Life’s Short, Get Ducks Part IV: Climbing Out Of The Rabbit Hole

Rocky Leflore: Welcome to the End of the line podcast. I’m Rocky Leflore and in the Duck South studios again with me today, Jake Latendresse, Ramsey Russell. Okay guys, when we left last week’s episode dude, I’m still living in it. You know, I was shaking. I couldn’t even open my mouth to ask you a question and that, being the co-host of this podcast along with Jake and Josh is very unusual because I’m usually the first one to jump in and ask a question. Last week we talked about teenage years of Ramsey’s and the life’s short, Get ducks series that we’re doing and then we went on into the story of Ramsey being in the garage cleaning paint brushes and an explosion happening, burning what 75% of your body Ramsey, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it was 79%, 2^nd and 3^rd degree.

Rocky Leflore: That’s the deepest burns you can get.

“When you get down to second degree, you destroyed enough dermal layers that the nerves are exposed and third degree is beneath the nerve damage and that, you know, it’s very painful. I remember it was very painful.”,

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s most painful to, you know, when you touch your hand to an oven, that’s first degree burn, you just kind of wake everything up. When you get down to second degree, you destroyed enough dermal layers that the nerves are exposed and third degree is beneath the nerve damage and that, you know, it’s very painful. I remember it was very painful.

Jake Latendresse: Since last week and, you know, we got into your story, I think we left off you were in Galveston, Texas. But man, I’ve been literally crawling around for a week now, just it’s something that sticks in my mind, it’s something that, you know, I’ve constantly been thinking about it since then, and I’m really intriguing and fascinated in a humanitarian way. I’m really fascinated to hear the rest of this story because it’s really intriguing and fascinating and extremely profound to hear someone that survived something like that, describe it in detail, like you did, like we’re there, so I’m looking forward to the rest of this series.

“I will say this, as Ramsey was telling that last week I was, you know, when you have kids and you see somebody else’s kid hurting you – put yourself in the parent’s shoes and you think about it happening to your kid man and I think that that’s what shocked me last week as we’re going through this, I’m thinking about something happening to Wilson. Wilson is my only son and I’m just sitting there in shock thinking man it could be my kid.”,

Rocky Leflore: I will say this, as Ramsey was telling that last week I was, you know, when you have kids and you see somebody else’s kid hurting you – put yourself in the parent’s shoes and you think about it happening to your kid man and I think that that’s what shocked me last week as we’re going through this, I’m thinking about something happening to Wilson. Wilson is my only son and I’m just sitting there in shock thinking man it could be my kid.

Jake Latendresse: It’s funny that you say that because that was my initial first perspective too. But then I went into what was that like? Like, I’m putting myself in Ramsey’s shoes because I’ve been in and out of the hospital quite a bit, not like don’t get me wrong, nothing even close to that. But you know, I’ve been in precarious medical situations before and emergencies and then I just put myself in Ramsey shoes and go, good Lord, what was that like? I mean the pain man.

Rocky Leflore: The pain, that’s where I was going to go next was the pain. I can’t even imagine Ramsey, the pain.

Ramsey Russell: We left the story. I was cognizant that I was ambulance to plane, plane to somewhere, I’ve never heard of before, Galveston Texas to a burn unit. Now, you know, and like we talked last week, it’s just bits and pieces of conscious memory that I had an awareness, a cognizance on just a very little piece level and I don’t know why I don’t remember more other than time and everything else but the trauma was so severe, 70 some odd percent you know, 2^nd 3^rd degree, which really, now let me just get back to basic stuff as a non-doctor but experienced persons degree, you know, then what you’re dealing with is infection. Infection cuts get infected, let alone 76% of your body open gets infected. That’s a very real concern. And there had been some infection set in and it became just urgently critical that I’d be moved somewhere far more capable than a hospital to do care and so I was sent down to the Galveston burn unit, Children burn unit in Galveston Texas there owned and operated by the Shriners and really for the next three months of this is just a real very few little memories and it took years maybe after this to, the kind of sort of sort out what might have been real and what might have been, you know, imagined or something. You know, it’s very difficult. I do remember very hellish nightmares and, but I do remember some other things too. I remember, I can remember one time to understand it, I think by the time I emerged from that unit I had underwent 70 plus surgeries. Nothing. No man, nothing like it looks like a Hollywood, good looking guy. I’m talking just . Now, understand here’s how this thing works. You know, you’ve got this big open wound, your skin is one of your 8 or 9 major body organs and when your heart is what you’re looking to go back, if that’s right, it affects everything okay. It’s a whole system all dependent on everything working, right, so there’s other concerns that come along but what they had to do is these medical, these doctors in Galveston, what they had to do is they had to get my wounds covered, you know, and only way you can do that skin now, you know, if you go and cut yourself, get a big abrasion on the back of your hand, you know, the skin surrounding it will grow back over or form a scar or something like that. Well in the absence of that you got problems, you know, because skin at the top of leg can’t grow all the way down to the tip of your toes and that thing’s ain’t going to happen. So what they had to do is they had to start putting skin and any anybody listening all two or three of you listening to this, you know bear with me because it’s a little graphic and I know it’s you know, not something you might want to hear about this, I’ll explain the way this thing works is, you know on the percent of my body that was not burned, what they would do is they would remove sheets of skin, while I was in surgery, they would remove sheets of skin and they would spread it, put it like something they could compress it and spread it to have more surface area, which they would then lay down on to that part of your body and staple and then hopefully –

