Ken has spent his life building hospitals. Across Houston, he’s helped raise the steel and structure supporting places designed to save lives, including Memorial Hermann Health System. He’s walked these buildings’ corridors before they ever held patients, long before the lights were fully on.
For years, he had a running joke with his contact at Memorial Hermann: he wanted a ride in a Memorial Hermann Life Flight® helicopter.
Eventually, Ken got his helicopter ride. Twice. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says.
The first came on July 4. Ken had been fishing in Matagorda, the kind of perfect summer day that lingers, when he climbed onto his UTV to head home. A truck appeared in the middle of the road. He swerved, the UTV flipped, and he landed on his head, trapping his body and leg. He remembers flashes of black asphalt and voices, drifting in and out, his friend Tom saying, “We need Life Flight” as a volunteer fire department arrived and called Life Flight to transport him to the hospital.
He regained consciousness briefly in the air and again as he was taken from the helicopter into the Red Duke Trauma Institute at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, rolling over the very same concrete he helped erect, the same concrete he had steel footprints of Dr. James “Red” Duke’s boots hidden in. The injuries were severe: a traumatic brain injury, a devastated left side—shoulder, hand and knee—and a crushed foot stripped of skin.
Ken was eager to get back home. Almost immediately, he began negotiating his way out of the hospital, asking which numbers needed to come down and what benchmarks he had to meet to be discharged. Eventually, he hit his goals to leave the hospital, and with his wife Angela and his mother, a retired nurse, supporting him, he continued his recovery through outpatient therapy at Memorial Hermann. Slowly, steadily, his life went back to its normal rhythm.
Months later, with his regained freedom, he went sheep hunting in Montana.
It was minus 30 degrees with wind chill when he began the hike. Somewhere along the mountain, he slipped and felt what he assumed was a cramp. He kept going, pushing nearly 10 miles before returning to his hotel. That’s when the pain set in and then intensified rapidly. A hot bath made it worse. He called Angela and told her, calmly, he was heading to the hospital.
The diagnosis was compartment syndrome. Emergency surgery followed, but the pain escalated to something he struggled to describe. From Montana, Ken called Memorial Hermann for guidance. After the second failed surgery, they didn’t just offer advice. They said, “We’re coming to get you.” A medically configured fixed-wing aircraft staffed by a Life Flight crew was sent to Montana to bring him home.
Back in Houston, his care team assessed the damage. Amputation was a real possibility, with an orthopedic surgeon standing by. In surgery, a severed nerve was repaired and another, long pinched, was released. Gradually, the outlook began to change. Ken kept his leg.
During his recovery, he had already begun preparing himself for a different outcome, scrolling through prosthetics, making peace with what felt inevitable. Today, however, sensation is returning, and movement is coming back to his ankle and toes. His care team describes his progress as remarkable, with his surgeon calling it a “Superman recovery.”
Ken doesn’t call it remarkable. He calls it a second chance. For both critical events, Ken has a deep sense of gratitude, for the teams and administrators who made sure he could walk out of the hospital and back into his life. Twice.