Luling — If not for the three of spades, Dale Stonecipher might have lost the poker game. If not for Stonecipher, Jessica Conlen might have lost her legs — or worse, her life.

It was late on July 30 of last year, and Stonecipher, who teaches at San Marcos High School but lives in New Braunfels, was playing cards with friends in Caldwell County.

“I almost went home early but I happened to catch a good card to stay in the game,” he recalled this week. “I ended up winning. That was a good thing, because if I’d lost I would have gone home before the accident happened.”

Feeling lucky about the win, he was headed home along a stretch of FM 20 that’s sparsely traveled that time of night when he saw the pickup smashed into a big oak tree. “That doesn’t look right,” he thought, and stopped to investigate.

“I got out and went up and it was very hard to even see because the truck was up against the tree. I yelled ‘is anybody there?’ and I heard her say ‘help, help me.’”

Conlen, 19 and a 2008 graduate of SMHS, was headed home to San Marcos from her mother and stepfather’s house in Kingsbury. She doesn’t remember hitting the tree. “The next thing I know I’m hearing Dale, I’m saying phone numbers,” she said from her room at Warm Springs Hospital in Luling.

Though he could see her moving around, Stonecipher couldn’t open the vehicle’s door. “That was probably a good thing, given the injuries she had.”

He dialed 911, prompting a response from several law enforcement agencies and a helicopter from Central Texas Medical Center. “I told them we were definitely going to need an ambulance and a fire truck, and from what I said, the dispatcher went ahead and called for the helicopter.”

With the phone numbers she’d given him, Stonecipher called Conlen’s mother Janet Herington, but got no answer. Then, he dialed her stepfather Randy Herington and left a message.

After that, there wasn’t much more he could do. “I told her I was not going to leave, I would stay until somebody got there.”

Conlen says she later learned it took two “Jaws of Life” hydraulic tools to free her from the wreckage and that paramedics on the scene “had ‘bio bags’ ready because they thought my legs weren’t attached.” Still, she doesn’t remember any pain, likely because she was in shock.

But what she saw is etched in her mind. “Picture a low budget horror movie — I could see blood squirting out, the inside of my leg, the little white bone and all the layers.”

She was still trapped in the truck when her parents, roused from bed, arrived, but doesn’t remember them being there.

She does, though, recollect the first DPS trooper.

“He was talking to me like you see on TV when they keep talking to the person. I knew what he was doing and I told him ‘I know what you’re doing but I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’ I do remember the helicopter. I heard it and the light shined right at me. I was pissed off — the light was hurting my eyes.”

Arriving at Brooke Army Medical Center, the area’s premier orthopedic hospital, she recalls hearing medical personnel discussing her case. “They said ‘her SUV hit the tree.’ I got mad and said no, I drive a truck.”

She was in surgery for nine hours and has had 22 more surgeries since. Doctors rebuilt her kneecaps and used cadaver tissue to replace tendons. She also had broken bones, nerve damage in her right foot, two broken vertebra in her neck, snapped when her truck’s air bag deployed, and a minor hand injury.

Doctors also had to remove two bones out of her back after an infection developed because of repeated epidurals that were performed to decrease her pain.

Conlen initially spent 10 weeks at BAMC and returned there for subsequent surgeries. In between, she’s been at the Luling hospital.

Little by little, she’s regaining the ability to bend her legs. “I basically have to make myself cry every day, but even crying, I had to suck it up,” and keep going.

Since the accident, Conlen’s only spent one week at home, but during that time she made good on a promise “to interrupt Dale’s classroom.”

Walking straight-legged with a cane, “I told the class how he saved me, how thankful and appreciative I am and what’s going on with me.”

“The whole class was very intuitive and listening the whole time,” Stonecipher said. “She did a good job telling the whole thing — there’s an art to teaching.”

Despite the challenges of what personnel at BAMC called a “limb salvage,” Conlen, who was a high school soccer star, expects to walk naturally and to be out of the hospital for her 20th birthday on May 5.

“I’m not even worried about the scars anymore. I’m happy to have them, I’m happy I can use them,” she says of her legs.

Her stepfather, set on brag, notes that prior to the accident, Conlen made the dean’s list both semesters at Texas State University and, despite her newfound knowledge of anatomy and pharmacology, intends to become a certified financial planner.

For his part, Stonecipher recounted that he went into teaching with the intent of helping young people. He just wouldn’t have bet his most meaningful chance to do that would have been because of a game of poker.

And that three of spades? It’s out of play now, proudly displayed on Conlen’s bulletin board.