Westside Stories Podcast: Doug & Jenna Teachey

September 20th means nothing to most people. To Doug and Jenna Teachey, it's the day an accident changed the entire trajectory of their future.

Doug was on a work trip to Montgomery, Alabama—a routine site visit to a bottling plant, the kind of trip he'd made a hundred times. He felt something hit the back of his head and knew immediately what it was. A forklift, going in reverse, had run him over. He was pinned underneath it for the better part of an hour, his leg wrapped around the wheel in a way that was somehow keeping him from bleeding out. He wanted to close his eyes. He was afraid that if he did, he wouldn't open them again. So he told himself the only thing he could: keep breathing. He kept thinking about Jenna. About their two little girls, Ellie and Molly, barely two and three years old. If he didn't wake up, who would take care of them?

Jenna got the call from a hospital chaplain while she was still buckling her daughters into the back seat after preschool pickup.

"Is my husband alive?" she asked. "We can't tell you that. You just need to get to Montgomery," they told her.

What happened next is the kind of thing you can only see in hindsight as God's fingerprints. Terrell Gilbert—still a member here at Westside—happened to be running down Howell Mill Road when Jenna reached him. He drove her to his home on Collier Road, where his wife started working the phones. A young woman named Hannah, unemployed and praying that morning about how to spend her time, ended up driving Jenna the whole way to Montgomery. None of it was planned. All of it mattered.

Doug lost his left leg below the knee. It took thirteen surgeries across six weeks and two hospitals to get him stable. He wouldn't walk again for seven years.

That's where we'll leave it here. What came next—the anger, the exhaustion, the long road of learning to be a family again, and the God who never once let go of them through it—is a story Doug and Jenna have never told publicly before.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.