The Best of Reader's Digest

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  Royd had been trying to take her mind off her predicament. “What do you watch on TV?” he asked, and they talked for a while about her favorite shows. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

  “Disneyland,” she said emphatically. “I love Mickey Mouse.” This man’s so brave, she thought. He could get out of here any time he wants. Grandad and Uncle Vincent must have sent him.

  Whenever she was startled by a sudden noise, Royd would explain what the firefighters were doing. He tried to reassure her: “You’ve got a few broken bones and burns, but it’s marvelous what the doctors can do.” Occasionally she would let out stifled moans. “It’s OK, yell all you want,” he encouraged. “Bite me if it helps.”

  The pain from the injuries to Shirley’s lower body was becoming unbearable. She cried out, burying her hands in Royd’s thick hair, pulling hard to ease her agony. As a firefighter, Royd had seen grown men with very little wrong with them blubbering like idiots, yet here was a 12-year-old girl who had not shed a single tear.

  After she had sufficiently recovered, Shirley got her promised ride on Gilly with Royd.

  The steady flow of water wavered for an instant. God no, thought Royd, the fire can’t take us now. Shirley barely managed to move her arms as the flames rolled in. Then the water came pouring back and Royd was horrified to see several layers of skin on her arms had slid down and bunched up round her wrists. “I’m still with you, Shirley,” he said. “Do you like horses?” he asked, desperate to get her talking again.

  “I’ve never been on a horse.”

  “When we’re out of here, I promise you a ride on my daughter’s horse, Gilly.”

  As Royd talked, he kept a finger on Shirley’s wrist to check her pulse. Now it was growing noticeably fainter and more erratic. She’d been trapped for nearly 40 minutes. Dear God, how much more can she take?

  With the wreck out of the way, Glass was trying to lift the trailer off the girl. He faced a knife-edge decision. A hydraulic jack would be quicker, but it risked tilting the trailer, tipping out more fuel and incinerating the pair. “We’ll use the airbags. They’ll give a straight lift,” Glass told his crew. Only one-and-a-half inch thick and made of rubber reinforced with steel, the 2-foot-square bags could each lift a railway wagon 2 feet. They slid one under each set of rear wheels and began feeding in compressed air. As the trailer moved they slipped in wooden blocks to keep it on an even keel.

  Royd felt Shirley’s pulse flutter and she closed her eyes. “Shirley, talk to me!” he pleaded. She rallied for a couple of moments but her pulse was so faint now he could barely feel it. She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. “If I don’t make it, tell Mum I love her,” she whispered.

  “We’re losing her, Warby,” Royd shouted. “Throw me an Air Viva!” He put the mask of the portable resuscitator over Shirley’s face and forced air into her lungs. She stirred a little and opened her eyes. “You tell your mum yourself,” he scolded. “I promised I wouldn’t leave you. Now don’t you leave me!”

  “I’ll hang on,” she murmured.

  * * *

  The rescue team had run into trouble. Part of the trailer was on soft ground, which was sodden from all the water, and the airbag under the wheel that was trapping Shirley was sinking into the mud instead of lifting. They blocked one more time and inflated the bag to its maximum, but the wheels had risen only four inches. “We must have her out now,” Warby told Glass.

  Praying it would give them that extra few inches of lift without tipping the trailer, Glass shoved a small hydraulic ram under the chassis. He held his breath. The trailer lifted some more. Now he had a 6-inch gap between ground and wheels; it would have to be enough.

  “Go for it!” he yelled. Royd gently, but quickly, untangled Shirley’s legs from under the wheel; they were crushed so badly they were like jelly in his hands. Warby helped him juggle her crumpled body from its tiny prison. Then they carried her to the stretcher. Just before Shirley was lifted into the waiting ambulance, she smiled at him and he bent down to kiss her on the cheek.

  “You’ve done it, Shirley,” he said. Then, overcome by fumes, shock and cold, he pitched forward into the arms of a fellow firefighter.

