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LINCOLN, Neb. (KETV) — A Lincoln man who was critically hurt while helping a neighbor in a snowstorm said he would do it again.
“I think anybody would, if asked. I don’t think there is any question about that,” Tim Houlihan said.
On Oct. 14, a branch fell on Houlihan, 63, as he was trying to help an elderly neighbor move a large branch that had fallen on her car.
“We got the branch off the car, but little did we realize something worse was coming from above,” Houlihan said.
“Just a blink of an eye. It was that fast. We heard the crack.”
The branch hit Houlihan on the right temple and then fell across his chest and on his hip.
It fractured bones in his neck and spine.
“I don’t think I took a direct hit. I don’t think I’d be talking to you if it were a case of hammer hitting a nail,” Houlihan said.
He needed surgery to rebuild his hip because all the muscles were pulled away.
“It was scary–very, very, very scary,” Houlihan’s sister Monica Houlihan Cramm said.
The 69-year-old neighbor remains in the hospital.
Houlihan’s sisters said they are not surprised he was trying to help someone else.
“Tim’s very giving. He’d do anything for anyone,” Coke Houlihan said.
They said that, now, he needs help.
The part-time lifeguard and instructor at the YMCA doesn’t have health insurance.
His sisters set up a GoFundMe page to help pay his bills.
“Tim has never been one to ask for anything,” Houlihan Cramm said.
Houlihan is recovering at Old Cheney Rehabilitation in Lincoln.
And it will be weeks before he can put any weight on his left leg.
“Time will hopefully heal and hopefully he will get his hearing back, because he can’t hear out of that right ear,” Houlihan Cramm said.
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That has been frustrating for Houlihan, who is a former Ironman triathlon competitor and had been an avid cyclist and swimmer.
“I was down, and some ways maybe still down, but I’m OK. There a lot of people who have got it worse than I do,” Houlihan said.
He said the outpouring of support he has received has been overwhelming.
“My family, old and new friends, old classmates and athletes that I had come in contact with the past 30 to 40 years that I’ve trained with, competed with or maybe even trained–it’s been unbelievable. It’s been hard to express,” Houlihan said.
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