On May 14, 2015, Angie Sing received the call no mother ever wants to get. Her child was hurt in an accident and he was being taken to the hospital by helicopter.
“Donnie (her husband) called and said for me to finish up what I was doing and meet them at the hospital because Kyle just broke his leg,” Angie recalled. “About five minutes later, if that, he called me back and said ‘You have to be done now, they are airlifting Kyle.’”
A farming accident resulted in Kyle Sing, who was 15 at the time, suffering from a broken femur and tibia, with three breaks between the two bones, in his left leg; three breaks in his pelvis; and deep lacerations.
When Angie and Donnie Sing, arrived at the hospital, they were quickly told that the local trauma unit was not equipped to treat Kyle’s injuries and he was going to be flown to a facility in St. Louis, Mo.
“When you hear a surgeon say that, it’s hard to take,” Angie said. “All I could do was pray.”
Kyle said the day of the accident was just a normal day at their family farm in Laclede County, Mo., where they raise beef cattle and Quarter horses with Angie’s parents, Lester and Becky Barker, and her grandfather, Kenneth Woody.
Donnie and Kyle were helping Kenneth replace a lot fence near an old barn. Donnie left for a few minutes to take he and Angie’s younger son, Colby, to meet up with friends for a baseball practice, while Kyle and Kenneth started working on the fence.
Kenneth was operating a tractor with an auger attached to a PTO to dig a hole for a new corner post. Kyle was about 4 feet away from the auger when it suddenly jumped from the hole and caught a wire panel. The panel then grabbed Kyle and twisting around him.
“I was standing there and when the auger went down, it went to spinning and it hit a big rock,” Kyle said. “When it jumped and caught the panel, the panel broke loose from the post and whipped around me, pulling me in. I thought I was dead; I didn’t know what was going on. I just remember seeing the roof of the old milk barn every time I would go around.”
“He was in the mixture of all three of them,” Angie said. “My grandpa had to cut Kyle’s belt off of him with a pocket knife, and my grandpa was 88 years old, so he had some major adrenaline going. When Donnie got back, he saw my grandpa on the ground and through something happened to my grandpa, then he saw Kyle. Kyle just said, ‘Dad!, Dad! I think I broke my leg.’”
In addition to the fractures and lacerations, a piece of the panel punctured Kyle’s leg. It missed the main artery by only 2 centimeters.
Kyle has endured six surgeries since the incident. Four of the procedures, which totaled 20 hours in the operating room, were done within six days of his arrival at the St. Louis hospital. Two later plastic surgeries took skin and muscle from his right leg and grafted it to his injured one.
“He laid flat on his back in bed for two weeks because of his broken pelvis and the open wounds,” Angie said. “He had wound vacs all over … He just couldn’t move.”
Kyle said the hardest part of his recovery was not being able to do what he normally did. In addition to a long hospital stay, he was in a wheelchair for about a month before he graduated to a walker, then to crutches.
Angie said Kyle progressed better than anyone expected, hitting milestones in his recovery within days, not weeks as expected. While he continues to be monitored by doctors, he has been released from all physical therapy and has no restrictions.
“He told us he was going to be off crutches by the time school started, and he weaned himself off the week before,” Angie said.
Today, Kyle still carries the scars of his accident, but he faces no additional surgeries. He can’t run the way he once did, which has limited him from playing sports, but that will come back in time. While he can’t play baseball or basketball, he can still ride a horse and throw a loop.
“Roping is my favorite thing to do,” the now 16-year-old said. He has recently began competing in high school rodeo events in team roping and has reclaimed his spot at local team penning competitions. “Some people say that you can lose your thumb or finger roping, but after what I have been through, it doesn’t worry me.”
Angie said while Kyle was recovering in the hospital, she and Donnie would wheel him outside, where they set up a roping dummy. She proudly shows the video of a hospital gown-clad Kyle throwing a rope from his wheelchair. He caught the dummy every time in the video. One of the first things he wanted to do when he got home was to see his horse, “Hoss.”
Angie said the horse approached Kyle and gently nuzzled him, as if he was welcoming a long-lost friend home.
Kyle has not let is accident diminish his plans to rodeo, or to continue his family’s farming legacy.
“I just love farming,” he said. “I’d like to get into animal science after high school and really want to keep ag a part of my future.”
Those future plans also include the hopes of a rodeo scholarship to Missouri State University or Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College.
Angie said Kyle’s determination to return to a normal life and the prayers of a community fueled his remarkable recovery, but for Kyle, there was something even more powerful that kept him calm and alive that day.
“As I was spinning around, I could feel someone pulling me away from the auger,” he said. “It’s like they had me under my arms, pulling me back. I heard a voice say to me that I was going to be OK.”
