV crash.
10 years ago
General
OK, so a few o' you guys asked me over on Y/T about how I've screwed my right leg up. So, I'm gonna write about it here before I film an update over on my YouTube channel.
So, fair warning, this journal's not for those that are squeamish. Here we go...
Here's a short history of my interest of radio controlled helicopters: 'Round about 2007~2008, one of my dad's colleagues lent me his SJM-450 to use as a reference for a high school project of mine; a LASER-cut acrylic helicopter. After that, I swapped it for his Hirobo ZX Shuttle (the biggest heli in the lineup; with the ugly orange/green canopy).
After about six months trying to get the engine started, tuning & going through two glow plugs & about a couple of liters of nitromethane later, this old bird sprang to life at Avalon Park. It was a very gusty, typical Wellington day, on that day & no sooner had I had the helicopter spooled up (ready for takeoff), a gust of wind picked up the old bird & dumped it onto the deck & into what's known among the NZ RC Heli Fliers as the "Funky Chicken." A dangerous situation (as depicted in the related video) where the helicopter's engine fails to shut down & consequently, the helicopter literally beats itself to death straight after the initial crash; nitro helis are particularly notorious for this when they crash.
So, the Shuttle's on the deck, doin' the Funky Chicken. I leaned into the flailing mess to shut the helicopter down manually - pinching the fuel line under the engine's carburetor. This is the gory part. Squeamish folk better look away now. The following is what played out while I was trying to shut the old bird down...
One of the main blades snagged my right forearm as I was reaching into the airframe to try to grab the fuel line, whipping the tail boom around my right shin & the tail rotor dish (the tail rotor - still spinning at full noise) cut into & chewed up a good chunk of my calf muscle. Half of it was gone.
I did shut the helicopter down in the end. Tidied up my field equipment & limped back to my home in Belmont Domain. Once I got home, I left the helicopter & my field equipment at the front door & went straight to my first-aid kit & sorted out the wound myself. Thank you, ATC & my Junior Leaders' Course for that.
So, why didn't I go straight to the hospital? Well, for one thing, I hate hospitals (mind you, who DOES like hospitals?) & two, I wasn't too fussed on somebody else fucking up my injury even further & three, I was hoping I would have bled out & died on the walk back home.
But, one thing DID happen & it was after I had dressed my leg, I passed out on my bed & didn't wake until the following day (or, at least what I THOUGHT was the following day). My friend came around & when he got to my place, he mentioned about the blood trail from Avalon Park to Belmont Domain.
Whatever the hell happened, whether I had died or not, nobody will ever know. But, as far as I am concerned, I did die & I came back from it. Don't ask how, 'cause IDK how I did it, but I can tell you that this isn't the first time.
The only other time that I have overcome my own death was when I was little & in a car crash in the early 1990's.
Now, the wound is all healed up, I still have only half the calf muscle that SHOULD be there in my right leg & it acts up... frequently. It even gets to the point where I'm unable to walk at all.
The best thing that I have been doin' with it since that crash was riding my mountain bike to & from my high school every day for the three years that I was there.
Some days, I would ride from school all the way up to the Wellington Model Aeroplane Club field or even further on into Upper Hutt.
The distance from Belmont Domain to Taita College for me was about 8km (5mi) & took me approximately 30mins to get to school, depending on where the wind was goin' & how strong it was.
One time, I tried to ride in a northerly gale & it took me an hour & ten minutes JUST to get to the rail bridge (which is just a quarter mile north of Taita College). So, yes, I DID turn around & rode back home & didn't attend all day.
Other times, I'd be riding, get to the rail bridge & go "fuck it! I'm not going to school today." & carry on riding all the way into Upper Hutt.
I suppose riding was easily the best thing for my right leg, to help the healing process & work out what little muscle I have left in that leg. I also still have a massive scar in my right forearm where the rotor blade hit. <--- THAT is why I am always wearing some kind of arm brace on my right arm, because that is what's under it.