Jake Latendresse:  So this is skin grafting, right? This is the process –

Ramsey Russell: Skin grafting and hopefully that skin graft would take some or all of it would take.

Jake Latendresse:  So this, let me ask you this, so these are epithelial cells from your surface layer of your skin that they peel off, they put it on places that are open wounds on your skin and then those epithelial cells have to then fuse if you will and graph into the existing flesh for regrowth. Is that how that works?

Ramsey Russell: Man that, if that’s what you say now, I mean, I don’t know what cells it is, I know it’s just sheets of skin and you know to me, I always looked at it kind of like them sign in the yard, they’re going out into a bear yard and laying patch inside and it takes and start to spread and that’s kind of what the process was, but there were other consideration, remember I supposed to lose my legs. In fact, he said, remember I’m supposed to have lost my right arm. I didn’t lose either one of them. But just a little, so that was a big process. And I remember bits and pieces of them having a poll of stable down. Now, let me tell you this, infection. You know, I don’t know how many times a day, more than once, as many as a dozen all the time that I can kind of remember, I was constantly being carried to the tub room because I’m wrapped, I’ve been in surgery, the skin graft, non-skin grafted areas, I’m wrapped head to toe with bandages and there’s leakage, you know, blood fluids and that begin to get hard and crusty. So what they have to do is put you down into a tub of Clorox, go straight to and put some Clorox on there. And they drop you into this tub of dilute Clorox and you soak until them bandages have loosened up and they would take the bandages off and begin the process of taking metal instruments and scraping everything that needs to be scraped and that what was mean scraping all that loose tissue very painful process. Very, it’s so painful, I told Rocky this one day it was so painful that I’m going to say, ooh 10, 11, 12 years later I was dating the girl that became my wife at Mississippi state time and they had a like a reunion or some get together and she and I drove down there and we were walking around the place, I haven’t been in decades, you know, and just walking around. She was walking around with meeting staff that I hadn’t seen in all those years and I’ve come a long ways and just forgotten all about it, dating pretty girl and you know, everything was in college Godly, you know, and but we just, there’s more room and all that the physical therapy and this and this and we walk pass that tub room and when I smelt it and I wasn’t even down where you would have turned to go down the hall to the room. I stopped dead in my tracks, my shirt started sticking to my skin I broke into such a cold sweat and I wouldn’t walk down up in that room. That was horrible. But you know, something interesting happened, you all, it ain’t like I could play back in my recliner, make this happen today, but it’s like climb down into a dark rabbit hole and what I mean to say is this, for the next three months, my memories of anything that I described, it’s like I remember having occurred in a pitch black dark room, maybe a stray sunbeam coming in through the window or maybe, you know, light under the crack in the door and otherwise dark room and that facility, it was never dark anywhere. There were bright lights. It was the most well lit facility you’ve ever been in because it was full on trauma care that Shriners based on that unit down there, it actually, that device what I guess, forever will be used as a burn unit because there were 8 rooms in that unit and they were laid up in a hexagon and dead in the center was a nurse station and at any time 24/7 staff could look up and look right into all of them rooms. It was fully lit. You know it is 24/7 trauma care. You know everywhere you go in that building is well lit very well lit like an operating room lit just lit. And yet my memory of it was haven’t all been remembered what I do is in the pitch black and what I’ve pieced together and later remember is you know, to escape, so to speak, the trauma and the feelings and the pain and it’s like I crawled into this real dark rabbit hole below human consciousness. The kind of place that exist but that most of us never know, we live a full life of 80 years old and we never know it exists because we don’t have to get in that place well, I have found that place beneath consciousness. And it really led to some things. It’s like, I’m not a violent person. I never have been, I’m not big enough and bad enough to be a fighter. But they had me in that unit and I was strapped down. They had my arms strapped down, they had me strapped down because to administer the kind of care they were having to give, I was violent. I would swing, I would hit, I would fight and what it was, was them, it’s like that disturbance would awaken me into consciousness and I didn’t want to be there buddy. Now, my mother described to me, now they had an apartment located next to the unit for families for a parent and my mother boy, let me tell you what, she, I guess walking to the bank and said she was gone because she lived right there in Galveston Texas across the street, while all this was going on and she couldn’t just sit up there all the time. You know, she literally couldn’t sit in that waiting room 24/7 but she’s been a long time up there. But she described probably the first month that I was in that unit and kind of out of my head now because I was in that rabbit hole. She described that she said she would call every hour every other hour and that somebody in the nurse’s station would answer the phone and that broom, the glass wall across the hall, through the glass wall that I was in, she could hear me screaming. It would be, she said, it was terrifying because you would, she said you would literally scream at the top of your lungs and when your lungs ran out of air, you’d be quiet long enough to take just one big deep breath and do it again. She said, and I would call back six hours later, it was the same thing and she said, and the next morning it was the same thing and she said, we’re talking weeks and days and they got me more or less medically stable, there’s things going on to surgeries and the antibiotics and the tub room and all the care that goes into this. But they actually she said or I heard, you know, they literally rolled taping me down and got me over to another facility next door to run cat scans, do brain scans because they’re like, the kid has lost his mind, he lost his mind. He literally, something to see if there was something going on, like if there’s been some brain swelling or something because they couldn’t understand it, what I think, you know, I think it was a combination of pain and trauma, but at the same time you got to understand, I wasn’t conscious of any of this and you know later, one of those terrifying moments of my life, that I remember in that three month period, I remember waking up but I couldn’t breathe. It’s like an elephant was literally standing on my chest and I could hear you know metal, I could hear metal tinkling in the background, I could hear voices kind of talking at a low conversational voice around me and I was just, but I couldn’t open my eyes and I needed to go, I needed to take in a deep breath because I was about to suffocate and I couldn’t and I remember a voice saying he’s coming to you better put him back down and I literally kind of just woke up, started gaining conscious and that was the most terrifying moment of my life, I thought I was going to die. You know, I needed to take a breath, but I couldn’t even speak.

