Mail carrier continues route after breaking wrist

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night  — nor broken bone — could stop a local postal carrier recently from completing her duties on postal route 14. 

It was a seemingly ordinary day for Karen Moore, a rural Limestone County carrier with the Athens Post Office, as she delivered mail to residents down a route that includes Yarborough, Looney, Black and Holt roads. 

“I was carrying a big package and walking to someone’s front porch,” Moore said. “I saw the sidewalk … but I didn’t step up at the right time. I missed and tripped instead.”

Moore said she fell hard, fast and face down scraping her arms and legs. She caught herself with her right hand and arm. She admitted she had to sit down a couple of minutes to regroup. “It kind of knocked the breath out of me,” she said. “I thought to myself ‘That hurts real bad,’ but there was nobody out there to cry for.”

She picked herself up and knew she had hurt her wrist, but played it off as only a sprain. “It happened on July 13.  Should have been a Friday, but it wasn’t,” she joked.

Moore continued to deliver the mail the remaining four hours of her shift.  The pain caused her to have trouble pulling down mailbox doors. She dropped mail several times because she had trouble holding it.

“When I got back, I said, ‘I think I’ve sprained my wrist really bad,’” Moore said. Her supervisor John Walker talked her into going to the doctor to get an X-ray. “I went to the hospital and they said, ‘Oh yeah, you broke it,’” she said. She had cracked her wrist, pulling the ligament away from the bone.

The accident has caused a few changes. She is temporarily on light duty, which means she isn’t able to deliver mail on her route. “I’m extremely right-handed,” she said.

She misses being outside and the people she knows on her route that have become her friends and sometimes considered part of her family.  Those are the people who make it worthwhile.

“There is probably not a carrier out there that doesn’t have someone that is special to them,” she said. “You just get attached to people.”

An avid barrel racer, Moore also misses being able to ride her new horse Mr. Crazy Magic. She got the horse two weeks before her accident and had plans to train him.

Moore said her story might seem a little a silly. “There is probably not a carrier out there that hasn’t gone above and beyond and people will probably never know,” she said. “You just do things extra for people sometimes. You don’t do it for recognition.”

Moore has worked with the U.S. Postal Service for 15 years. She and husband Charles have two children, Kevin and Cody Scott.  Two of her sisters also work at the post office.