Cory Davis Checks In

Snocross fans have probably already heard about the injury Cory Davis sustained to his foot while riding moto about four weeks ago. When he’s not racing sleds the Christian Brothers Racing/Team Arctic rider from Soldotna, Alaska, says he absolutely loves riding freestyle moto and that’s exactly what he was doing when he got hurt, getting ready for a comp in his gravel pit. Cory checked in with sledRacer.com last night and gave us all the (sometimes gory) details on exactly what happened. Read on and learn all about getting pumped full of sedatives, fracture blisters and exactly how many doctors it takes to put your foot back onto your leg. Here it is in Cory’s own words:

We were out ramping and I had a few shows coming up so I was practicing getting ready for them. I had just learned bar tricks and I learned like six tricks in an hour. I was just running around crazy because I was super excited that I had learned all these tricks. I was just starting to try and make my dead bodies look good. We were taking pictures and

Cory at Duluth, 2009. Hopefully he'll be there for the 2010 version.

we were looking at them to see what we needed to do. Two times before my crash my right foot hung up in the bars but I got my left foot back to the peg and I landed hard, but I was OK. I rode around my gravel pit a little to recover a little and then went to try it again and the same thing happened. I’m not even sure why my foot was getting caught up. The last time I did it, the time I wrecked, I must have put my foot a little farther forward on the peg and my toe caught in the dirt and my foot went under my peg. Then while my foot was under the peg the suspension compressed and sheared off my foot at the ankle. It did this in the boot and I’m not even sure how that works because the boots are pretty stiff. And I’m wearing Gaerne SG12s, pretty much the best boot you can buy, for sure the most expensive. It ripped it under, hyperextended everything and broke all the bones.

When it happened I didn’t even wreck. I was still on the bike and I rode away, my leg was kind of dragging and I just fell off the bike and rolled onto my butt. I knew something was wrong because I could feel in my boot there was pressure on the top of my foot. I ripped my boot off real quick and I could see a big hump in the top of middle of my foot and it hurt like crazy. People were calling ambulances and I was just telling them to get a pickup and put me in the back because it would probably be faster. But the ambulance came and we went to the hospital in Soldotna and they

Fracture blisters - we had never heard of them either. Looks like it stings.

started pumping me full of drugs. After that it was kind of la-la land for me, but from what I gather talking to my girlfriend they couldn’t find a pulse in my foot because the ankle was dislocated and sheared off. It didn’t break my tibia or fibia, just the ankle. They put me out and she said there were seven guys trying to put my ankle back in place. She was holding my arms because I kept trying to wake up and rip the oxygen tubes out of my mouth and stuff. She’s kind of a girly-girly and I’m guessing she didn’t enjoy any of it.

When I woke up the doctor said my foot was pretty bad and they couldn’t really tell me what was going to happen. They set it and it had blood flow, but he said he didn’t know the consequences of it not having blood flow for so long. They sent me to the hospital in Anchorage and they evaluated it and I stayed the night. The next day the doctor said he was surprised I didn’t have any fracture blisters. I said, “What the hell is a fracture blister?” He said, it’s when there’s so much trauma to the skin from getting ripped around twisted it just kills it. That night I went home and woke up I had two little blisters. By the time I got back to the hospital that same day they were ten times as big and there were ten times as many. A day or two later when I had surgery it was one big mega blister. During surgery they went in through two little holes and put two pins in my ankle and scraped off that blister and basically got everything set so it could heal.

It’s four weeks out and right now I’m doing daily gauze changes, some cold laser therapy and just watching my diet and taking a handful of vitamins a day. So far every checkup I’ve had and every specialist I’ve seen its been nothing but positive so far. In two weeks they pull the pins out and at ten weeks I can start putting pressure on it.

There’s a laundry list of stuff though, like every fluid sack in the joints in my ankle and foot burst, almost every bone in my foot is broke – I’ll never have the same foot again. I’ll have arthritis and not as much mobility, but I still have my foot and that’s good enough for me. It was a pretty dark time for me sitting in the hospital listening to them talk about cutting my foot off.

Couple days later. That's dead skin.

I’ve been in contact with Dwight Christian, my team owner, and they know we don’t just sit on the couch all summer and these things can happen, so they’ve been really cool and supportive. I’m not going to miss the whole season, but at the same time I want to be 100 percent before I come back so I’m not putting any dates on it. My first priority is healing and I don’t know what that means, maybe I miss Duluth, maybe I miss the first two races, I don’t know. But my foot feels better every day and I’m feeling really good about it right now.

I must have had 500 phone calls while I was in the hospital and I appreciate every one of them. I appreciate how everyone cared about me enough to call. I wish I could have called everyone back but that week wasn’t a good one. But I’ll be ready to go for the snowmobile season, luckily you don’t need that good of a foot to ride snowmobiles.

Later,

Cory

For more info on Cory Davis check out www.cory-davis.com