Isaac LaBozetta

Our youngest son, Isaac LaBozetta, a stone/block and brick mason, loved his job. He got up every morning happy to go to work and eager to get there. How many people can say that? His special ability, said one of his bosses, was that he could lay out a whole building’s stone wall on the ground (like a big patchwork quilt) and remember where every single stone belonged as it was set in mortar.

I was glad he found work he loved so much, but the mother in me worried about the hazards of that particular work. Every time there was a news alert on television that a construction worker had fallen or been injured somehow, my blood would freeze until I knew my son was safe. Then one day our family got the call we hoped would never come:

On July 5, 2006 Isaac lost his grip while climbing a scaffolding at his job site and fell four stories onto concrete. He was life-flighted to the local university medical center and was kept in their ICU for about two months. His injuries were terrible: head injury and bleeding into his brain, broken ribs, fractured collarbone, lacerated liver, broken jaw, collapsed lung, and three broken vertebras in his back, one a burst fracture with a large hematoma behind it. He was labeled “catastrophically injured” by Workman’s Compensation and it wasn’t immediately clear whether he would survive or what kind of condition he would be in if he did.

If his many injuries weren’t devastating enough on their own, he contracted MRSA every which way a person can get it while in the ICU: bloodstream, lungs (pneumonia), and skin. (Sepsis and MRSA, Sepsis and Pneumonia) The family was told the hospital was presently having a serious MRSA problem in the ICU and that almost everyone placed on a ventilator was getting it. To their credit, the hospital staff was monitoring the potential for infection and did not try to hide the problem, responded immediately, and appropriately, when it manifested in our son.

His second lung started to collapse after he got the pneumonia and it was terrible to witness him so injured and sick, chest tubes inserted in both sides of his body to keep his lungs working. He ran a high fever, his heart raced. Antibiotic after antibiotic was tried. Eventually, he was transferred to an intermediate center and an infectious disease specialist was called in to administer a month of IV Vancomycin. In October of 2006 Isaac returned home, to his wife and three children–and went right back to work two weeks later. (light duty–he was never able to return to masonry) It is truly a miracle that he survived his fall. It is another miracle that he survived all his injuries. Of all the construction workers in the area who fell that summer our son was the only survivor. But the biggest miracle of all is that he survived MRSA all three ways he had it.

Update, February 6, 2014

Isaac did return to work as a mason. He suffers back pain but he accepts it as the price of being able to continue to work at what he loves and being able to support his family.

Source: By Elizabeth LaBozetta (Isaac's mother)