Jake Latendresse:  Like you were drowning?

Ramsey Russell: Like I was drowning. I remember the first time, I remember just one moment when I was in the tub and they’d sat me up and I saw my legs for the first time. I remember that I’ll never forget it. And you must understand there ain’t no mirrors around a burn unit, okay? Man, they don’t go there, there ain’t nothing like that and while that in my mind and done anyway. And I remember the dreams, I remember consciousness. I remember being in this dark environment and I remember, it must have been three months into it. I remember for example there was a teacher, a psychologist, somebody on their staff there that would come to my room, badger me, he sit beside my bed he’s a very nice man and he would talk I know you’re in there, he’d hold up flashcards, he do things he would engage me and it was very hostile and profane my reaction because understand his job was to get me out of that rabbit hole and my job was to stay in there. I did not need to come out from that sub consciousness, just glimpses. I remember, it was, I remember a dream one time, it was a dream. I’ve been out for three months let’s say just deep dark hole. Now, remember this dream, I was like in a castle it was just this dark stone, dank, dark, faulting ceilings, castle or something like just walking down this galley and somebody, a friend, a friendly boy, somebody was behind me and they were talking to me, it’s very soothing. I was walking down this dark hall, this dark dungeon, this castle and we stopped and it was just this big window that was taller than and had rounded arches you know, lined with square stones and beyond it, no glass beyond it was the most beautiful landscape. Just this green, lush grass all the way to the horizon, blue sky and I stepped up to the edge of the window and was looking out at it and the voice, that nice guy behind me was just very saying, you know, walk out there, walk out and you know, and I could imagine man, I could feel that cold grass on the bottom of my feet and all I want to do is, walk out in that grass, you know, you don’t have to hurt like this the boy said, it is ridiculous, look how beautiful that is. Just walk out there, let it go and just walk out there. And in that instant after three months, but in the bowels of hell in that instant I woke myself up yelling, God saved me. Boom! And just like that, boom man, I’m telling you what? I was wide awake. I was in my room and at the shout, jean one of the male nurses come busting in, he says, are you with us now? I said, yes sir and all the nurses came in and that was it. Now, I still have three months to go and it was conscious then, I really remember it then, said I was out of that rabbit hole and I was back in the real world.

“Wow, you have to let me swallow a couple of times Ramsey, throughout this time you said it in the previous podcast, the pain, I’m sitting here thinking about this, you know, escaping into the rabbit hole to, you know, not only physically what this has done to you, but psychologically, you couldn’t take pain medicine, you couldn’t take the medicine, pain medicine because your body wouldn’t heal correctly, right?”

