75-Year-Old Woman Crawled Home Like an ‘Inchworm’ for 14 Hours After Breaking Leg in the ‘Middle of Nowhere’

NEED TO KNOW

• Charlene Kirby crawled back to her home with a broken femur after falling on her remote Colorado property on June 7

• The 75-year-old retired nurse crawled for 14 hours with the injury before her son found her on the morning of June 8

• “I had dirt in my nose, in my ears, on my teeth, in my hair, all down the front of me,” she recalled to ABC affiliate Denver7

Charlene Kirby loves living in the “middle of nowhere” — but the remoteness makes it treacherous to get help in an emergency.

And "treacherous" is a fitting description of the journey the Colorado native made after suffering a broken bone on the evening of June 7.

The retired nurse and paramedic, 75, was clearing brush and weeds from her remote property in McCoy when she took a hard fall, she recalled to local ABC affiliate Denver7.

After hooking up a trailer to a side-by-side to dump some of what she had cleared over a hill, the vehicle “wouldn’t go over.” She told the outlet, “When I let off the gas, it rolled backwards into the trailer, which jackknifed. So I got out, and I took out some stuff, thinking, 'Well, maybe it's too heavy.' Got back in, still couldn't quite make it over that crest."

The side-by-side started “running backwards over me,” she explained, addind, “So, I started running backwards, and then I turned to run, and that's when I fell.”

The trailer then jackknifed again, but “the side-by-side did not run over the top of me,” Kirby told Denver7. However, she wasn’t in the clear, as the retired nurse “could feel” that she had broken her femur.

After breaking the thigh bone, Kirby said she screamed, but nobody was near her property — which is situated between Vail and Steamboat Springs — to hear it. She had to get home to get help.

"After I got done screaming,” Kirby told Denver7, “I was laying on my backside, and I thought, 'Well, I can't lay here.' And you're really not supposed to move a [broken] femur, because you could sever your femoral artery.”

But she had no choice, and “just started pulling myself,” she continued. “In my mind, I was going to get home, I was going to drag myself in my basement and call 911, because I have a phone down there.”

So, as the night grew colder and she questioned whether she was going into shock or suffering hypothermia, she pulled a sweatshirt over her head for warmth and began crawling back to her house, per Denver 7.

Kirby crawled for 14 hours — from about 7 p.m. local time on June 7 until 9 a.m. on June 8 — she told ABC7 Chicago. “People asked me if I did the army crawl,” she recalled to the outlet, “and I said, ‘No, I think it was more like the inchworm.’ ”

As she slowly made her way home, she told Denver7, she thought to herself: “You can do one more inch. Nope, do one more inch.”

And by the time she got help — her son found her in the morning — Kirby had brought some of her property back with her.

"I had dirt in my nose, in my ears, on my teeth, in my hair, all down the front of me,” she told Denver7. “My oldest son said, 'Mom, when they turned you over to put you in the ambulance, your belly was full of dirt and gravel, and you had a big old rock right in your belly button.' That's a visual you're going to live with for a while.”

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But, maintaining a sense of humor, she added, “I wish somebody had taken a picture, actually, because I have no idea how bad I looked.”

She has since gotten surgery on her femur and hip, and done rehabilitation. She returned home nearly a month after the treacherous journey, and her doctor said she will be able to attend her grandson’s wedding — the reason she was cleaning up outside in the first place.

Kirby told Denver7 that her doctor told her, “Well, you'll be at the wedding. You just won't be dancing." Her response? "Watch me."

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