Linn that he had driven his car off the pavement near Bonanza Road and Christy Lane and hit a chain-link fence in a homeowner’s yard. A pole fastened atop the fence broke through the windshield, went through Linn just below the right side of his nose and ripped out teeth before slamming through the back window.
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“We’re bringing in a patient with a foreign object impaled in his mouth,” radioed the paramedic to Dr Jay Coates in the UNLV Medical Center.
What wasn’t said was that the foreign object was a 2-inch diameter metal pole that had been driven through the man’s mouth and out through his neck.
“What the (expletive) am I going to do with this?” Coates remembered saying as he looked at the man sitting before him with 4 to 6 inches of pole sticking out of his mouth and neck. “I had to form a game plan fast.”
Emergency rescue personnel later would tell Linn that he had driven his car off the pavement near Bonanza Road and Christy Lane and hit a chain-link fence in a homeowner’s yard. A pole fastened atop the fence broke through the windshield, went through Linn just below the right side of his nose and ripped out teeth before slamming through the back window.
“All I remember is going to bed after a dinner and then waking up in a hospital,” he said in a phone interview from his Cedar City, Utah, home. “After seeing the pictures of the pole through my mouth and head that they took at the hospital, I’m glad I don’t remember. It really upsets my wife to see those pictures.”
He now theorizes that he woke up hungry late at night and drove to get a hamburger.
“I must have fallen asleep at the wheel,” he said.
Soon after Linn arrived at UMC, Coates had an X-ray done. It showed that the pole had missed Linn’s spine. He called in Moxley and Donahoe to help with the case.
Before Coates cut Linn open to examine just what internal damage had been done, he had do a tracheostomy: create a hole in the front of Linn’s neck and into his windpipe.
Without the tracheostomy, there was no way that a breathing tube could be put into his mouth for an exploratory operation under general anesthesia.
“That metal pole was blocking everything,” Coates said.
The tracheostomy was done under local anesthesia.
“I don’t remember him complaining or moaning in pain at all that night,” Coates said. “The body really has a way of protecting us.”
After Coates was assured the tracheostomy allowed Linn to breathe under general anesthesia, he put him out and then made an incision behind his right ear down to the base of his neck.
To his surprise, neither he nor Donahoe found the jugular vein or carotid artery visibly affected by the trauma.
“I couldn’t see all of the artery, though, so I was really afraid it might break loose when we pulled it out through the mouth,” he said.
It was Moxley’s job to pull the pipe out.
Before he began to pull, the back of the pipe behind Linn’s head had to be recut.
“There were some really sharp edges from where the rescue workers cut it to get him out of the car,” Moxley said. “We were afraid that when we pulled the pipe through his head, it would cut something.”
Just before Moxley began to pull on the pipe, Coates remembered that the team looked at one another and the tension level rose. Blood soon could be spewing from Linn’s head.
But nothing really happened as Moxley extricated the pipe. The artery and jugular had been pushed aside and compressed.
“In short, all of the bad things that could have happened, didn’t,” Moxley said.
If the pole had gone in just a fraction of inch differently, Linn would have died.
“People who are in accidents like this go to the morgue, not the emergency room,” Moxley said. “It’s just a miracle he lived.”
Before Moxley sent Linn to intensive care, he repaired a hole in Linn’s palate and put in plates and screws to move Linn’s broken jaw into proper position. His lip was sutured. Broken teeth were taken out of the back of his neck.
Today, Linn does exercises for his jaw.
“It was wired shut, and I can’t open it wide enough right now to get the dentures on my right side,” he said. “I hope that will happen in a couple of months along with some cosmetic surgery for my lip.”
His right shoulder was badly hurt in the crash and will require surgery within the next three months. Linn spent only two weeks in the hospital after the accident.
His friends try to help him through his recovery with humor.
“I had this one friend ask me whether I was going to the NASCAR race in Las Vegas. And I told him, no. And then he said, ‘I was sure you were. I thought you won the pole position.’ ”
As if further proof were needed that New York is not the center of the universe.
The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas.
You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week.
The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.
But the post office is going with it.
“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”
The service selected the image from a photography service, and issued rolls of the stamp bearing the image in December. This month, it issued a sheet of 18 Lady Liberty and flag stamps. Information accompanying the original release of the stamp included a bit of history on the real Statue of Liberty. Las Vegas was never mentioned. The whole mess was exposed by the stamp magazine, which this week ran photographs of both statues.
To the average tourist, there are obvious differences. The Las Vegas statue is half the size of the real Statue of Liberty. And of course, they are in different cities. But it takes a real student of Lady Liberty to notice the contrasts in a stamp-size photo of her head. The hair is different. The replica’s eyes are much more sharply defined. A rectangular patch — a plaque, maybe? — is on the replica’s center spike.
The post office, while perhaps chagrined, is standing by the stamp but changing its informational material about it.
At the New York-New York casino, where a permanent Sept. 11 memorial is positioned in front of the fake New York Harbor in which the fake Statue of Liberty sits, there is nothing but pride.
“Everyone thought the post office was honoring just one great American institution when in reality they were honoring two — the Statue of Liberty and Las Vegas,” said Gordon Absher, spokesman for MGM Resorts International.
Meanwhile, back in the real New York, Edward I. Koch, who declared that the city was the center of the universe when he was mayor, offered some insight into what it all means: “It simply means the post office is doing a stupid thing.”
A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.
This Lady Liberty Is a Las Vegas Teenager
By KIM SEVERSON and MATTHEW HEALEY
Published: April 14, 2011