Rocky Leflore: Wow, you have to let me swallow a couple of times Ramsey, throughout this time you said it in the previous podcast, the pain, I’m sitting here thinking about this, you know, escaping into the rabbit hole to, you know, not only physically what this has done to you, but psychologically, you couldn’t take pain medicine, you couldn’t take the medicine, pain medicine because your body wouldn’t heal correctly, right?

“They needed my metabolism and whatever they could do of it, they needed healing. They needed those skin grafts sticking and they need that skin begin growing. They needed new skin to come off until we got covered up.”,

Ramsey Russell: No. they, from what my mother and some of the professionals later told me was they could not administer pain medication, pain pharmaceutical, whatever that may have been, I don’t know, you know, they couldn’t administer it because to do so would have slowed, you know, opiates or whatever would have formed, would have slowed your metabolism such. And now remember they’re pulling sheets of skin off and that area has to heal so they can go back and get more. And so they needed that, they needed everything run full bore. They needed my metabolism and whatever they could do of it, they needed healing. They needed those skin grafts sticking and they need that skin begin growing. They needed new skin to come off until we got covered up.

Jake Latendresse:  You’re farming your own skin.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly what I was doing. I’ll tell you an interesting sidebar that doctor that I had Dr. Herndon was his name. That man, that lead doctor down there has since developed technology to where they can take skin and put it in a environment and farm itself, they can turn a small sheet of skin into enough skin that would have just covered my entire body now, they’ve developed that technology. And that skin looks good, you know? It doesn’t have a lot of blemishes and stuff from the technology they used 36 years ago. I’ve seen people that have gone through some trauma like that and I’m like baloney, that’s a skin graft. You might can see a scene just as a little hairline scene where the two sheets grew together, if that’s it, it’s amazing the science, that’s where that doctor went with his career. But back in those days hanging down in Galveston Texas, you know?

Rocky Leflore: One thing I want to ask you though, Ramsey, of course your body is scarred from the burns, but there’s a scar on your head of where they farmed or where they came in and got –

Ramsey Russell: They took a skin graft. I do, I got a spot about the size of a quarter and you know, it’s so ridiculous to talk vanity, you know, but I remember back when I actually had hair, boy, I let it grow long enough to cover up that spot. I was self-conscious of all the things, you know, and you all met me, you all seem to have all that stuff and then it’s funny to be self-conscious about that now, of course I shaved my head and it’s slick bald right there and that’s just where I’m mad and I don’t know how it happened, what happened but if I had to imagine it would have been like an intern, get to take a test drive with the skin grafts machine and you know, get just a little too low or not, not hitting it right, you know, and just accidentally scraping too low to where the hair didn’t grow back. But yeah, it’s just little things like that, just, they piece it together and it took a long time, but they finally got it right and you know, slowly but surely I would say you can talk and go ahead.

Rocky Leflore: I was going to say, you tell that story, you come up, you come back alive per se physically and spiritually did your outlook and the, so everything changed for you from that day on?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And you know, it was real bad, you know, and I wouldn’t say I came back, I was lucid and I still had surgery to go and things to do and you know, but as soon as I became lucid, they began taking me down to physical therapy and later, you know, I can remember, let me tell you what, don’t matter who you are and I was, you know, it’s like they say, you know the fact that I was 15, the fact that I was in great shape the fact I had this wheel and God on my side and the only reason I beat those odds I mean, so I was in good shape but you take anybody and you lay in a bed in mobile for a long period of time and you lose everything and it’s like I can remember one day MG was her name, I remember her, she was a graduate of the University of Alabama. In fact she brought me a picture from Paul Bear Bryant, she knew him and went back home or something and when she came back on vacation he had written me a picture, you know signed a picture to me and she brought me up number 42 jersey one of the and you know it’s crazy now, this is crazy part while all this is going on you know with my world and my little dark rabbit hole man there’s Ted turner wrote a letter, Donny and Marie Osmond, how the heck did they hear about me? I was getting letters from people encouragement from Houston oilers football players.

“This was pre social media so I’m like, just spread out all over Instagram and Facebook and this was getting like –”

Jake Latendresse:  This was pre social media so I’m like, just spread out all over Instagram and Facebook and this was getting like –

Ramsey Russell: No, cable TV wasn’t in half the homes in America in 1982 man there was no cell phones, you know, you couldn’t back in the old days, I remember growing up in Greenville there was a nice black lady Ms. B to help you know, that came by every morning my mother worked cleaned up and fed us kid raised us kids, she had raised my mother and every Sunday night that’s when if you want to call long distance it will only cost you a dime or 20 cents a minute do it. You called on Sunday night between 9 and 10 or something and my mother said that every weekend that I was in that unit B called to check on her baby and I hadn’t seen that woman since I was, I had not seen her since I was 10 years old and she called every Sunday night to check on her baby. Just you know my, I had an aunt on my daddy’s side describing being in a church service her church somewhere in west central Louisiana and some little girl that nobody knew, you know, when the preacher put out prayer request some little girl raised her hand and described me and buddy there was power of prayer going on has to be because it was serious stuff and you know just the outreach of, you know letters coming in from people I didn’t know just they don’t know, you know cards and things that nature you know it’s amazing. Any time, you know, I think that’s all the time, like when a hurricane blows in, you know, it don’t take the president to make America or humanity good again, all it takes is Crisis.

