WHERE’S WALDO: When RC racing (literally) left a mark on me

0 June 13, 2017, 4:53 p.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

Some of the most memorable moments of my RC career - on-track accomplishments, job achievements, the friends I've made and the places I've visited - have left a mark on my life. One of them actually left a mark on my body.

It happened about fifteen years ago, during a Friday night club race at the original The Dirt Raceway in Hemet, CA. My dad and I were there to get some extra practice before the Pro-Line Southern California Saturday Series race the following day, and I slipped while jumping back over pit wall after setting down a friend’s car for his main event. The wall was about two feet tall, with a well-worn 2x4 running along the top and, combined with a muddy shoe, was quite slick. I landed on my shin on the corner of the wall and hobbled into pit lane to catch my breath.

“You’re going to need to go to the hospital,” said a horrified fellow racer, prompting me to look down at what I thought was just going to be a bruise. Instead of turning shades of black and blue, my leg was split open and bleeding rapidly; needless to say, 15-year-old me didn’t handle that very well. I hopped and screamed my way back to my pit table, alerting my dad (and everyone else within earshot). He grabbed our cleanest pit towel, tied it around my leg to stop the bleeding, and rushed to pack our gear into the truck with the help of other drivers. Two people helped lift me out of my chair and into the passenger seat of my dad’s truck, and we sped off to the emergency room at Hemet Valley Medical Center.

When we arrived, the staff didn’t seem concerned with my condition - after all, an emergency room often has to deal with more life-threatening conditions, especially late at night. We sat for a couple of hours, while my dad impatiently encouraged the nurses to at least take a look at my leg; when we were finally admitted, the nurse tasked with cleaning the laceration expressed her concern that we hadn’t yet been seen.

After several shots of anesthetic, many liters of saline, what seemed like three months of uncomfortable scrubbing, and the doctor using scissors to cut away the dead, smashed flesh, my leg looked like the inside of a blood orange with a slice removed. I told the doctor that I was taking anatomy and physiology classes in high school and that I wasn’t concerned with seeing anything graphic, so he instructed me to move my toe up and down - and pointed out that my tibialis anterior muscle was visible before stitching the gaping wound closed. The doctor explained how pre-tibial lacerations can be tricky to sew together and require extra time to heal, because the skin is thin and gets relatively little blood flow, and the fact that I fell on a blunt wall rather than something sharp had caused greater tissue damage. He chose to be conservative, using two rows of seven stitches each, and sent us on our way with specific instructions to keep the area clean of dirt, dust and mud.

Keep my leg clean at an outdoor nitro track? There’s no way we were going to miss a points race!

We got the discharge orders shortly after 3 AM and managed a few hours of sleep at a friend’s house before returning to the track. In fact, my favorite part of the whole ordeal was upon arriving that morning, when Adam Drake laughed while telling us that, after we had rushed out of the parking lot the night before, someone had asked if he thought we’d make it back on Saturday. “I know they’ll make it,” he said with a huge smile.

I don’t remember where I finished in the A-Main on Saturday, but I know that I didn’t turn marshal that day. I got the stitches removed a few weeks later and, ever since, I’ve had a smooth, shiny spot on my right leg that doesn’t quite have the same sensation as the skin around it - but it brings back fond memories of racing RC cars.

Have you ever suffered an injury at an RC track? Do you remember how it happened? Tell us in the comments below!

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