Unfortunately, the story about my right eye is nowhere near as good as my RC heli crash. My right eye's just a birth defect. BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Anyways, I can only see about 5~10% out of it. IE I can only recognize color & shapes. Outlines are blurry as fuck & I can't read Jack Schitt outta it.
This means that I also have difficulty with judging distance & depth perception? Forget it. That's non existent. Everything appears flat to me & not three-dimensional like it should. Oh, & before I forget, I often experience a phenomena known among the engineering crowd as "parallax."
Parallax is where a perceived object's position or direction appears to change (despite not movin' at all) when viewed from a different angle. A perfect example of this is when I'm flying one of my RC helicopters, particularly in a hover. So, the helicopter's sittin' about six feet off the ground (my eye height) & is sitting "left-side in" (left side of the bird is facing me). I see things like the landing skids & the main rotor dish around the opposite way to how they actually are.
In this instance, I think that the helicopter is coming toward me & tilt it in the opposite direction to stop it. But, the heli was already in a perfect hover & it just gets away from me. :3
So, how does that affect my life in general? Good question. Obviously not a lot if I hadn't noticed it until 2012, when I went to the Wellington Trades Academy at WelTech for my mechanical engineering course. I just got around it by making sure that the machines I was workin' on had digital readouts & all of the things I made, I made them with a higher precision - which in turn took slightly longer to machine.
Now, it's affected me a lot more now where I'd walk into things (like street lamps etc) without knowing it or thinkin' they're further away from me. This is where Flash comes in... Well... his main job. For those of you who don't already know who Flash is, he's a border collie & my 4 year-old S.D.I.T (Service Dog In Training). Now, technically speaking, I am not blind. My eyesight is just somewhat limited. Flash is a "second-set-of-eyes" for me & steers me clear of almost anything that I would otherwise collide with. Flash also alerts me to my panic attacks (which happens when I'm either in a huge crowd or when someone's standing behind me & out of my line-of-sight).
So, I know this is a bit of a wall of text for you guys. But, for those that have read it, thanks for takin' the time to check it out & I hope this gives you a little bit of an insight too. I'm gonna film an update vid for this too. So, if you don't wanna read this journal, ya can check out the video over on my Y/T channel instead. [Check back here for the link]
So, fair warning, this journal's not for those that are squeamish. Here we go...
Here's a short history of my interest of radio controlled helicopters: 'Round about 2007~2008, one of my dad's colleagues lent me his SJM-450 to use as a reference for a high school project of mine; a LASER-cut acrylic helicopter. After that, I swapped it for his Hirobo ZX Shuttle (the biggest heli in the lineup; with the ugly orange/green canopy).
After about six months trying to get the engine started, tuning & going through two glow plugs & about a couple of liters of nitromethane later, this old bird sprang to life at Avalon Park. It was a very gusty, typical Wellington day, on that day & no sooner had I had the helicopter spooled up (ready for takeoff), a gust of wind picked up the old bird & dumped it onto the deck & into what's known among the NZ RC Heli Fliers as the "Funky Chicken." A dangerous situation (as depicted in the related video) where the helicopter's engine fails to shut down & consequently, the helicopter literally beats itself to death straight after the initial crash; nitro helis are particularly notorious for this when they crash.
So, the Shuttle's on the deck, doin' the Funky Chicken. I leaned into the flailing mess to shut the helicopter down manually - pinching the fuel line under the engine's carburetor. This is the gory part. Squeamish folk better look away now. The following is what played out while I was trying to shut the old bird down...
One of the main blades snagged my right forearm as I was reaching into the airframe to try to grab the fuel line, whipping the tail boom around my right shin & the tail rotor dish (the tail rotor - still spinning at full noise) cut into & chewed up a good chunk of my calf muscle. Half of it was gone.
I did shut the helicopter down in the end. Tidied up my field equipment & limped back to my home in Belmont Domain. Once I got home, I left the helicopter & my field equipment at the front door & went straight to my first-aid kit & sorted out the wound myself. Thank you, ATC & my Junior Leaders' Course for that.
So, why didn't I go straight to the hospital? Well, for one thing, I hate hospitals (mind you, who DOES like hospitals?) & two, I wasn't too fussed on somebody else fucking up my injury even further & three, I was hoping I would have bled out & died on the walk back home.
