PEA RIDGE — As a farmer, he’s had his share of accidents, but the most recent one was a whopper.
Tim Tillman has fallen from a hay barn, been slung out of a manure spreader, stomped by cattle, had a foot broken when he dropped a trailer, been kicked.
Then, four weeks ago, Wednesday, June 20, Tillman was kicked in the face by an 800-pound bull.
“Your mother always said ‘God’s got plans for you,’” Chelle Tillman said to her husband Tim.
Tillman, Chelle, their sons and Chelle’s father were working cattle - running them through the squeeze chute, banding them to neuter the bull calves.
Chelle said she grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma and her father castrated the bull calves, so he was there to see how they’re banded.
“My job was to hold the tail,” Chelle laughed, as Tim teased her that she dropped the tail and that’s why it happened.
“Everything was fine. I got the rubber band on my hand and when I pulled it around ... he brought his leg straight up in the air between my arms,” Tillman said. “She dropped the tail.”
“It wasn’t that bad, not as bad as you’d think. It was stinging hard. I knew he broke my stinking nose,” Tim said.
He said getting kicked in the knee last year hurt worse than this.
“As soon as it happened and he went down, he grabbed his nose.
He moved his hand so I could see and there was blood everywhere.
The thing that concerned me was that within a minute, his eye started swelling,” Chelle said, adding that she knew she had a small window of opportunity to get him to the hospital before he refused to go. As for his nose, “somehow he had the sense to grab it, put it back and hold it there.”
“His eye was swollen shut by the time we got to the ER,” Chelle said, explaining that he doesn’t usually go to a doctor and initially said they could “just go to the clinic.”
Tim got stitches in his nose where his glasses had cut his nose. There was a hole that wasn’t stitched.
His nose is shattered.
His eye socket is broken.
“They were worried about a blood clot,” she said, adding that the swelling was so bad that although the two visited an ear, nose and throat specialist the next day, they had to wait a week for the swelling to decrease enough for a second examination.
“He was on the tractor that night,” Chelle said. The next day,Tim “zip-tied” his glasses to his hat, Chelle said.
Tim Tillman, the youngest of seven children born to Jack and Virginia Tillman, grew upon on a farm on Gann Ridge Road.
There were three boys and four girls in the family.
Laughing, Chelle Tillman said Tim’s mother, Virginia, said: “A boy is a boy; two boys are half a boy; and three boys is no boy.”
As a young father, he was critically ill. The twins were 3 months old, and he got sick. His blood pressure plummeted and he had a high fever. He underwent exploratory surgery and was in the intensive care unit of the hospital for five days and then weak for several months.
Tim and Chelle Tillman have been married 13 years. They have a daughter, Katelin, 19, Jackson, 12, and twins Cooper and Samual, 9.
“We grateful for all the friends praying,” Chelle said.
The couple are members of Boundless Grace Church.
News, Pages 1 on 07/18/2012