Jake Latendresse:  Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: You know, it brings out the best in people, but I had a long road home so for the next three months I just remember bits and pieces. I can remember that MG handed me a 2.5 or 5 pound of weight this tiny little bitty weight and I couldn’t even lift over my head and but they fast track me, man there ain’t no sense in beating around the bush because as quick as they could get me up on crutches wearing orthopedic shoes and braces because I’m just a mess. You know, they did it, they had me up man and walking, you know, like I had, they might wheel me down to physical therapy but I had to walk back up with a lot of help and crutches. It was struggle because and I remember being a lot of emotionally broken, I mean really and truly emotionally I was lucid, but I was emotionally broken. It just, you go through that kind of stuff. It just happens. I mean it just, it really just kind of happens –

Jake Latendresse:  Part of the process isn’t it?

“But I’ll tell you something, you tell me out when it’s sync in when I realized what forever was and I must say a lot longer than this part right here but the first inkling I remember to be honest with you, Rocky and I were kind of talking about this podcast, it made me start thinking about some things. A lot of it was like pulling off a scab.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And you know, like I can remember not having any clothes for example, none that would fit me, none that anything, you know, and my mother, man for about the next year and a half my life or at least year and a half, I didn’t wear anything but warm up pants, liberty overall man and overall the best big baggy overalls. I could climb into them later much later after I’d gone back home, like I could climb into them and dress myself, which was a thing onto itself. But I’ll tell you something, you tell me out when it’s sync in when I realized what forever was and I must say a lot longer than this part right here but the first inkling I remember to be honest with you, Rocky and I were kind of talking about this podcast, it made me start thinking about some things. A lot of it was like pulling off a scab. You know, going back through memories and this is something I had forgotten about maybe forever and this weekend fishing with my boys, thinking about some of this conversation ahead. I remember this, I remember my grandmother, my mother’s mother had come down there also, they were sharing an apartment, you know the sweetest lady I’ve ever met, just I love my grandmother absolutely positively to death. She had come down to stay with my mother. I remember them willingly me down for the first time we were going to go just drive across Galveston from the unit. They wanted me to get out just okay, you know, just get out just, it’s time for you to get in the car, you know they want you to get you back in the normal flow of life. I mean, you know sitting around here all the time you got a life to live and the next month so you’re going home and so it’s kind of a big deal for them and my parents you know, we’re not because they were going to wheel me downstairs and I was going to get in the car sitting air conditioning and we were going to go to I guess with JC. Penney’s somewhere to local shop, of course I won’t go in shoot you kidding? I’m going to sit in the car in the air condition going, my grandmother, my mother’s going to go in and get some clothes. And it was just, I can remember a several of those you know, once a week or so doing this throughout my stay there, I remember the first one because I was in the front seat of the car, my grandmother was in the back her big sedan and my mother was driving and we’re going down the highway along Galveston beach looking at the gulf and heck I’ve never seen the gulf for this event. I mean, that I’ve kind of been home you know, I’ve never hardly been outside my home county. We were looking at the beach and just driving down and all the bright sunshine and we came up to a red light and I looked to my right at the car just pulled up and in the back seat I remember that old boy just long, stringy white trash hair, smoking a cigarette, how old was he, I don’t know, late teens old enough to smoke and that was it, that was the first person I saw on the outside world, outside of these doctors, outside the professionals, outside of anything. You know, my mother, my grandmother we’re in car, we come at red lights and I look, just look to the right the car next to me, that boy sees me and it wasn’t even a real laugh. He just, he pointed and he covered his hand like he’s snickering and giggling and I think that might have been the moment it’s stuck in, that I was different, something and just cold blooded. I mean just a lack of upbringing whatever you want to call it, I don’t, you know, I don’t have no enmity towards that guy, but I never forget how I felt and I wanted to see a mirror right then. And you know, but it’s just funny how you remember something like that, just one little thing. I mean, how many times you been laughed at snickered out of cut up jokes or you know, I mean, it’s nothing but at that point, you know, I’m telling you physically and really spiritually and emotionally I was at ground zero. I was an absolute positive ground zero. Less than I’ve ever been in my life. And that intuit itself became struggle. You know, I could tell you that –

