Good Samaritan drowning in medical bills

It’s still a blur for Dustin Nealeigh.

The 23-year-old boat mechanic remembers hopping aboard a vessel to help a fellow boater in distress and later, winding up strewn on a bed in Naples Community Hospital missing a thumb, no medical insurance and thousands of dollars in debt.

“This dude’s boat broke down and we tied him to ours,” Nealeigh said, slouched over a wooden bench at Salty Sam’s Marina in Fort Myers, where he works. “I was looking at the engine. He turned it on. I still had my hand wrapped around the gears.”

In the next minute and a half, he was en route with paramedics to Naples Community Hospital.

Nealeigh’s thumb was severed in the accident that occurred in Naples.

And the boater that Nealeigh went to help hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Unless the boater comes forward, Nealeigh, of Fort Myers, is stuck with his own hospital bills.

“I just leaned back on his boat.” Nealeigh said, pushing back his faded, black baseball cap to reveal a shaved head that once had red hair. “There was blood everywhere. I think there was even blood on [the boat owner].”

Photo by MICHEL FORTIER, Daily News

Good Samaritan Dustin Nealeigh, 23, lost his thumb while trying to get a motor running for a stranded boater. Simple tasks such as buttoning a shirt have become difficult, not to mention his job at Salty Sam’s Marina, where he works as a rigger, forklift operator and manager. The boater fled the scene, leaving Nealeigh with rising medical bills.

His best friend and roommate, Jeremiah Ritchey, 24, was with him and described the scene of blood squirting from Nealeigh’s left hand.

“It looked like somebody got killed,” he said.

The boat owner left the scene without offering his name or contact information. And so the search is on to find him.

Ritchey remembers some details about the man: 215 to 225 pounds, balding with a brown goatee, tattoo on his left arm, in his mid-30s and between 5 feet 8 inches and 5 feet 10 inches.

“The boat was light brown aluminum, about 15-to-17-feet,” he said.

The blunt consequences of his generosity struck the young man during a consultation with the orthopedic hand surgeon, Dr. Thomas Parent at Naples Community Hospital.

“We were sitting there and he said I couldn’t keep my thumb,” Nealeigh said, subtly glancing at his bandaged hand. “I cried. I sat there on the table and cried.”

The doctors weren’t equipped to handle the reattachment surgery and hospitals in Miami and Tampa refused the case.

“The reason they typically give us is that they’re too busy,” Parent said. “I know the one fellow in Tampa was calling me from the operating room and the fellow from Miami was on his way into the operating room.”

But under the thick cushion of gauze and skin-colored bandages, there is still a thumb – black and immobile, but a thumb nonetheless.

Instead of removing the finger, Parent pinned it in place and is monitoring the healing, which he reports is going well. The only trouble so far is a lack of blood flow to half of the tissue, which could be fixed by transferring other tissue.

The doctor sees Nealeigh twice a month, during visits that the young man pays for out of pocket.

Nealeigh signed up for insurance a week before the late May accident but he wasn’t covered until June 1.

“My mom was nagging me, telling me something could happen,” he said, smiling softly and shaking his head. “She’s devastated.”

Sitting on a damp, wooden bench in the forefront of the gray horizon, Nealeigh is submerged in medical bills.

“They’re getting up to $6,000,” he said.

But under the weight of responsibility resting on his shoulders, Nealeigh exudes charm and ease as he points to a box perched on the countertop of the marina’s shop – Dustin’s Thumbs-up Fund.

“They even started a fund for me,” he said, smiling broadly and adding that the crew at Salty Sam’s is family to him.

“This is a situation where life is definitely not fair,” said Captain John Bunch, a frequenter of Salty Sam’s. “He’s just a great kid. He’d help anybody do anything.”

When asked what he’d say to the anonymous boater, Nealeigh turned away his bright, green eyes in thought and said he really didn’t know.

“I don’t want to [mess] the guy’s life up or anything,” he said. “Maybe if he has boater’s insurance, he could help me. I don’t know.”

Ritchey is quick to jump to his friend’s defense.

“We’re not trying to get him (boater) in trouble or anything,” he said. “It was an accident, absolutely. But that’s why insurance is out there. Dustin was just trying to help him.”