Duluth man finds healing through ballroom dance

Jim Carter was at a friend’s buffalo ranch to buy some meat when he was gored by a buffalo. He was thrown about 20 feet, and broke both shoulders, but the main damage was a ruptured femoral artery.

Through a miracle, he said he didn’t die that day, but he’d lost all nerve/brain connection to his right leg.

Nine months after his injury, a physical therapist suggested he try dance to help him learn to walk again. And he’s been dancing ever since.

Carter of Duluth makes his living in a risky business. He repairs high-pressure leaks in pipes.

But it was a trip to a local farm to buy some buffalo meat in 2013 that almost did him in.

Nitro, a 2,000-pound herd bull, snuck through a gate and when Carter and the farm’s owner went to get some feed to coax him back to his pen, Nitro went to work.

“He stuck his big head down right here, and he gored me right here,” Carter related, pointing under his right thigh. “And his horn went in, exploded my femoral artery, hit my femur, traveled all the way up from my femur to my pelvis.”

Carter regards it as a miracle that the horn didn’t penetrate farther than it did. Instead, the bull tossed him into the air. He landed next to the buffalo.

Carter was alive and conscious, but in serious trouble. The femoral artery is the second-largest artery in the body. Carter didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew he didn’t have much time.

Carter would have bled to death, but the farm owner recalled reading something about a University of Minnesota surgeon who advised his students to stick their fingers in a wound to stop bleeding.

That’s how Don Solwood saved Carter’s life.

Doctors took over at the hospital and thought Carter would lose his leg. They told him he’d probably be in a wheelchair.

Carter didn’t want to be in a wheelchair, so he took over his recovery.

His right leg was mangled and he couldn’t move it.

He joked to a friend that since he couldn’t ski anymore, he’d try dancing instead.

A friend suggested that wasn’t such a bad idea.

Carter didn’t just learn to dance; he learned to dance competitively.

A year after he started, he won first place in the student division at the Snow Ball, a national dance competition in the Twin Cities, [teacher Andrea] Kuzel reported.

She learned from the organizers that they knew nothing of his back story.

“I am so, so, so proud of how far he’s come,” she said of her student. “I wish everybody could have that positive attitude and that can-do attitude.”

About Kuzel, Carter said, “She taught me how to walk.”

“I think ballroom dancing could heal the world,” she said. “Honestly, it could create world peace, because you can’t have a dance class and leave unhappy.”