Teresa Stepzinski

Jacksonville Times-Union

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Four months and nine surgeries after a pickup truck slammed into his tent at a southwest Iowa campground and dragged him, James Foley got the green light from his doctors to finally return to his Florida home, in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

July 24 had been a long, sad day for Foley and his Foley Boys bicycle riding team. Early in the morning, on the first day of the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, one of their friends, a fellow rider, died after being hit by a pickup truck.

As Foley slept, a Ford F-250 heavy duty pickup truck rumbled out of the darkness, suddenly careered off the Shenandoah campground driveway and slammed into his tent. The pickup dragged Foley — entangled in the shredding fabric and screaming — about 50 feet through gravel and over grass before the driver lurched to a stop at his own campsite, an Iowa State Patrol investigation showed.

“I was screaming my guts out at this guy to stop the truck,” said Foley as he lay in his hospital bed last week. “Part of the tent ripped right away and I could see the bottom of that pickup truck. Then he stops. He drove up the road 40 to 50 feet then he backed up and drug me back down the road. He made a turn and left me lying there …”

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Foley also remembers vividly rolling around beneath the truck as the tent fabric disintegrated.

“I tried to figure out in my mind, what the hell’s going on here. And when I finally hit the dirt, I was gone, I was out. I can’t remember anything after that,” Foley said.

Four months later, Foley refuses to surrender to his injuries.

Foley, 68, of Middleburg, Fla., suffered a crushed pelvis and numerous other injuries. He was participating in his 16th RAGBRAI.

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He was discharged Wednesday from a Jacksonville hospital, and he was able to spend Thanksgiving with his wife, two of his children, his grandchildren and friends, said Adam Foley, his son.

“The important part is, there was no spinal cord injury and no head injuries. Everything I have that’s broke, is fixable. But it’s that God-awful word, ‘time,’ ” said James Foley, who faces the prospect of more hip surgery after the first of the year along with countless more hours of physical therapy.

His wife, Terry Foley, said, “Every doctor has told us, ‘Thank God, he was in good shape or he would never have made it’. Because the night they took him in, he coded several times.” Her husband went into cardiac arrest while being flown from the Shenandoah campground to an Omaha trauma center 60 miles away.

It was 11:30 p.m. Foley was run over 17 hours after another pickup truck driver struck and killed Jacksonville bicyclist Wayne Ezell, in an unrelated collision still under investigation by the Iowa State Patrol. Foley and Ezell were friends as well as avid bicyclists.

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“Wayne was just the nicest guy. … I feel so bad for him and his family,” Foley said.

At the campground, Foley’s riding team rushed to help him. A doctor on the team provided emergency first aid to Foley who lay broken and bleeding in the dirt. Paramedics stationed nearby because of the bicycle ride arrived within about three minutes, the couple said.

Foley spent two months in the intensive care unit at Creighton University Medical Center. Often sedated and hooked up to a ventilator, he underwent eight painstaking surgeries to piece together his fractured and fragmented pelvis, replace his shattered right hip, drain an abscess on his colon and repair his other wounds.

Foley was awake and talking when he arrived at the trauma center. He recalls the doctors giving him cardiopulmonary resuscitation when he got there, and “they brought me back and I started talking again.” He then woke up about two months later after being sedated all that time, he said.

“I’ve had the best doctors and nurses every where I’ve been. I can’t say enough good things about them all,” he said.

The State Patrol said the driver, Danny Cardin, 55, of Homer, La., had a blood alcohol level of 0.161 after Foley was run over, which is twice the legal limit for drivers in Iowa. It was Cardin’s second drunken-driving case in a little more than two months, Iowa court records show.

Cardin initially denied all wrongdoing but ultimately acknowledged drinking and driving the pickup. He smelled of alcohol, his speech was slurred, his eyes bloodshot and watery and he swayed on his feet having a hard time standing up as he talked to investigators, according to the State Patrol.

The State Patrol charged Cardin with operating a vehicle while intoxicated, serious injury by vehicle and leaving the scene of a serious injury accident. Two months earlier, Glenwood police charged him with operating a vehicle while intoxicated.

Cardin, free on $50,000 bail, has pleaded not guilty and faces a tentative trial date of Dec. 6 in the Foley case. He is scheduled to be sentenced Monday after previously pleading guilty in the Glenwood case, court records show.

On Sept. 6, an air ambulance flew Foley home to northeast Florida. For all but a brief time since then, Foley has been in one of three area hospitals.

He’s also had another surgery to repair his hip, bringing the total to nine procedures, and has been undergoing physical rehabilitation therapy to rebuild his core body strength and in his arms, improve his stamina and relearn how to walk.

Foley lost 50 pounds during his first two months in the hospital. But his sense of humor remains intact.

“I think the big guy flipped a coin whether I was worth it or not, because I was pretty busted up,” he said. Nonetheless, he acknowledged it’s very hard not to get frustrated because there still are many things he can’t do for himself, such as turn to pick up a glass of water at table beside his hospital bed.

“I’m not complaining. You can go upstairs and find people in a lot worse shape than I’m in. I’m lucky as hell I didn’t get hurt worse. That’s the best part. I could have died that day,” Foley said.

Terry Foley said that her husband will be able to walk on his own again but that it will take a while. He’s made good progress as a result of physical and occupational therapy. When he first arrived at the hospital, Foley said, he couldn’t even raise his hand up off the bed and needed help to move at all.

Now, he can pretty much maneuver himself and has regained enough strength to propel his wheelchair, Terry Foley said.

The couple, who are both from Clinton in eastern Iowa, have been married 45 years. Terry Foley has been by her husband’s hospital bed ever since he was injured. Their three grown children also have been with there with him, and currently check in with their Dad daily by telephone to keep up with his recovery.

Together, the couple owned and operated a small lawn care business in Middleburg, and he also had a hurricane shutter business. Together they built the business from the ground up. But they had to shut it down when Foley was hurt.

“There was no way we could do it …But we’ll find something else down the road hopefully,” Terry Foley said.

It will be months, possibly years, before the U.S. Army veteran who served as a combat engineer during the Vietnam War, is well enough to work again.

Meanwhile, the medical bills are mounting, already well into seven figures. They have some insurance but it won't cover everything. The current focus is on Foley’s recovery.

“If we can just come out of this without being so far in the hole that there is no way to climb out … . But it’s not the priority,” Terry Foley said.

Foley said money is not his main concern.

“My primary concern is pushing all this extra work on Terry. She got a call at 3 o’clock in the morning about me and flew to Omaha the next day. And she hasn’t missed a day sitting in that chair since,” said Foley as he pointed to a chair beside his hospital bed.

A GoFundMe account established for Foley and the family had $31,607 as of Nov. 20.

“We’ve had people come out of the walls to help. Friends of ours, and strangers too. I wasn’t even awake yet and one of our friends built a wheelchair ramp at the front and back door of our house,” Foley said.

After he’s discharged, Foley’s doctors want him to do three days a week of outpatient therapy.

“My plan is to ride a bike next summer,” said Foley who wants to return to RAGBRAI as soon as possible. But more importantly, he wants to be around to see their two granddaughters grow up and to go with many more weekend bicycle trips with them.

“My next goal is relearn to walk, then walk better, walk better, walk better, then ride the bike,” Foley said.