  For Shirley, the ordeal continued. As the ambulance headed for hospital, the paramedic bathed her burns in saline solution and gave her nitrous oxide to relieve her pain. If anyone deserves to live, he thought, it is this girl who has fought so hard.

  Back at the mall, firefighters were able to pour foam into the tanker. Before, it would have endangered Royd and the girl; now they quenched the burning rig in just three minutes.

  When Hyland revisited the scene the next morning, he saw something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. For 75 yards the top layer of tar on the road had burnt away, in places down to bare gravel—except for a patch the size of a kitchen table that was lightly scorched by fire. This was where Shirley had been lying.

  “It was as if the devil was determined to take that girl,” one firefighter said later, “and when she was snatched away, he just gave up.”

  Originally published in the August 1991 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Shirley’s recovery was slow, and included a series of painful skin grafts to her legs. Orthopedic surgeons found the right calf muscle too badly damaged to repair and decided to amputate her leg below the knee. Royd Kennedy now lives in Australia and retired in June 2019 after 44 years in firefighting and emergency service work. Shirley has three children.

  • YOUR TRUE STORIES •

  A BONDING MOMENT

  I sat in a rocking chair holding my sleeping three-week-old son. He wasn’t sleeping through the night. He was always fussy and only slept two hours at a time. I felt like I was a failure. I was sure I was doing everything wrong. Overcome with emotions, I began to cry. I looked down at my son and was surprised to see he was awake and staring at me intently. I looked down and met his gaze. We sat there for a moment gazing at each other and then simultaneously we both grinned. The wonder of the moment caused me to laugh out loud. At the sound of my laugh, his grin widened into a full open mouth smile. At that moment, I let my anxieties go and began to focus solely on the joys of being a mother.

  —Rebecca Jamison Emporia, Kansas

  AFTER YOU

  Having had a total knee replacement, three weeks ago, I recently had my first outpatient visit with the surgeon. When the office visit was over, my wife went ahead of me, to get the car. I walked, cane assisted, through the lobby. As I approached the glass exit door, and started to press the automatic door button, I noticed an elderly gentleman, approaching from the other side. To be courteous, I waited for him to enter, first. Only then, did I realize I was looking at my own reflection in the door!

  —Dr. Gregory Larkin Indianapolis, Indiana

  PHOTO OF LASTING INTEREST

  Gone Fishin’

  Although human visitors to Katmai National Park in Alaska are required to complete a “bear etiquette” orientation, the bears make no offer of their own hospitality. As the salmon in this 2017 photograph are about to find out, brown bears rule at Katmai. Around 2,200 of them roam the four-million-acre park, compared with the 60 campers allowed at the park’s only established campground. Photograph by Art Wolfe

  • YOUR TRUE STORIES •

  MAKING FRIENDS WITH MY KITCHEN

  When my son’s kindergarten teacher had the kids draw pictures of their moms, he drew me baking a birthday cake. A note on my refrigerator says, “Deer Mom. Yor fud is gud.” (Translation: Dear Mom. Your food is good.) If you asked me what I did best, cooking would be far down on the list. I cook out of necessity. Hungry family + tight budget = being forced to become friends with my kitchen. I didn’t have cash for a bakery birthday cake and the meal that inspired my son’s note was made out of leftovers and random cans from my pantry. One day, after getting frustrated by a recipe that wouldn’t turn out, I asked my son why he thought I was a good cook. “Because you love us,” he said
as he reached over to give me a kiss on the cheek. Yup. That works for me.

  —Dana Hinders Clarksville, Iowa

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

  A group of uniformed servicemen was exiting a restaurant as I entered with a group of teacher friends wearing our school shirts. I thanked them for serving our country, and as they walked away, I heard one say, “They’re the ones who work in a war zone full of runny noses, stacks of papers, and 1,000 questions a day. I prefer my job!” Coming from a military family, I was both humbled and amused by our mutual admiration.

  —Stephanie A. Woodard Missouri City, Texas

  How to Ruin a Joke

  by Andy Simmons

  A classic joke goes like this: A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, “Doctor, doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.” The doctor says, “Tell him I can’t see him.”

