It wasn’t until Monday — a full nine days after an explosion leveled her house and critically injured her husband, Max — that Beth Houk was able to see the devastation firsthand.
Beth wasn’t home the day of the Nov. 2 explosion. She was with her mother and aunt at a wedding three hours away.
“And I just went straight to the hospital when I got the call,” she said in a telephone interview Wednesday from her husband’s hospital room in Kansas City.
So on Monday, Beth drove to their small farmstead about six miles north and one mile west of Moran.
“I’d seen pictures of the damage, but it’s entirely different to see it in person,” she said, “to see everything you have blown away. You think, ‘well, this was supposed to be here, and this was what went there.'”
IT REMAINS a long road to recovery for Max, who remains hospitalized at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
Houk, 62, suffered injuries to both legs after a wall and cabinet collapsed on him in the blast.
A pair of surgeries have followed, the first on an unrelated health issue.
Before the explosion, Max was scheduled to have a cancerous growth on his adrenal glands removed, his wife explained.
Because the adrenal glands control such things as blood pressure, doctors wanted to have those removed before doing any type of surgery on his badly injured legs.
That was done.
The second surgery was to place an external fixator on Houk’s legs in order to stabilize them while the swelling subsides.
“Once the swelling goes down, they’ll be able to put in pins and rods to set his legs,” Beth explained. “It’ll be a couple of weeks before that happens.”
The plan is to have her husband kept in a skilled nursing center until his leg surgery.
