Getting Cam Back on His Feet
Cam Arnett, a server from Atlanta, GA shares how Giving Kitchen helped him recover from an injury that kept him from work right as he found out he was expecting a second child.
The industry is kind of something that found me.
I started in catering, so that ended up being the industry that I was extremely comfortable in, besides videography and photography. And I almost naturally gravitated into it and, ended up sticking into it and becoming one of those people you call a “server lifer.” I’m one of those service industry people that stay in the career, no matter how much you try to leave it.
As a server in a fifth group restaurant, we've, known about Giving Kitchen for years. We push Giving Kitchen, we let all of our employees know about Giving Kitchen. But I was always one of those people that said, “That's not really something that applies to me. It's something that's good for me to know to help other people, but I'm a careful person. I don't break anything. I don't get sick. Short term disability, call it long term. 'Cause if something happens to me, I'm out forever.” But I, I didn't, I wasn't thinking like that.
I'm also a photographer and videographer and it seems that sometimes that is also a dangerous practice. I was doing a photo shoot at a skate park. Which, of course, photos and skate parks and looking at your camera instead of at your feet always go perfectly together. So I fell backwards into a skate pool, straight down. I put out my leg to catch myself. And unfortunately, my leg lost the battle.
It was one of probably the most difficult times in my life. On that Friday, I found out that I was expecting another child.
Going through my mind, my only concern was [figuring out] how my family was gonna eat, how my mortgage was gonna be paid, how my child was going to not go back to the life that I might have had when I grew up.
I went into surgery that day, got a metal rod placed into my leg, but that didn't leave room for me to be able to do my job in terms of serving. And a, a lot of servers have this same issue that our bodies don't work, if our mouth doesn't work, if our eyes don't work, if our fingertips don't work, we can't do our jobs.
I remembered about Giving Kitchen. Somebody said, “Hey, reach out to them.”
I reached out to Giving Kitchen immediately.
They responded immediately, and we were on track even while I was laying in the bed in pain. In just a couple of days they were able to take care of my mortgage for three months, my water for three months, my electricity for three months, and my gas bill for three months.
That just put my mind at ease to the point where healing was no problem at all.
Giving Kitchen is the one thing that helped me get through that. Not only get through that, but be able to put my mind in a place where my family needed me to be.
You know, as servers, we never see ourselves as those type of people that, uh, the rug could be pulled from under us. There needs to be something in place to take care of those gaps. And at the end of the day, Giving Kitchen has always been able to step in and be that filler.
We got through, we're on the other side, and now we have a beautiful baby at home. I have a different position at the restaurant. It's looking like a great 2024.