When Jonathan McCubbins regained consciousness, he was standing next to his truck.

It had come to a rest after rolling down a steep embankment along the highway between Thompson Falls and Trout Creek one day three years ago. The windshield and sunroof were gone.

McCubbins looked up at the road, more than 30 yards away from where he now stood on his left leg.

His right leg wasn’t in such good shape. His foot was turned 180 degrees and had somehow migrated up close to his knee on  the back of his leg, held by just skin and arteries. McCubbins, in shock, tried to take a step with his mangled leg.

His jagged tibia and fibula sunk into the soft earth and he fell on his face. He was forced to drag himself the rest of the way to the road.

Three weeks ago, McCubbins took his first painless step since the accident, using his own leg and not a prosthetic. It all can be attributed to new dynamic bracing technology. 

“We had talked about amputation so many times,” McCubbins said. “I wanted to keep my limb. When I asked my doctor what he’d do if it were his leg, he hesitated, then said he’d amputate it.”

Doug Jack, a certified prosthetist and orthotist, has worked with McCubbins for a year and a half. When McCubbins first went to Northern Care Prosthetics and Orthotics, he was going to discuss the finer points of a prosthetic leg after amputation.

Jack, who had been hearing rumblings of a new technology surfacing in his field, first advised McCubbins to lose the leg. Then things changed.

“Just hold on for a bit, I told him,” Jack said. “Now that I know this technology is possible, there are a lot of amputations we can prevent.”

Jack had seen an Afghanistan veteran in an airport using a Dynamic Bracing Solutions brace. He, like McCubbins, had nearly lost his leg. The veteran was near an improvised explosive device (IED) that had gone off. 

The brace alleviates pressure on McCubbins’ pain-ridden ankle. It uses his own body weight in a sort of pulley system, that stores energy in a spring. It immobilizes his ankle while keeping his muscles taut, relieving him of pain for the first time in years.

With a newborn, Amelia, and a toddler, Kateri, the brace was a timely investment for McCubbins and his wife, Natastia. 

“With this brace, I can chase my kid if she’s about to run in the street. I couldn’t do that before,” he said. “We went with strollers for three miles the other day.”

An investment it was, as the custom-fit carbon fiber brace cost $25,000. For McCubbins, that’s a drop in the bucket.

“We honestly stopped keeping track after we passed a million dollars,” he said of tallying hospital bills. “Insurance is covering a lot of it, but still, not all of it.”

Since McCubbins was tossed from his truck (or perhaps he hobbled out, as his seatbelt was on) three years ago, the 31-year old had been desk-bound and gaining weight. 

After the brace, he is back on his feet, and the fish biologist in the Noxon area is happier than ever. He’s even lost 10 pounds. The day after he sat down for an interview, he eagerly announced that he had run for the first time in years.

“(Jack) is incredible, he’s absolutely changed my life,” McCubbins said. “Every time I would approach my doctors and say, ‘OK, I’m ready for this amputation,’ I’d hold off on it. I think so many people would benefit from this technology.”

The reason McCubbins’ Toyota pickup ended up in that ditch was due in no small part to his scamp of a puppy in the passenger seat. Moose, a basset hound and six months old at the time, was bouncing around next to McCubbins and then jumped into his lap. 

McCubbins drifted into the other lane, and then slightly overcorrected while putting the dog back in his seat. His rear wheel caught some loose gravel, his back end fishtailed out over the ditch and he began to roll. 

After inching his way to the road, a good Samaritan pulled up to help.

 “He said to me, ‘your leg is messed up’,” McCubbins said. “I told him, yeah, no s---.”

The Samaritan said an ambulance was going to take him to a helicopter. The ambulance crew confirmed it when they arrived. McCubbins begged them to just drive him to the hospital in Missoula. He couldn’t afford a helicopter.

“This female paramedic then straddled the stretcher, looked me in the eyes and said ‘if we don’t get you on a helicopter, you will die.’” McCubbins said. “That convinced me. I wish I could find her and thank her.”

As the helicopter cleared the trees, McCubbins’ shock wore off. He went from laughing and joking with the EMTs to having every nerve still attached in his leg searing up and down the limb.

“We get off the ground in Thompson Falls and I finally felt safe,” he said. “I was never worried about my leg before, it was about ‘I’ve got to live.’”

His wife, a registered nurse working out of Spokane, met him in Missoula before he took a jet to Seattle. McCubbins said that without the support of his wife and family, he might not have made it through his ordeal.

“She’s everything in my life,” he said. “She probably went through just as much, if not more than I did. I never heard her upset about it. She’s incredible.”

Besides the gruesome leg injury, McCubbins’ thumb was badly dislocated and was flopping around his wrist. He had cracked one vertebrae and shifted three others forward. McCubbins said a doctor told him he was lucky to even have feeling in his mangled leg.

Now, all that is left from the crash are some wide scars running from his knee to his ankle. They are pulled taut and hard, as there is little tissue between the scar and the bone itself. 

This brace not only saved his leg, but his life, he said.

“It changed my life 150 percent,” McCubbins said. “Last Christmas we were still talking about amputation. Now I’m back at work and playing with my kids.”

And Moose? The basset hound puppy? McCubbins was sure he had lost him. The dog was nowhere to be seen while he was crawling to the road.

McCubbins asked a friend in the local fire department to go look for his puppy’s body so they could bury him. When his friend arrived at the scene of the accident, a small dog was curled up in the shade of a tree near the truck.

Moose bounded happily in circles when he saw the friend.

He still lives with the McCubbins family, with only a scratch on his nose to signify the violent crash.

“He’s a happy, healthy dog,” McCubbins said. “He’s part of the family.”

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.