“There is a way in which, because [Lucky] requires my care to exist in this world, caring for him is part of my understanding of a higher power that I’m accountable to.” Ned Parker is one of EMU’s newest faculty members, highlighted in a previous article co-written by Caleb Metzler and Will Blosser titled “EMU Welcomes Five New Faculty Members to Campus.” After that article was published, the Weather Vane inquired about doing a more in depth interview with him due to an interesting factoid he shared for that piece. At the end of his brief bio, Parker described how both he and his dog Lucky live with foreign objects embedded under their skin, something that formed a deep sense of connection between the pair even before they met.
“I had always told myself, you know, in the age of being able to find things online, I’m never going to adopt without meeting the dog,” Parker shared. This stance changed though when Parker came across a photo on an adoption website of an x-ray depicting a dog’s skull with metal shrapnel embedded all around it.
“I have three plates, and 28 screws, and two pins in my [right] arm, so the moment I saw this x-ray… as somebody who has these invisible disabilities, you know finding this furry companion that also has his own was really appealing,” Parker commented. He would later come to find out that the shrapnel in Lucky’s skull was the result of a gunshot directly to the back of his head, likely due to being mistaken for a fox by a frustrated farmer. After Lucky arrived in Connecticut, where Parker was living at the time, from the adoption agency in Tennessee, the two formed an unspoken bond straight away. This happy union between the two companions came though after a rough period for Parker, throughout which he heavily wrestled with his own identity.
“I was a semi-professional triathlete at the time, and… I was out for a training ride when I got hit by this car that was taking a left turn as I was going straight,” said Parker. This accident would drastically alter the course of Parker’s life, changing many of the major plans he had for the next couple of years. Just before being hit, Parker had been finishing up working as a firefighter in Amherst, Massachusetts, with the intention of becoming a U.S. Army Chaplain. He wanted to help people in the military who were experiencing daily high stress situations, similar to the firefighters he worked with. Parker recounts that the two paramedics who picked him up from the scene were two people he worked with extensively at the Amherst EMS department.
“I didn’t know how badly I was hurt until I realized that they didn’t, I had worked with them for five years and they didn’t know who I was,” Parker articulated. After undergoing four surgeries directly after the accident, half of Parker’s fire department came to spend time with him and his family as they began to work through the shock of this overwhelmingly traumatic experience.
“It was amazing to feel like you’re part of this community that you have to trust with your life, right?” Parker elaborates, “you’re going into a burning building, you have to trust the person in front of you and the person behind you…, and that trust is reinforced ten fold when you have this traumatic injury and they all show up to be there with you.” In addition to the trauma of a 50 mile-per-hour collision, what further pushed Parker into a roughly decade long struggle following the accident in 2005 was that six weeks to the day of him being hit and surviving, a close friend of his was also hit on a bike but did not survive the impact.
In wrestling with the aftermath of both of these catastrophic events, Parker turned to alcohol to cope with the trauma and haunting thoughts. After eight years of active addiction, he stopped drinking cold-turkey and started attending support meetings where he learned of the idea of having a pet as an addiction accountability partner. While Parker did not adopt Lucky for this reason, it is one of the things he now takes seriously in their relationship.
“One of my commitments to Lucky, who has his special needs, is that I stay sober because I need to continue caring [for him].” reflected Parker. As of this month, it has been 12 years since he made that commitment to staying sober.
Parker concludes, “I had a very concrete notion of who I was 19 years ago, and now 19 years later I’m still trying to figure out who I am and how this body moves in the world.”
