Boat accident crushes butcher’s hand, Meat Olympics dream may be over
A boat roared by too close and snagged the tow line Suzie Roeger was pulling into her own boat, jerking her violently into the Pitt River.
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In a momentary lapse of judgement, Suzie Roeger wrapped a boat’s tow line around her left hand.
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As she began pulling in the five-metre line, another boat zipped by too close for safety, snagged the end of the line and violently jerked Roeger into Pitt River, near the lake.
It’s still too fresh in Roeger’s mind for her to talk about the accident itself, but it severed the top of her pinkie and broke every finger bone in her hand, said her friend Samantha Bull, who was on the boat when it happened.
“We were about to find a place to go have a barbecue,” Bull said. “Suzie had (our boat) pulled in a ways and this other boat ripped past way too close and picked up the end of the line and actually hauled her off the boat into the water.”
Roeger, an Australian, is in Canada after earning a government fellowship for two years to hone her butcher skills and learn all she could in this country before heading home to share the knowledge and experience.
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“I’d won a few competitions, and there’s something called the Queensland Overseas Foundation,” said Roeger, who despite being 26 has been butchering for almost 11 years, zipping through her apprenticeship in two years rather than the customary four. “You travel and work for a couple of years, then you’ve got to come home and for a year or so you go around and show what you can do with a trade — that university is not your only option, that getting a trade can get you places.”
With the World Butchers’ Challenge cancelled both this year and last, the Brisbane native was excited to represent Australia at the 2022 so-called “Meat Olympics” in Sacramento, Calif., next September.
With rods in her hand to help her fingers heal properly, it’s going to be a tough slog to make it now. But her surgeon told her the long-term prognosis of regaining the use of her ring, middle and index fingers is hopeful, so she’s not giving up.
Indeed, she sounds defiantly determined to be there.
“I’m going to go, I hope. That’s my plan,” Roeger said. “I know I’ve got awhile yet before I can get back on the knife, which I’m still trying to process, but that’s my goal now, to be ready for that.
“I want to go down there and win that. I’m not going to go down there just to compete and get through it, I’m going down to win.”
Her friend Bull has set up a GoFundMe page to help Roeger with the cost of prescriptions, physio and loss of income until she can get back working.
Source: vancouversun.com