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Copyright © 2001 Eastern Ontario Farmers Forum Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Fourteen-year-old breaks both arms in PTO
Kemptville College employee Todd
Brown shows a power
take-off with a safety cover. Donovan Lavallee,
of Beachburg
almost lost his arms when he got caught in a spinning PTO
while trying to repair an old manure spreader.
(Patrick Meagher photo)
BEACHBURG — Fourteen-year old Donovan Lavallee is recovering at home from injuries after the front of his shirt became caught in a tractor power take-off (PTO). Both his arms were broken below the shoulders.
Endowed with a mechanical aptitude, he was trying to get an old manure spreader working, his grandmother Carol Lavallee said.
He succeeded but then the machine shut off. He started the machine again, but what happened next is only a blur. He remembers a tug on his shirt. Both arms were pulled into the PTO and were broken just below the shoulders.
Donovon only remembers that something broke on the tractor and the tractor shut off. "Thank God he wasn’t killed," his grandmother said.
He went into shock yet managed to free himself. He ran for help, crying, "I’m burning, I’m burning," Lavallee said. He appears to have pulled many of the muscles in his body.
He was cut on the neck and had a chunk taken out of his buttock the size of a tennis ball. Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, in Ottawa, discovered the injury to the buttocks. A weakened Donovan said he was feeling much better when he spoke with Farmers Forum, almost two weeks after the May 12 accident. He has gone from morphine to 222s for his pain and is using cow balm for burn areas.
School is out for Donovan this year. He says he’ll be back in the fall. His father, Jeff Lavallee, owns a dairy farm at Beachburg, west of Ottawa.