My Infamous Treadmill Incident

By Pastor Brandon in Deep Thoughts on 5/5/09

The Nasty This past Sunday, as a part of our Scarred message series at Canyon Creek Church, I showed off the nasty scar on my leg. I get asked often where that scar came from by random strangers. It always allows me to warn them when happens when you don’t you the safety clip while running on the treadmill. Since I get asked the story often (and for pictures almost as often) I thought I would share the story in blog form!

It was a Friday morning, Di had left to volunteer at my boys school, so I took advantage of that free time by working out. After lifting weights I started running on the treadmill while watching a DVD of my favorite show The Ultimate Fighter. The rest of the story is still a tad foggy to this day. I best I recall, I ran for about 10 minutes when I tripped. Somehow I hit my head against the railing along the treadmill and knocked myself out. Being a typical man, I failed to have the safety clip attached. Laying at the foot of the treadmill, knocked out, it rubbed the skin on my right leg down to the muscle. The picture above is what I woke up with. My brother-in-law affectionately dubbed it the nasty, which has stuck to this day. As nasty as this looks, it didn’t really hurt. The treadmill burned through my nerve endings while I was unconscious leaving me without pain. This was super handy until the nasty got severely infected (now that hurt!).

Since it had gotten infected it needed to be removed and I needed to have a skin graft. The surgeon removed the nasty using only a local anesthetic (which receiving hurt worse than the actual accident). Half way through removing the nasty he discovered it was much larger and deeper than he had originally thought (it was actually about 3/4 of an inch thick). He apologized for not giving me enough local and warned me that this is probably gonna hurt (understatement of the year) and proceeded to finish cutting the nasty out. I have always considered my self a pretty tough dude with a high pain tolerance but I have to be honest and say it hurt so bad I cried.

Anyways, the doctor finished up the skin graft, bandaged my leg up, and sent me on my way. Di and I left two days later with our kids to Disneyworld. I was in a wheel chair the first half of the trip so we got to cut to the front of every line. Unfortunately I don’t remember that trip because of the pain killers I was on. Everyone tells me the trip was fun.
After several more months of visiting the plastic surgeon, my leg got better and now all I am left with is a nice gnarly scar. As we have said during the entire message series, that scar is a reminder of pain I once had that is now healed. I hope you enjoyed the treadmill story. The moral is…...always use the safety clip.

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