Eight months ago several tornadoes swept through Eastern Ontario, uprooting trees, flattening homes and injuring dozens of people. Dunrobin farmer Leo Muldoon was one of the injured, when the barn he was on was ripped apart.
Muldoon has worked hard all his life. Even after a tornado blew him off his barn, he was determined to get back on his tractor and plow his land. The 78-year-old is not one to waste time, so he is taking the short cut on this road to recovery: working hard to get back to the farm and the life he loves.
He has been coming to LiquidGym in Ottawa’s west end, working in a pool where the buoyancy frees his body of pain while he strengthens his muscles with free weights and an underwater treadmill. “No pain at all,” he says with a smile, working alongside his physiotherapist.
Muldoon has been in rehab at LiquidGym since November, two months after the tornadoes swept through Eastern Ontario and West Quebec. He was on his barn in Dunrobin, fixing a piece of tin on the roof, when the tornado hit him from behind.
Not that he remembers it. “I miss that part,” he joked in hospital in November, “because I was flippity-flop.”
There were five barns on the Muldoon property the day the tornado hit, and all of them were flattened, including the one Leo was on. He recalls sheet metal flying over his head as he lay on the ground waiting for help. It was touch and go for a while: he had seven cracked ribs and two collapsed lungs. “At that point I wasn’t sure he was going to make it through that night,” recalls his wife Adele.
But make it he has. After weeks in the trauma unit at the Ottawa Hospital, then several more at Elizabeth Bruyère, he began rehab at LiquidGym. “He came in with a walker,” Karen Snyder recalls, “hunched over, taking two-inch steps — and as soon as we got into the pool, things started to change.” The walker is gone now, and so is the cane.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out of here?” Muldoon was asked in hospital in November. “See if I can get on my tractor.”
Wearing the t-shirt his daughter made him — “It takes more than a gust of wind to keep this guy down” — Muldoon is back in the tractor seat and has the barley in the ground. “Thought I’d get her planted,” he says with a chuckle, “and then the rain came, so all it has to do is grow.”
As for the tornado, the road ahead does not include it. The Muldoons are talking about replacing the flattened barn with a Cover-All, which is round, so Leo will never have to climb a ladder to fix the roof again. He jokes to Adele that he has been grounded.