  Pretty simple, right?

  Here’s how I tell it: “A nurse—her name is Joyce—feels a presence in the waiting room. She looks around but sees nothing. She jumps up from her desk, carefully replaces her chair, and runs down the lavender-hued hallway to the doctor’s office. She knocks on the door. No response. He’s not there. Where can he be? She continues down the hall, admiring a lithograph of an 18th-century Mississippi paddleboat along the way.” By this time, my audience has left, but I soldier on. “She bursts into the exam room and says, ‘Doctor, doctor!’ The doctor, I should mention, is a urologist with a degree from Ohio State, which is where my nephew…”

  You get the idea I’m an embellisher. I can’t leave a simple gag alone.

  I’m not the only joke-challenged member of the family. My sister’s worse than I am. Her problem: She can’t remember them. “ ‘A nurse rushes into an exam room and says…’ Uh, let me start all over again. ‘A nurse rushes into a waiting…’ No, it’s not the waiting room. She just came from the waiting room. Let me start all over again. ‘A doctor rushes into…’ No, wait…”

  My uncle’s different. He’s guilty of taking a perfectly fine joke and selling it as the second coming of Oscar Wilde: “Okay, this is a good one. Ready? No, really, ready? Okay, fasten your seat belts. Ready? ‘A nurse…’ Got it? A nurse? Okay, ready? ‘A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, “Doctor, doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.”’ Now, this is where it gets funny. Ready?”

  No one is ever ready, so they leave before he gets to the punch line.

  My father’s on Wall Street, so he hears all the jokes before they hit the Web.

  My father’s on Wall Street, so he hears all the jokes before they hit the Web. And he lets you know he knows them all by telling you all of them. He also knows that most people don’t like jokes. So he slips them in under the radar: “I was chatting with Ben Bernanke the other day. You know Ben, don’t you? The Fed chief? Anyway, we were reviewing the Fed’s policy on long-term interest rates, and he told me it had evolved into its current iteration only after a nurse rushed into an exam room and said, ‘Doctor, doctor, there’s…’ Hey, where are you going?”

  My brother Mark understands that the secret to good joke telling is to know your audience. When he entertained my grandmother’s mahjongg club one evening, he made it a point to adapt the joke to them: “A stacked nurse rushes into an exam room…”

  No one in my family has ever finished this joke.

  But as bad as it is not to be able to tell a joke, there’s something worse: not being able to listen to one. Take my cousin Mitch.

  “Why couldn’t the doctor see him?” he asked.

  “Because he’s invisible,” I said.

  “Now, I didn’t get that. I thought the doctor couldn’t see him because he was with a patient.”

  “Well, yeah, okay, but the fact that the guy was invisible…”

  “Could the nurse see him?”

  “No. She’s the one who said he was invisible…”

  “How’d she know he was there?”

  “Because he…”

  “When you say he was invisible, does that mean his clothes were invisible too?”

  Here’s where I tried to walk away.

  “Because if his clothes weren’t invisible,” Mitch said, stepping between me and the exit, “then the doctor could see him, right?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “At least his clothes.”

  “I guess…”

  “Unless he was naked.”

  “Okay, he was naked!”

  “Why would he go to his doctor naked?”

  Next time you see my family and someone’s telling a joke, do yourself a favor: Make yourself invisible.

  Originally published in the September 2008 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Humor Hall of Fame

  Cartoon by Dan Piraro / bizarro.com

  The note I left on my middle-school student’s test said: “Please look up the meanings of suppository and depository.” It was in response to a question he’d answered concerning where Lee Harvey Oswald was when he assassinated President Kennedy.

  —KAREN SKOPHAMMER FORT DODGE, IOWA

  “In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,” I said to my sophomore English class, “a man, discontented with his life, wakes up to find he has been transformed into a large, disgusting insect.” A student thrust her hand into the air and asked, “So is this fiction or nonfiction?”

