My name is Rick Krahn. I'm a father and I'm a husband, I'm a farmer, and I am an injured worker.
Dad and grandfather bought Birchwood Dairy in 1968. Started with 90 cows and worked
their way up to 150, and mid-80s my dad built a processing plant to make our own
ice cream and yogurt and milk, and we're open all year round.
Rick is my oldest son and he's a general manager of Birchwood Dairy Farms. His uncle asked him:
What are you gonna do when you grow up? And he says I'm gonna help dad on the farm.
And that's Rick, always there ready to help, and he chose that I guess because he liked farming.
Started doing tractor work 11 to 12 years old and helping out where we can and making hay.
I was 24 roughly when I started to take over the farm, but I had some big responsibility.
On April 28th 2010, I was getting our forage harvester ready to go and my
nephew Cody was in the tractor and he had started it up for me so he could listen to it
and somehow I got too close to it and it grabbed my coveralls then it just
turned it in until it got my leg and then started breaking it as it went.
I just remember my nephew Cody come run around screaming in the phone for
911 to come and if he hadn't been there it would have been game over.
My dad and my brother came rushing out then and and then my mom came a minute later and
my dad stopped her and said go back, and you know when the ambulance come direct them back here, you don't want to see this.
It's a sudden shock.
I seen Rick in the machine, I saw Cody pulling on the PTO shaft getting it disconnected,
and my other son holding him up as I started cutting his pant legs off so that he could get free.
The ambulance was here within, I think it was 12 minutes, and the air ambulance was right behind him.
Yeah it just changed my life forever there, just the blink of an eye.
My injuries were, obviously, I lost my leg above the knee,
I lost tips of these fingers and half my thumb, broke a main artery in my stomach,
my ACL MCL I snapped right in half with the torque that I put on it,
one bone in my knee and one bone in my ankle, and I broke my hip.
It wasn't such a shock when the doctor said we had to amputate his leg because I already had seen the damage in the machine.
I was in the hospital for three months, then it was like, okay now it's time to go home.
But it was a tough transition. That was where
it really kind of hit me that, you know, this is gonna take a while to get better.
Pretty much soon after I got home I started going to physio and I started working on my upper-body strength.
Rick, even from day one, he came in with a smile on his face, a positive attitude,
he had support from his family and community,
and I never heard no from Rick about anything that we did.
When I was ready to start wearing a prosthetic, then they fitted me with what's called a c-leg,
and it is one of the best legs you can get.
It's got an artificial knee that you try and mimic what your real knee would do.
Everything that Rick had to work on, it was from the ground up.
I mean he had to learn how to balance, how to stand on two feet again,
and then starting to walk, and then core is very important for amputees.
So once he had those basic components, then we could move towards doing higher functional level activities.
When I first met Rick, he made it very clear to me
that he wanted to return to work right off the bat, right from our first meeting.
From that point forward, I knew that that was the avenue that we would have to take.
He never really knew exactly to what level he'd get back,
but he was always keen to be active and a participant in some form or fashion back there on the farm.
There was no thinking of doing something else.
It was just, you know, as soon as I got home, I wanted to get to the farm and see what was going on.
It's not just a business, it's a family business.
I still wanted to be part of that, even though much of my role has changed somewhat
that I can't do as much as I used to. And you slowly start doing different things,
and, you know, climbing up on the tractor without falling, and how to get off it.
And a lot of it was just learning to push yourself; okay I think I could do
this, let me try it. And hey I could do it, and they say I'm
back to doing probably 80-90% of what I was doing, just slower, and more cautious.
There were very many hurdles that Rick had to overcome in order to return to work.
Just simply the physical environment of a farm is not conducive to someone with a prosthetic.
Very physically demanding, labour-intensive work that even a most able-bodied person would have difficulty with.
On a practical basis, we've assisted Rick by providing him with home modifications,
modifications to both work vehicle and personal vehicle.
I've got a John Deere Gator that WorkSafe paid for
and it's got a hand control, and I use my left foot on the brake, and it's been one of the greatest things
to get around with because I don't burn up so much energy trying to walk the whole time.
Len, my dad, was very encouraging.
Don't overdo it, don't take things too fast, but, you know, learn your limits.
We didn't regulate anything; he did what he wanted to do and what he could do. He paced himself.
If I could speak to someone that was in my shoes that had just gone through this,
you've got to have the will to keep going. Don't load the
self-pity, and what happened happened. You can't change it, you can't sit in the house and just do nothing.
Because you've still got a life, you've still got a family. It's gonna be tough, no doubt about that,
and you're going to have your up days and your down days, but it gets better and you will be able to do it
as long as you have the right mindset to do it.
I'm sure there's days where he wished it wouldn't have happened,
but immediately he says, it happened, I can't do anything about it, so I carry forward.
I feel very proud to have been able to get back to the job that I like to do, and that WorkSafe has provided the tools to do that, and the support.
I think I've got as good a future as anybody because, you know,
don't let it hold you back. It's only a leg.
I mean, sure, it's a big challenge, but I don't see my future being much different as it was before.
We're gonna keep right plugging along and the future looks bright again.