‘Crippled Pickle’ grows from Newtown man’s devastating crash, recovery

Michael DeLong’s life was upended in an instant.

One moment DeLong, 23, of Newtown, was with friends taking a Chrysler 300 for a test drive. The next moment he struggled to crawl from the wreck vehicle after the car crashed when its accelerator jammed. His injury was catastrophic. His neck fractured at C6, and he was paralyzed.

“From where my chest is, from where my arm pits are down, no function at all,” he said.

The prognosis devastated him.

“Never be able to get out of a power wheelchair … never work again,” he said, remembering his early thoughts. “They told me I was gonna be in a nursing home the rest of my life.”

Life as he knew it was over. A graduate of Council Rock North High School, he had been an HVAC tech, and was looking to join the union. With those plans gone, he returned home to Newtown.

“When you lose your job, it really does hurt inside,” DeLong said. “You feel like you don’t have a place. Like everyone else is working, everyone else is going out and you’re just staying at home, like you’re a child or something.”

That’s when he got an idea.

Ever since he was a little kid, he loved to grow vegetables. That love came from his grandmother, said his mother, Donna DeLong.

“My mother-in-law is an amazing vegetable gardener, and he spent a lot of time with her when he was little,” she said.

Said Michael: “I had all the vegetables in my garden, and it was something for me to tend, to take care of and it gave me a sense of independence.”

He started pickling vegetables as he recovered and rebuilt his life.

“People said they were good,” he said. “So, I kind of realized there’s something about pickles, something about cucumbers, that people love.”

He launched a line of pickles called “The Crippled Pickle.” He grows and makes the products and labels them. They are sold exclusively at the Newtown Hardware House on S. State Street in Newtown.

There are no online sales because he wants to draw people to the borough’s much-loved hardware store which, like himself, is a survivor of tough times.

Meanwhile, he aimed to defy experts who said he’d never walk again.

“I don’t think the doctors realized that I just couldn’t accept that,” he said. “Some of those doctors — they counted me out.”

There were two breakthroughs. The first came when he was in his chair and a friend of his father’s came to visit and said, “Mike, try to wiggle your knee.” He did.

Then, during a physical therapy session, a nurse noticed he was moving one of his toes.

“Once I saw that I kind of just did the math. If I keep progressing like that, eventually I’ll be able to walk, so I keep moving,” he said.

His outlook was sunny, though not always easy. He would not compare himself to others in his situation, but instead to his friends.

“My friends are playing sports, so I thought, you know what? I’ll play sports, too. It might look a little different, but I’m gonna do it, too,” he said.

His mother, a nurse, wasn’t surprised.

“When he put his mind to something, always accomplishes it,” Donna DeLong said.

But there is also prayer. DeLong is a parishioner at St. Andrew Church in Newtown. She leaned on her prayer group for strength and sought a miracle.

“There have been 250 Masses said for him,” she said.

Within months movement returned to Michael’s legs.

“I’d try to kick a ball as much as I could. I could only move my leg a little bit but I still tried,” he said.

The long road back was hard physically and mentally.

“I gotta say that in the beginning, the ‘Why me’ was incomprehensible,” he said. “I felt just so irrelevant. It is hard to even explain just how worthless I felt.”

He ditched the moments of self-pity by focusing on his recovery.

“It was like someone trying to escape from prison,” he said. “Every day you’re trying to get out …. I kept moving and moving and moving, kept moving my muscles until everything started to work.”

Last week, two years after the crash, he stood at Newtown Hardware House next to his display of pickles and jams. He steadied himself with an arm crutch.

“The jams are seasonal, but the pickles” — he has four flavors — “are very vinegar and salt. All natural. They’re good for you.”

Will he return to HVAC work or build a pickle empire?

“I think the pickles are gonna take off,” he said. “But the HVAC knowledge is still there — if I ever get into refrigerated pickles.”