But, one thing DID happen & it was after I had dressed my leg, I passed out on my bed & didn't wake until the following day (or, at least what I THOUGHT was the following day). My friend came around & when he got to my place, he mentioned about the blood trail from Avalon Park to Belmont Domain.
Whatever the hell happened, whether I had died or not, nobody will ever know. But, as far as I am concerned, I did die & I came back from it. Don't ask how, 'cause IDK how I did it, but I can tell you that this isn't the first time.
The only other time that I have overcome my own death was when I was little & in a car crash in the early 1990's.
Now, the wound is all healed up, I still have only half the calf muscle that SHOULD be there in my right leg & it acts up... frequently. It even gets to the point where I'm unable to walk at all.
The best thing that I have been doin' with it since that crash was riding my mountain bike to & from my high school every day for the three years that I was there.
Some days, I would ride from school all the way up to the Wellington Model Aeroplane Club field or even further on into Upper Hutt.
The distance from Belmont Domain to Taita College for me was about 8km (5mi) & took me approximately 30mins to get to school, depending on where the wind was goin' & how strong it was.
One time, I tried to ride in a northerly gale & it took me an hour & ten minutes JUST to get to the rail bridge (which is just a quarter mile north of Taita College). So, yes, I DID turn around & rode back home & didn't attend all day.
Other times, I'd be riding, get to the rail bridge & go "fuck it! I'm not going to school today." & carry on riding all the way into Upper Hutt.
I suppose riding was easily the best thing for my right leg, to help the healing process & work out what little muscle I have left in that leg. I also still have a massive scar in my right forearm where the rotor blade hit. <--- THAT is why I am always wearing some kind of arm brace on my right arm, because that is what's under it.
Unfortunately, the story about my right eye is nowhere near as good as my RC heli crash. My right eye's just a birth defect. BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Anyways, I can only see about 5~10% out of it. IE I can only recognize color & shapes. Outlines are blurry as fuck & I can't read Jack Schitt outta it.
This means that I also have difficulty with judging distance & depth perception? Forget it. That's non existent. Everything appears flat to me & not three-dimensional like it should. Oh, & before I forget, I often experience a phenomena known among the engineering crowd as "parallax."
Parallax is where a perceived object's position or direction appears to change (despite not movin' at all) when viewed from a different angle. A perfect example of this is when I'm flying one of my RC helicopters, particularly in a hover. So, the helicopter's sittin' about six feet off the ground (my eye height) & is sitting "left-side in" (left side of the bird is facing me). I see things like the landing skids & the main rotor dish around the opposite way to how they actually are.
In this instance, I think that the helicopter is coming toward me & tilt it in the opposite direction to stop it. But, the heli was already in a perfect hover & it just gets away from me. :3
So, how does that affect my life in general? Good question. Obviously not a lot if I hadn't noticed it until 2012, when I went to the Wellington Trades Academy at WelTech for my mechanical engineering course. I just got around it by making sure that the machines I was workin' on had digital readouts & all of the things I made, I made them with a higher precision - which in turn took slightly longer to machine.
Now, it's affected me a lot more now where I'd walk into things (like street lamps etc) without knowing it or thinkin' they're further away from me. This is where Flash comes in... Well... his main job. For those of you who don't already know who Flash is, he's a border collie & my 4 year-old S.D.I.T (Service Dog In Training). Now, technically speaking, I am not blind. My eyesight is just somewhat limited. Flash is a "second-set-of-eyes" for me & steers me clear of almost anything that I would otherwise collide with. Flash also alerts me to my panic attacks (which happens when I'm either in a huge crowd or when someone's standing behind me & out of my line-of-sight).
So, I know this is a bit of a wall of text for you guys. But, for those that have read it, thanks for takin' the time to check it out & I hope this gives you a little bit of an insight too. I'm gonna film an update vid for this too. So, if you don't wanna read this journal, ya can check out the video over on my Y/T channel instead. [Check back here for the link]
