A Lake Arrowhead man continues to recover nearly a month after his leg and trailer were crushed in a major accident rockslide on Highway 18 near Crestline.

“If anyone had been in the passenger seat, there is no doubt they would have been dead,” Joseph Furtek said from his hospital bed at Loma Linda University Medical Center. “I spoke to one of the police officers who was at the scene and he said when they arrived at the scene they thought it was a death, there was no way this person could survive. So I’m very, very happy to have survived.”

Furtek said he didn’t remember anything about the violent rockslide but was grateful to the good Samaritans who helped him that day and the doctors at the hospital who helped save his right leg.

“I completely broke my right leg,” he explained. “So there was discussion at the scene, even in the emergency room, in the trauma unit, of amputating the leg, because I was losing so much blood from that leg that they gave me 12 units of blood.”

Furtek said he lost about 75 percent of the blood in his body.

“I was getting to the point where I could die,” he said.

Dr. from Loma Linda University Medical Center. Erin Chang said Furtek was very lucky to survive.

“There are many things we look at when we look at a leg injury,” Chang said. “The first is how badly the bone was injured and how badly the blood vessels were injured. Luckily, they were able to look at the blood vessels and he was fine. So the orthopedic surgeons were able to rebuild his leg.”

Furtek also suffered a traumatic brain injury.

“I’ll wake up and be convinced I’m somewhere else and try to get up and walk,” he said. “They had to restrain me a few times, but they did an unusually great performance.”

Furtek’s sister started a GoFundMe campaign Fundraiser from Furtek Laura: Support Joseph Furtek’s Path to Recovery helping pay for his medical expenses as well as the cost of his caravan, which was destroyed in the incident.

“That trailer was to be my residence until I could find a place to stay,” Furtek said. “I am very grateful and grateful to the people who responded; some of them have been very generous and this will help me a lot because when I bought this Sprinter, this was going to be my residence.

“I took it two days before this happened. So it came at a bad time; it really put a strain on me. But you know I have a life and I’m very lucky to have it.”