Veetoune Mokhantha got a weird feeling as he lay in the hospital room. A bunch of people were gathered around - his mom and dad, his girlfriend, some buddies.
They kept looking at his leg, you know? They kept looking at it.
And then the doctor told him. Said he’d lost his left leg below the knee in the drilling rig accident.
“I started crying,” he said. “I was pissed. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. Just kicked everybody out.”
He was alive, at least. The young roustabout had stepped into a hole in a steam-filled room, into a spinning industrial auger that nearly devoured him. With finesse and brute force, rescuers cut him out of the steel. Flew him 800 miles off the frigid North Slope to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.
So he’d survived.
But how would he live?
Mokhantha - family members and friends call him Toune, like Toon, or Tim - spent all spring recuperating from the March 25, 2006, accident.
And through the summer, he learned to walk again. He was fitted with a prosthetic leg. Started out on a walker. Then a push walker, crutches, a cane.
He did learn to walk.
But it’s not over.
It’s not the lost leg that causes him the most trouble and pain.
It’s the right leg, the one that was wrapped around the shaft of the auger, shattered and torn. He can put his fist in hollows where muscle should be. Most of the calf is gone. His big toe and two others also are gone.
He also suffered serious burns from the cutting torches rescuers used to free him.
He’s had multiple surgeries on the leg - bone grafts, installing and removing screws and other hardware, fixing the Achilles - and faces more.
It’s more like a peg than a leg. He has no dorsiflexion - can’t move his foot and toes upward. Like the ankle is wooden.
So his toes stay curled down all the time, hooked like claws, which means he walks on top of them till they bleed.
His second toe, the one next to the big toe, is scabbed and bleeding one February day as he arrives at the Providence physical therapy center. It’s got Toune in a bad mood.
“I hope they cut it off,” he said.
(A surgeon did, last Wednesday.)
But soon, he’s smiling - he’s got a brilliant, boy’s smile under that Yankees ball cap - as he works with Wally Wilson, an easygoing therapist who got his training in Alabama.
Wilson helps stretch his legs. Then Toune sits on a giant, green medicine ball and they toss a soccer ball back and forth. Hones his balance.
“He’s strong. He’s fit. He’s got great upper body strength, which is an asset,” Wilson said.
Nearby, an old woman pedals a stationary bike.
After an hour, Toune hobbles out to the reception area, where his mom is waiting, but turns back and pokes his head into an office.
“Bye, Melissa.”
'I WAS SO MAD’
Alaska’s oil industry is flush with risk, as enormous rigs employing 100 workers or more punch holes into the North Slope tundra, typically in winter when the ground is frozen rock solid.
The oil fields are isolated, arrayed along the Arctic Ocean coast.
Mokhantha’s rig was in an especially remote area, drilling a wildcat well deep inside the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a mostly empty federal tract the size of Indiana. The site was more than 100 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, the biggest of the Slope’s oil fields.
Despite the dangers, injuries as severe as Mokhantha’s are rare on the Slope.
The type of machine that trapped him, however, has maimed or killed plenty of people in a variety of industries.
An auger is basically a long corkscrew laid in a trough or pipe, its spinning blades designed to push along bulk material ranging from concrete to grain to cow manure to, in this case, mud used to lubricate drilling bits.
An arm, leg or piece of clothing in an auger often means severe injury or death. They’ve mangled many a farmer. In 2005, a pregnant woman working on a factory fishing ship in the Bering Sea lost both legs when an auger at the bottom of a hopper she was cleaning was switched on by accident.
Steam obscured his vision as Mokhantha entered a side room on the rig and stepped into a hole created after a co-worker removed a floor grate covering the auger, which was clogged with ice the workers were trying to dislodge.
He’s disgusted with himself - why did he have to step into that auger?
“I guess it was meant to be, whatever,” he said. “I was so mad.”
But Alaska safety inspectors believe the accident could have been prevented.
In August, the state Occupational Safety and Health office fined the rig operator, Nabors Alaska Drilling Inc., a unit of Bermuda-based drilling giant Nabors Industries Ltd., $18,900 for three safety violations: failing to train workers effectively, unlawfully cleaning machinery in motion and failing to erect a temporary protective railing around the floor opening.
Nabors is contesting the fine and the case is unresolved, state officials said.
MOTORCYCLE DREAMS
Around Christmas, as Mokhantha tells the story of his ordeal, he tears up as he describes how toolpusher Ray Barnes, the top man on the rig, stayed right by his side throughout the seven-hour rescue. Held his hand. Talked to him.
“He’s cool,” Toune said.
But Toune’s not got much use for Nabors. At first, he said, Nabors managers were “all goodie goodie.” Called him. Came to visit.
Now, he said, weeks and months roll by without any contact. Workers’ compensation is paying his medical bills. But there’s been no Nabors settlement, and state law generally prevents injured workers from suing their employers. So Mokhantha and his lawyer have sued a Nabors subcontractor they say was supposed to make sure the company followed safe work practices on the rig.
Asked if he’s still a Nabors employee, Toune said blankly, “I don’t know.” He knows he’s not getting a paycheck, though.
Except for his medical troubles, he seems to have a comfortable life.
He lives in a basement apartment in his mom and dad’s South Anchorage house. His space is dominated by a 50-inch TV, a billowy white sofa, two sleek motorcycles and a rambunctious Shar-Pei puppy named Blue.
His gorgeous girlfriend lives with him, though Toune said he told her after the accident that she could leave if she wanted.
He was born in Michigan, to parents who immigrated from Laos. Around the Mokhantha house, visitors can hear not only English but Lao and Thai.
Toune was a decent running back at Zeeland East High School, near Grand Rapids, and was a brawny guy before the accident - 5 foot 10, 190 pounds.
In the hospital, his weight dipped as low as 130 pounds and he still looks slight, except for those powerful arms, one of which he’s covered in tattoos of a coy fish and a Lotus flower, symbolizing strength and new life.
Friends ring his cell phone often, and they come and get him almost daily. They hit the mall, or hang out in one guy’s garage. Whatever.
Toune is 20 now, almost old enough to go into a bar.
He’s alternately despondent and stoked.
It disappoints him that he can’t stand or walk for more than 20 minutes or so before pain in his leg forces him into a wheelchair. And he frets about what he’s going to do for work. He said an insurance claims adjuster keeps asking him about his plans, but he figures he’s got enough to worry about with the surgeries.
“I wish I could go back to work. But what kind of job would take me?” he said. And then he looks down and mumbles, “Be a burger flipper.”
He knows he wants to get better.
He watches that Discovery Channel show, “Rebuilt,” about a high-tech prosthetics lab.
More than anything, he dreams of riding his motorcycles again - crotch rockets, a Yamaha R6 and a Honda 954.
Because he can’t work the gear shift with his left leg, he’ll have to rig up a hand shifter. But he’s sure he’ll ride.
“Summer’s coming,” he says over and over, and flashes that smile.
Daily News reporter Wesley Loy can be reached at wloy@adn.com or 257-4590.
