Truth be told, it took a while for them to be OK. Post-surgery, Dr. McCarty referred Bigler to STHS’s Occupational Therapy team, where he would go once a week for six months. There, the hand therapists – Dolly Smith, Tricia Doell and Cassie Cloutet; he remembers their names – helped him adjust to his injury and regain motion in his hand.
They didn’t’ just patch him up physically, though. They helped him with the emotional aspects of his injury, as well.
“It’s a blow,” he said. “It really is a blow to your sense of identity, especially for me, working with my hands.”
He added: “The words of encouragement that they did offer were things like, ‘You’re not alone with this. This does happen, and people recover and we see it all the time. You’re going to be fine.’”
Eventually, Bigler – who gives all the credit to Dr. McCarty, Dolly, Tricia and Cassie – not only reopened his shop, Bigler Woodworks on North Jefferson Avenue in downtown Covington, but he decided to rededicate himself to it. He even went so far as to have a sign made to hang out front, which he hadn’t previously felt compelled to do.
Among his new clients: St. Tammany Health System, which, as it turns out, needed a board room table for its recently opened new wing. This wasn’t just any table, though. It would be have a 360-square-foot footprint, big enough to seat at many as 27 people. It would be an enormous challenge from a design and a construction standpoint, but Bigler jumped at the chance.
“It was immediate for me: ‘Yeah, I’m going to do that,’” he said. “‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to not just build that project, but I’m going to make it the best thing I can.’”
After a year of design and construction, he delivered his finished product, made of American walnut over a welded steel frame, in March. His unique vision for piecing the table together involved 20 pieces, with the largest being delivered to the hospital on a custom-built trailer and with a police escort to help manage traffic.
It took a small crew and no small amount of sweat to maneuver it into the new building’s board room. There was also some sweat with regard to whether all the pieces would fit the way they should.
This is where the triumph part comes in.
As the last piece fit into place, Bigler threw his arms in the air in a “Rocky”-style celebration. A quick-thinking friend of his took a photo of the moment, captured from behind Bigler – and capturing the moment of victory that closed the book on that awful night three years earlier.
“One of the things that struck me about what was said at the ribbon-cutting (for the new building) was this concept of, ‘We’re reworking our identity’ or ‘We’re building our identity at St. Tammany with the expansion of this new tower,’” Bigler said. “And in a way, St. Tammany Parish Hospital helped me rebuild my identity.”
He added: “I got the opportunity to craft a boardroom table where you’re going to have the kings of the community, really, that are influencing the direction of where St. Tammany Hospital goes. That’s pretty cool for me. It’s kind of full circle, really.”