Rocky Leflore: Ramsey, how do you mentally climb, how do you start climbing that ladder?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know man, it’s like eating elephant. You do it one bite at a time I guess. You know, it’s a process and you know, you can’t really set out to say I’m going to do this. I’m not, I didn’t have adult falconry. I was a child about 16, but really come on 16 year older children, they don’t have what we adults have. They don’t have a bank of perspective and experience to bar from you know, it’s just, I’m alive and I’m here and you know, from there it’s just a process. And I remember it was, it had been November, May, end of May I went into my birthday May 28^th, I flown to Galveston and sometimes in November, I went back home. A lot of my friends, a lot of my high school buddies, you know, a lot of people were there to meet me at my home when I came in just to say hello, very humbling, very emotional. That was different. And understand I’m going to tell you all this, you know, I don’t know what the technology of how they treat this stuff now but what they did is at the time of one of the last things I got fitted with before I came back was a suit. And think of it like pantyhose only it’s like about the quality about the density of 14 gauge aluminum, custom fitted compression suit pants and like long johns with ultra-compressive and very heavy and dense material. And they had put a, they had fitted my face made a custom mold of my face with a silicone shield over which this compression like a real tight compression wrestler’s mask went on top of and then my entire body, I had gloves all the way up to my fingertips. I had all my arms, all my body, my whole body was just covered in this pressure and deal was wear it as long as you wear it forever, wear it don’t ever take it off. You know, take the mask off a little bit and I put it right back on for months and months and months. So this would’ve been November and I came home as I recall my mother had gone back to work about a week or two after I got home and I left alone for a period of time to do nothing, read and watch TV or something, you know, wouldn’t else I could do get up and use the restroom and then after thanksgiving break I started back to school and that was real difficult, very scary. You know, my mother had a job and understand, you know, parents are separated now. She had a job, I had a brother, you know, there was remember two, you know, she’s got two kids, not one and you know, so to get to school on time, I’m a 16 year old boy, I’m not a little baby. You know, it’s kind of weird for mama to bathe a 16 year old kid don’t you think. So, there that thing going on too. But you know, I needed her help. And so, I would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning school started at 8, bell rang what? 07:50 or something? Well to get there was a choke because I had to get up and undress, she would have helped me prepare a bathtub with stuff in it, you know, then I would have to lower myself down into the tub and soak. I would have to unwrap bandages because it wasn’t just compression suit. There were bandages involved, ace bandages involved, I mean miles and miles circle the world 10 times bandage and I would have to soak like I learned to do there and I would have to just wrap myself back up, you know, administer whatever lotion had put on there and wrap it back up. This process took a long time and then I’d have to get my suit back on and then I have to get dressed ready to go to school and I would sit there through, I think I took four classes that year. Oh God bless those administrators for not making me, you know, be a real student. They let me back into school. I flunked out, get this, I flunked out of school, I flunked the admissions test to get back in the school, I had to take that thing you take in grade school, you know, where seeing and hearing, I failed a hearing test. There was a medicine, an antibiotic or something they used back in that period of time that damaged hearing. Everybody knows, I don’t hear well I can hear you whisper in a sawmill, but I can’t hear high pitched tones and a lot of that’s got to do with, I guess millions of rounds I’ve shot in the last 25, 30 years. But it also stems back to that whatever that medication was. So, I fail my hearing test and somehow, you know, but I don’t know what my mother did, I’m scared to think what might have done, but you know, I somehow missed going into special aid. I put it that way. I somehow, you know, they wanted to, the system want to put me in the special education cut flunked that, but instead I got to go back to school in the classroom with the folks I had just been to school with before getting hurt.

Rocky Leflore: Ramsey, what was the reaction and you know, there’s bullies in every school. What was the reaction overall? I’m sure that you –

Ramsey Russell: You know, I can say this for a fact, I went, you know, people are people and people take different paths in life. We talked about that one time, you know, but at the same time, you know, it was a small school, South Jackson, just middle class folks and country folks mixed together, black and white and they were all just almost to a person, just good people. There wasn’t anything at all. There was no bullies. I mean somebody may have said something behind my back, something. No, it was nothing like that. Nothing at all like it’s very accommodating. I’d hobble into school and sit in the desk, do whatever I did, I don’t know what I did, you know, but I do remember that I would be there for whatever it was three or four classes before lunch and then I had a friend, a neighbor, a good friend of mine for a long, long time, best friend, type friend that man, he was a star running back and just really good guy and I know that he would, he worked for the office. You know, I’m often errand boys and it’s off the schedule and he would at lunch, go down the cafeteria and get to lunches and come back up to the classroom and eat with me and we sit there and talk, I take my mask off and we carry on the talk, stuff like that. And then I had finished up the lunch period.

Rocky Leflore: That sticks in your memory heavily, doesn’t that? The guy that did that?

