On Thursday Dave Wolverton / David Farland's teenage son was critically injured in a longboard accident. Ben and his family were life-flighted to Las Vegas where Ben has since been in a medically induced coma. He has had multiple emergency brain surgeries to attempt to control the swelling in his brain.
Below is his most recent Facebook update regarding his son's condition:
Quote:
"About Ben's accident: Ben went long-boarding with a friend up near Snow Canyon, a scenic place with lots of rolling hills. They had never been there before, and Ben's friend, Tyler, went down a steep hill and thought that it was too difficult for Ben's board. He turned around to warn Ben, but by then Ben had already been thrown from his board.
Apparently, Ben was thrown forward and rolled head-over-heels several times. That's why he crushed his skull (down near the hind brain), and then hit his back hard enough to bruise his lungs, then broke his pelvis/crushed his vertebrae, and so on. Beyond that, he has bad "road burn" on his knees, shoulder, back, hips, and so on, and a split lip. With the concussion, his ear drum broke, and he lost a lot of blood through his left ear and again through his nose.
An ambulance reached him quickly, and stayed with him until a helicopter got there to evacuate him at about 45 minutes. It flew him to the hospital in Saint George, but they don't have the equipment/staff to handle severe head trauma cases, so they administered meds and flew him to Las Vegas.
Ben is still in a coma, but his vitals are stable. They tried feeding him some solids through a tube yesterday, and he held it down well, so they're now starting him on more food. However, he hasn't moved since about 4 hours after the accident. We'll just have to hang on and see if he wakes up."
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As of right now, the estimated medical costs are staggering. Dave and his family have no insurance and they are looking to end up with medical costs in the millions as of right now.
For those that don't know Dave Farland, he's a NYT best selling author of "The Runelords", a couple of "Star Wars" novels, multiple young-adult books and even a few self-published books like Nightingale and In the Company of Angels.
Dave has been a mentor to a whole bunch of authors over the years, several who happen to be a great deal more famous than I (Eric Flint, Stephanie Meyer, Brandon Sanderson). He's regularly been a judge on the Writer's of the Future Contest, which has helped plenty of other aspiring authors break in, most recently, a guy by the name of Patrick Rothfuss won and went on to publish something called "The Name of the Wind."
He's been a great friend and always willing to lend a helping hand. I respect the hell out of the man and have been privileged to have been able to learn from him.
If anybody here would like to help, the best thing we can do at this moment is a book bomb campaign. Dave self published Million Dollar Outlines, which is probably one of the greatest "how-to" books I've read. It was one of his text books in the classes that he taught.
He also self published a book called "Nightingale" which won a bunch of awards last year.
Since Dave self-published those, he stands to recover the most royalties from their sales. He's also got plenty of other short stories and a bunch of other good stuff on his web-store.
-kd Alexander