  —DIANE STURGEON SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA

  Nailed Through the Heart

  by Per Ola and Emily D’Aulaire

  As a youth, he’d performed countless daredevil stunts. Now he needed a miracle to save him.

  Sun beat down on a grateful Mike Spaulding. The 32-year-old framing contractor had a house to finish in the hills overlooking the town of Truckee, California, in the Sierra Nevada. He and carpenter Travis McMaster, 27, wanted to take advantage of the good weather before snow blanketed the Donner Pass region.

  Using 3¼-inch-long spikes that fed into their powerful nail guns like bullets in a machine gun, the two men pinned rafters into place as easily as stapling sheets of paper together. A slight pull on the trigger drove a nail up to its head in the heavy timbers.

  By midmorning that December 5, 1991, the temperature had climbed into the low 40s. The two men were working in their T-shirts. McMaster was holding a rafter in place while Spaulding muscled the lower end into position. Suddenly, a gust of wind caught the board and swung it toward him. The unexpected impact caused Spaulding’s finger—resting on the trigger—to squeeze. The gun fired.

  At first, Spaulding thought the nail had missed him—he felt no pain. Then a searing agony welled up from his chest. Glancing down, he saw the nail head buried so deep in his chest that it had pulled part of his T-shirt into his body. His mustachioed, chiseled face became contorted with pain. Feels like someone rammed a railroad tie through my chest, he thought.

  Gasping for breath, Spaulding tugged at his shirt, trying to wrench the nail free. The fabric ripped, but the nail wouldn’t budge. Frantically, he reached for his “cat’s paw,” a tool with a curved hook for extracting buried nails.

  “Stop!” McMaster yelled, as he raced down the ladder from the ridgepole above. He remembered a cardinal rule of first aid: never pull out an object impaled in the body.

  Whatever had been struck in Spaulding’s chest, McMaster knew, the nail now acted like a finger in a dike. To remove it without surgery could cause Spaulding to bleed to death in minutes.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” he told his boss, trying to sound calm. He steered Spaulding toward the pickup truck.

  Spaulding felt himself fighting the darkness squeezing in on him as he propped his feet on the truck’s dashboard and tucked his head down to minimize shock. A former professional freestyle skier, he grasped the irony of what had happened. After all the risks I’ve taken for fun, he wondered grimly, am I going to die on a simple little job?

  At age 15 he was doing two backward somersaults on skis after soaring off a ski jump. For a movie, he’d once
raced down a 50-degree slope, sailed off a 30-foot-high cliff, performed a perfect back flip over a moving freight train and landed safely on the other side of the tracks. Three skiers who had tried the stunt before him had been killed.

  I got through some crazy things, he thought woozily. But I don’t know if I’m going to dance through this one.

  With flashers blinking and his hand on the horn, McMaster raced the truck down the mountain roads. “You’ll be okay,” he kept telling his friend. “Just hang in there.”

  Spaulding’s eyes shut, and he started to slip into unconsciousness. “You can’t die on me, Mike,” McMaster bellowed. “Hang on! We’re almost there!”

  Struggling to stay conscious, Spaulding thought about his girlfriend, Judi Schorr, 28. He’d met the petite brunette a year earlier on a blind date. Almost immediately, he fell in love with her. After a few months he asked her to marry him. She said no—not because she didn’t love him, but because she’d decided marriage wasn’t for her. She’d seen too many marriages end unhappily.

  “After you drop me at the emergency room,” Spaulding gasped, “tell Judi what happened. Ask her to come to the hospital. I may never see her again.”

  * * *

  Shortly after 11 a.m. at Tahoe Forest Hospital, emergency-room nurse Judy Erhardt heard a truck skid to a halt in the bay normally reserved for ambulances. Erhardt hurried outside with other staffers.

  “My friend’s dying,” McMaster yelled, waving toward the barely conscious figure slumped in the passenger seat. Sweat poured from Spaulding’s face, drenching his clothing. His lips were blue from lack of oxygen.