Ramsey Russell: It does. Oh yeah, yeah man, absolutely it does because bet your butt he was old, he was a year older than me. So he was a senior man he’s a senior high school, you know, he wanted to be down there hanging out with his buddies and football partners, you know, but we were buddies since 7^th grade he come up there and spent that time and I never forgot it.

Jake Latendresse:  There had to be something to the fact that you were, let’s just for lack of better words, you were normal up until that explosion. So your peers and friends and family and all that stuff, they knew Ramsey Russell, they knew who you were previous to that and there has to be some carry over into, you know, knowing someone in the normal sense and then that carrying over into this this trauma and how they knew, they knew how to react to it because they knew who you were.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they got the subdued version. When I came back to my junior year, it was a very subdued version of the guy I had been because I had been a real problem child 80 HD loud boisterous, you know, I mean just really a not a good student, not a bad person, but not a good student. And when I came back, I was helpless and I remember after that class, that bell ended about five minutes before that class let out in the halls filled up. I would leave that classroom and walk down the front of building just down the hall, a taxi cab. I don’t know who dispatched that cab, but it came every day and smithy, I think his name was, the driver would be waiting on me and I would climb into a yellow cab and he take me over to Mississippi Medical Center rehab and I would do two or three hours of rehab. It was just some of the most, some of the silliest stuff my friends –

Jake Latendresse: It is like a movie.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like, it will be just some of the silly stuff I did, you know like just anything to make me use and like a lot of stuff I remember was the fingers. Now, let me tell you this, I did not lose my right arm, but there was a lot of problems I do. I’ll tell you another thing I remember was one of them glimpses, let me step back to the burn center again. I remember my hands being like gripping a ball and being wired to a ball, whatever immobile, but I can remember pins, especially my right hand, big long pins sticking out of my fingers and covered with like a little piece of cork because what they had done to save my hand is they had gone in and retained as much material as they could. And they had initially basically just fused the joints, I mean it wasn’t enough anything to move and make a fist to do anything hardly anymore, but they had salvaged what they could and while that bone were healing connected, they stuck basically just stuck some pins all the way through the bones and you know, and just to lock it in place and I could remember and they did it on my right hand. And so you know, I was back to physical therapy, you know, they were making me it was different hands than what I left with, you know, they weren’t as sense that they weren’t as tactile and so I was being now having to use and do just the silliest little thing, like, I can’t remember some of the stuff the product I did, but it was just, you know, like sowing, you know or look, I had this old lady, I love nurses, now, I’m going to tell you right now, and this is why this whole story I met nothing but great nurses. But my physical therapist at the time was just as you know, I’m going to say she was 35, 40 years old and just a softie little lady. I mean, she was just, I look forward to going and seeing her every day. She was so friendly and so outgoing, but she was a ballsy little redhead too, you know, she wouldn’t let me see, I mean she made me do and use these hands and do stuff and you know, but that was just, that was my life for months, November, December, January, February, March, April, May now, we’re getting back up into my senior year of high school. And that was just my existence, get up bathe myself for hours at a time and then bandage myself up and go to school and just exist.

Rocky Leflore: Ramsey, at that time, we have, you know, regular kids have a immature look on life, it’s here now. And I’m not saying that you were because you really faced a tough task in life. Did you think about the future? Did you look out ahead of you and what this may physically and kind of vanity, what you’re talking about, how it would affect the rest of your life?

Ramsey Russell: Man, that’s a long question. Honestly, in those days and they only into my senior year until at some point, you know, it was rested development. You know what I’m saying? I missed what normal people, regular people miss in their junior and senior year. I missed that. I did not develop like that. And because I was young, I didn’t have the mental faculty to look and wonder what if and what about now? What about later? You couldn’t, kids can’t look ahead. They can’t possibly look, I don’t know that adults can look ahead. But at 16 years old and that absolute down to that just stripped all the way down to the foundations, there was no way all I could look at was now. All I could look at was right now. Getting through the next day. Man, you better bet I don’t cry much anymore, but you better bet for a 16 year old boy man, there was a lot of tears back in the old days. There’s a lot of tears, a lot of time by myself.

Jake Latendresse:  You ever just say, ever think to yourself. You know, at some point, you just say screw this, I can’t do this anymore and think about ending it?

