In September, the now 60-year-old Springfielder added six or seven more breaks to his total.
Four were to bones on the top of his left foot, which the drummer calls his “hi-hat foot” to distinguish it from his right foot, which operates the bass drum pedal.
The bones broke as he was trying to break part two of a fall he thought might crack his skull.
In part one, he had broken two or three ribs (“It felt like 10,” he said) when he crashed sideways into a stove.
All resulted from a kitchen tumbling run initiated by – get this — Gibson and his wife’s rescue dog, Clyde.
(Mental note: I guess it is the dog that gets rescued.)
The schnauzer has only gradually stopped putting his paws over his eyes when a voice is raised – a hangover from the animal’s previous life in a home where Gibson said heroin was sold.
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And although dog and owners have come to love one another dearly, Clyde retains what Gibson calls “a terrible habit of walking under your feet when you don’t know he’s there.”
Clyde’s latest trip down under did have one upside: It set the stage for an emergency room nurse to tell Gibson: “Dude, everything we x-rayed, you broke.”
Gibson got his first break in 1986 or ’87 when his then band New Music was moving out its Spring Street practice studio.
“I was carrying drums – way too many – and I stepped out on what I thought was the bottom step.”
Because there were, in fact, two more below it, “I kind of moonwalked out into the air.
Upon landing, his right baby toe “snapped like a twig.”
(Mental note: Gibson turns a phrase as easily as he does an ankle.)
In 2015, instead of falling victim to a structure, he fell victim to a season: winter.
“We had this terrible ice storm. And me, with a lack of brain cells, decided I was going to go out.”
Home alone, keys in hand, he was right by car when he fell like a snapped limb.
A neighbor helped him up, Gibson got a hot shower and felt better until the returning pain led to an emergency room x-ray that revealed he had broken his back – two vertebrae, to be specific.
In terms of healing, “It’s like a rib,” he said. “There’s not much they can do.”
That healing took its course, avoiding surgery, and “within a couple of weeks I was sitting my drums … and nothing really hurt.”
The next fall came “almost a year to the day” later, he said.
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This time, “I broke my left shinbone.”
The good news: “That hurt for just a second, and I forgot about it.”
The bad news: He also broken also four bones, two on each side of his left ankle.
He said it hurt even to look at it, because, on further review, “my foot was exactly backwards” from its normal position.
Because so many other people got breaks that same icy, by the time the squad arrived, “I was about stuck to the driveway.”
That led to more good news: The warmth of the heated emergency room blankets felt heavenly.
A twist and heave in the emergency room got his foot headed back in the right direction without a need for surgery on the ankle, and a temporary cast, then a boot took care of his shin.
It’s one of two boots now in his collection.
As many of you know, this is only part of the story that began when Gibson was diagnosed with diabetes at age 12.
By 1998, at age 39, the disease caused his kidneys to fail.
But Gibson was thrilled when the man he calls “the late great Dr. (George) Varghese told him he could get on a list not only for a transplanted kidney but a pancreas to go with it – the latter effectively ending his life as a diabetic.
The phone rang two years later, and Gibson had the transplant at the OSU Medical Center. Although back in surgery a day later to repair a hemorrhaging pancreas, “within hours of waking up (from that surgery), “I was fine.”
He was told at the time that, over the years, anti-rejection drugs used to preserve his kidney would weaken his bones and might well lead to breaks. But that seemed far in the future.
Eleven months after surgery, he doubled over in pain after taking a shower, which set the stage for the next year when “they replumbed my pancreas.”
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A year later, he came close to losing a leg because of a circulatory problem, leading to surgery that marked Gibson with his “shark-bite scar.”
Then, 12 years after the transplant, he said “a rogue doctor” changed his drug regimen to try to reduce skin cancers. That “toasted my kidney,” he said, sent his blood pressure through the roof and led to his most serious stroke.
After that one, “I had to learn to walk again, brush my teeth, comb my hair, talk.”
Damage to his kidney led to a second transplant and the biggest surprise in his life and wife Sonnie’s. Learning that her husband might receive a kidney sooner if she donated one, she went through the testing and she was excited to learn that she qualified as a donor. Then she was floored when she learned that, as a universal donor, she could give it to her husband.
Told over the phone of the good news, “she came out of the bedroom just crying,” Mr. Gibson recalled.
A second stroke came Gibson’s way three years later. Although not as severe, it led to a period when he saw “a guy sitting up in my window” in the hospital, who eventually disappeared.
Hallucinations also led him to almost get into a fist fight with a nurse, he said.
“As I got better they informed me I was just crazy” during that stretch, he said.
The third stroke came while he was recovering from surgery for an umbilical hernia was. But for him, it was a mere blip on the radar screen.
In a hospital bed while recovering from surgery, “I started stuttering real bad,” and a scan showed a small brain bleed and treatment,” he said. “The next day I wasn’t stuttering. I was fine.”
So, what about all this suffering?
What about all this pain visited upon him by the breaks, strokes and surgical pain from the transplants?
“I’ve certainly had more than my share of kicks to my teeth,” Gibson said. “But that foot’s bounced off my mouth and I’ve kept my teeth.”
“I think that as bad as it’s been, it can always be so much worse. There’s always somebody who’s got it worse.”
“I know people who have been through the same transplant as me that aren’t with us anymore,” he said, among them a friend who “just had a series of bad luck things happen to him.”
And there is all the other carnage regular reported on the news, none of which has come his way.
“I am just happy as a lark that things have turned out OK,” Gibson said.
His bottom line?
“I’m still standing.”
Doing so required the help of an immobilizing boot and a cane when Gibson said it.
But he meant it, nonetheless.
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