'I wasn’t trained on how to ride the bloody thing': Surviving a quad crash and living to tell the tale
Philip Crowe: 'I always went too fast on the quad anyway.' Photo: NI Limousin Cattle Club/Facebook
Philip Crowe, a Co Cavan farmer, spent nearly a week in hospital in May after he was thrown from a speeding quad that he was driving.
The Ballinagh man damaged his kneecap and leg during the incident and ended up having his patellar tendon surgically reattached in the aftermath.
The father of three was on two crutches for six weeks and is now moving around with just one. However, it will be another couple of months before Philip’s recovery will be more pronounced.
He is now advocating for reduced speed on quads and for farmers to just take that one or two seconds to think about the task at hand before they actually carry it out.
“Stop and think,” warns the Ulster farmer who, together with his brother, runs a 100-acre farm comprising 20 pedigree Limousin cows, 40 pedigree yews — Dassenkop and Blue Texel breeds — and 150 sows with an integrated pig unit.
“It’s all go here I can tell you,” he told the before highlighting how, in hindsight, “I always went too fast on the quad anyway”.
“I know that for sure, and to be honest with you, there is an ol’ buzz on them, especially if you get going hard on them,” he continues before adding that on the day of his accident he had just gotten the quad back after it was away for the previous six or seven weeks being serviced.
“I got it back on the Wednesday, and I decided I would put some medicated water up into a tank that was up high. I went off then on the quad to get a sizing pipe.
“Up I got on the quad and, like I always do…full rev and went flying off! There is a corner on the lane, and usually as I approach it, I’d ease off on the revs, come round the corner and on up to the house; usually everything would be grand.”
However, on the day of Philip’s accident, the rev stuck on the quad and instead of slowing down as he was coming up to the corner, “the quad was doing three times what it should have been doing”.
“I put on the brakes, but the quad wouldn’t stop,” he adds.
Philip’s head slammed against the ground and he became unconscious. He also damaged his knee and patellar tendon. He was taken to hospital and the next morning underwent surgery on the leg. The medical team also removed 100ml of fluid from his forehead, which he added “was up like a balloon at that stage”.
“When I hit my head I became unconscious — I don’t know exactly how long I was unconscious for, but I do know that my children arrived and they thought that I was messing around.
"When I came round, then I wasn’t able to move, and it was at least five minutes before I could feel anything again. That was probably the shock of what had happened and the severity of the bang I got when I hit the ground.”
The Cavan farmer says that during the first month after the accident there were many days when he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. “In fact,” he continues. “It took months for my head to settle down after everything that happened”.
“I needed to be trained on how to use the quad; there is a cut-off switch on them — you just pull a little band and the quad stops — but lookit, I wasn’t trained on all of that and the accident happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to do anything.
“I’m still using a crutch and going to physio, and I basically haven’t done a proper day’s work since the accident.”
Meanwhile, when Philip woke up after the accident, he recalls how his “head kept going back to those last few seconds before everything went dark”.
He says he thought initially he would be back up and running sooner rather than later, but that, however, is not how the situation panned out.
“Lookit, that isn’t how it worked out for me at all. I did so much damage to the drainage system of my leg — deep wounds that went down into the bone — that anytime I go to do a bit of work now, fluid starts building up again because it can’t be released,” he continues.
“While things have improved for me and I am improving slowly, there are things going on around here all the time, and I’m just not able to sort them out.
“For instance, a cow calved here the other day, and she calved out through a gate and into another field — I wasn’t able to get that sorted, and it’s just an example of something that I would normally have just run out to and sorted quickly. But this time I wasn’t able to lift up the calf and bring it back over the fence.
“And yet I was here going off my head with the worry of the calf, and I wasn’t able to do anything. That type of stuff is very difficult for me at the moment. And I have had a few losses this year simply because I wasn’t able to be where I was supposed to be at a particular time.”
He adds: “My brother is helping me on the farm and my mother is a great woman; she’s working away on the farm too. And I also know that I’m one of the lucky ones because I have lived to tell the tale.
“But these quads are going far too fast — we don’t need quads that are fit to travel at a speed of 80-90km/h. To me, that doesn’t make any sense. There should be an onus on everyone who has a quad to do a course at least every three or four years.
“I think to myself now that if I had done a course and was trained on how to use them safely, i.e. to be able to pull the power when you need to, I would have had a very different outcome 16 weeks ago.”
Elsewhere, the Cavan man got back up on the quad recently and while he points to how he’s “not trying to win any time trials”, he is “tipping about on it”.
“I’m hoping to be off this crutch by Halloween, but for me, full recovery is going to take time. The morning of the accident, when I got up on that quad, I wasn’t thinking about it; I was thinking about getting up to the house and getting my pipes. I wasn’t concentrating at all.
“I know that what happened to me could have been avoided, and sometimes us farmers are in a rat race, a different world. We should all have accidental injury on our insurance policy as well because after I had my accident, I learned one very important thing — I had everything on the farm insured except myself.
“At least if you have the cover, you could pay for a man to work the farm for a few weeks or months, or however long you needed it. And, I can tell you, that is something that would alleviate a lot of the stress and worry you experience after a farm accident.”