Ramsey Russell: There were low points, you know, probably a lot of teenagers, good and healthy everywhere else think about alternatives like what you suggest. But yeah, sure I did, but you know really and truly just think, you know, all people at that point, the doctors and the nurses and the parents and the family and friends and the community and the prayers. No, I couldn’t betray that. You know, I didn’t see that then, but I couldn’t, you know. I do remember this, I do remember, you know, getting sent to a psychologist, family council, whatever it was, 2 or 3 times a week that lasted about two or three weeks. I mean, here I was putting an office with some suit that didn’t know me from Adam, didn’t hunt, didn’t fish, there was nothing to talk about. You know, how do you feel about that? You know, it is just trying to make a conversation about nothing, you know, and then no playing pinhole you and put you on a pill. They put me on some pill, I didn’t feel nothing. You know, they put you on a pill, you take this pill like you said, dude, you don’t feel anything and the truth matter is I didn’t take them, I didn’t want to take them. But the truth matter is you’ve got to feel something, you know, at that point your life, you know, God gave us feelings to be angry to be happy to be sad and the part of the process is feeling them. You’ve got to feel them. You’ve got to weather it out.

Rocky Leflore: It’s a wise statement you just made.

Jake Latendresse:  Amen, I mean, if people that just heard that don’t take don’t, they don’t take that and put that in their front pocket for the rest of their lives then don’t bother with anything else because that is a vastly important, resonating, powerful engaging statement. I mean that is freaking huge Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a part of process guys. I mean it just really is, you know. I tell you but you know, speaking of age, I can tell you this it’s, that’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of understanding and a lot of everything to go into a 16 year old mind and heart. Years and years and years later, years later, decades later I was sitting in Uruguay at a hunting camp talking million the in the banker and the doctors and we had way too much wine and we were talking heart to heart and the elder physician there. I mean 70 some odd years old. Real respected family doctor. You know, we were just talking heart to heart about something and he said, you know Ramsey, you unfortunately you understand a special part of the human condition that’s usually reserved only for us old doctors about living and dying. You know, it’s way too, that’s just way too much. I mean, I would not wish that on anybody and you know, I can’t tell you all how awesome it was too much later have Children. I mean, they go, you bet your ass every time I didn’t think I was ever going to have kids, find a pretty girl. I mean it was tough time for years after but when I had Children, you know, and now my daughter is 16 Duncan is 18, Forrest is 20 and watching them go through knowing where I was when I was 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 but seeing them live, it was so worth it. You know what I’m saying. It was so rewarding about. I just thank God that my child, I mean, it would have been so, it would crush me, my Children had. I cannot imagine what my dad and my mother and my family and the people that love me went through at that period of life. I just can’t even imagine what they were going through.

Rocky Leflore: No, it’s been a –

Jake Latendresse:  I need a cigarette.

Ramsey Russell: I do to.

Jake Latendresse:  And I don’t smoke.

Rocky Leflore: I want to say, I’m like Jake, I want to say this. If you didn’t hear what Ramsay said and I said this numerous times in conversations with my wife with pastors. If you didn’t hear what he said, you take that pill, you lose that feeling and to get through something, you got to work through it, you got to fight through it.

Jake Latendresse:  Got to feel it, like he said, you have to feel it, feel it to go through it to understand it, you’ve got to feel it and that is God dang, that’s like one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard.

Rocky Leflore: This is just unbelievable.

Jake Latendresse:  That’ll make a great Instagram caption.

Rocky Leflore: There are brighter times ahead Ramsey, like I said last week, thank you for walking back through this. I know it’s tough on you, but there’s a lot of brighter days that hit that’s coming up in the next few episodes, if we’re going to cover.

Ramsey Russell: We’re fixing to get into the fun stuff now, we’re fixing to get in some fun stuff. I appreciate anybody’s listening. You know, I don’t, I just, I’m appreciative of you all talking me into to talking about this stuff, I probably never would have had that, you all not induce me for this conversation.

Jake Latendresse:  You’re making my life better Ramsey, because, you know, as I look towards my future and my Children, like you just talked about, you know, once you have Children, you put your energy towards protecting your Children, but you want your Children because you want your Children to live that normal life and all these things and it’s not, it’s an intra perspective, you know, outlook and it’s not about what happened to you, but how you dealt with it. It’s so intriguing to me and so powerful to me and what I want to pass on to my Children, because that’s what gets you through. Dude, if you can, if I can teach my Children to get, if you can get through the hardest things in life or things that are unimaginable, like you went through, then there’s no excuses that you can’t get through anything in life and with honors, you know, if you will, so I really appreciate hearing all this and I think it makes anyone that is listening to it. I bet they’re shaking their head right now going, yep, your story is making us better humans and better people. So, thank you. I mean there’s no greater gift in the world than that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you all saying that.

Rocky Leflore: I said this when we first started, Ramsey is one of my top most respected people in the duck hunting industry and great respect for him. Now, I mean, just hearing this to know what you’ve been through and to become what everybody knows you are today. It’s amazing and I appreciate you telling it. Guys, I have to go, thank you all for being here, Ramsey, thank you again for telling the story, I want to thank all of you that listen to this edition of The End of the line podcast, Power by DuckSouth.com.

[End of Audio]

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