I Should Be Dead..

20/10/17

My day started like any other. Aswell as working full time in construction I was running my own gym on the side. This complimented a gym equipment company, which I was also owner operator at. Construction paid my wage, and enabled me to do something I loved after hours. It was a pretty hectic lifestyle, but I loved it! I never thought I would be able to train so early in the morning, especially when I had a 10 hour shift on site to do, before coming home for a quick shower, and off to coach for 3 hours. But I actually loved getting up at 0315 to train before commencing my day. Tell a lie, I hated getting out of bed at that time. But once I had finished my session, I felt so energised and alive. This feeling stayed with me the whole day.

So once I had trained, showered, had my breakfast and made a coffee I was off to work.

I love construction. I love the physicality of the job. Moving and lifting things and working hard all day. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much if I wasn’t fit. But being fit and strong made my job easy and enjoyable. 2 years on and I am struggling to say Im a personal trainer when people ask what I do for work. I have always felt like I was defined by my career as a carpenter. Probably sounds silly to most reading this, but it made me feel like a real man - Being the provider, working in a trade. Maybe because I always saw my own Dad as exactly that. I still say I’m a carpenter when people ask what I do for a living, even though Im not working in my trade, and can’t see myself returning to it at any stage. It’s a huge thing for me to let go of, but I will get to why that is a bit later in the story.

I have had some great jobs in construction. Many I have gotten because I am dual ticketed. Both as a carpenter and a rigger, with plenty of experience in both. This keeps my day interesting as I am always doing something different. It also makes me pretty valuable to a company as I can do a wide range of tasks on site.

Today I would be working on the cranes, loading and unloading steel from trucks. Id be working alongside a man I got along with greatly. Ill try keep names out of this story as much as I can as I don’t want to direct and attention to others that may not want it.

The day was flat out. A lot of steel had to be moved from a site in Belmont, back to our site in Bayswater. After some small jobs onsite in the morning off we set for Belmont to start loading the truck. I can skip right to the end of the day from here as the whole day went well. Very busy, fast paced day making sure we had everything done by days end.

Just before 4pm there was a fair bit of communication happening on the radio between my fellow rigger and a supervisor on the other part of our site. We were still unloading trucks, so for now we stayed on our side of the site. The site we were working on and were inducted on, is where we had been working for the last 5 months. We had no overhead high voltage powerlines on site, but we did have that hazard when we worked on, or close to the train tracks. In this scenario all machinery had boom restrictors on them, we had flagging, and spotters in place to ensure we didn’t come too close to the overheads. We all know it wouldn’t be good if machinery came into contact with those wires.

Just after 4 my fellow rigger said we had to head to the other site to do some lifts before we knocked off for the day. We packed up and headed over.

As we entered the site there was no signage to warn us of overhead powerlines, nor any height markers (flagging) to alert us of height restrictions. Both of which are mandatory on sites with overhead powerlines or other overhead dangers. Our tasks were giving to us by our supervisor, again with no mention of overhead powerlines. Ordinarily we would stop for 10 minutes to fill out a quick hazard identification checklist when working in a new area, but as this was the end of the day, and pressure was being put on to finish before we knocked off, this was not done. We had our take 5's and crane specific JHA done but slowly, all of the holes in the cheese were starting to line up.

Our main task was to erect a time-lapse camera pole. The position of the pole had been previously determined by onsite engineers and supervisors, and a lift study had been carried out for this. A lift study will highlight any dangers, and also describe equipment required to perform the lift, and where the lift will be carried out. It is a comprehensive step by step description of the task ahead. And rightly so, as rigging is considered to be a high-risk job.

**After writing this I am filled with memories. I can’t even begin to explain how much I miss my job. Ive gone from running two fitness businesses and a full-time construction job, to part time PT and full time stay at home dad. ABC kids is my life now. I am still struggling to get used to my new identity.**

Im trying to describe the events in a way that even those who don’t work in construction will understand. The pole we were erecting is basically a streetlamp pole, with a camera on it instead of a light. Pretty darn good conductor aswell, I can confirm.

As we were only travelling about 20m we decided to stand the pole vertically, so we could land it straight onto the concrete block and bolts. This saves us double handling the load. Had we been travelling a larger distance we would have carried it horizontally and tied it back to the crane. This pole is about 8 metres high (or there abouts) so as you can imagine the boom of the crane would need to be extended into the air a fair bit to clear the ground. No problem as there was no dangers overhead right?! Wrong.

As we travelled forward with the load, the pole started to wobble about. Pretty normal for a load that’s slung high. A tag line only pulls, it cannot push, so I decided to hold the pole with one hand, and use the rope to pull with the other hand. Again, this is common practice for rigging. As we were closing in on the concrete block there was more movement in the pole. I decided to put my other hand on the pole to help stabilise it a bit better. The instant I put my second hand on that pole, is when the boom of the crane made contact with the power lines.

BANG. I felt like I had been hit by a bus. What is this strange feeling? I had an instant out of body moment, where my body was doing one thing, and my mind was doing another. Time seemed to go slow. I could feel and hear the electricity in my body. At the time I was unaware that it was electricity. In that moment my brain was still trying to work out what was happening. I distinctly remember thinking – “What the fk is going on?”. It felt like the end of a 3rd person shooter game, where the avatar drops to their knees as the camera pans around them. That’s literally what was going on in my mind. I was seeing strobe lights. Later I would realise this was glimpses of the sky, and glimpses of the ground. You see, I had done 3 backflips before hitting the ground. Did not stick the landing though, so definitely lost points there. Still, claim to fame – 3 backflips from a standing position. Ive previously only been able to do one.

When I hit the ground, I was incredibly lucky. I landed flat on my back in the sand. I could have easily broken an arm, a leg, or my neck. Right now though I was still trying to figure out what happened. My arms and my legs were crunched up. They slowly released and relaxed to the ground. I was racking my brain. “How the fk has this thing fallen on me”. I thought the pole we were carrying had come off the hook and crushed me. I was paralysed and could not move. I couldn’t feel anything. I was now scared shitless. Am I still in danger? How will I get out of danger? Oh shit, how am I going to be a good father? Im never going to be able to run around with my daughter ever again. She is my world. Ill never train again, run again, walk again. Holy fk am I going to die?

At that moment I heard my mate on the phone. He was hysterical. “He’s been electrocuted I need an ambulance”. Electrocuted?? By what? How the hell have I been electrocuted?

I Want to break from the story for a minute. Its been two weeks since I last edited this. After writing that last paragraph I had a bit of a meltdown and I lashed out on my Instagram page. So much anger came rushing to me. That’s the first time I have made a public post about my anger towards what has happened. To this date I have been patient, I have respected the process, I have trusted that people are doing their job to move us toward some sort of closure on this. Fact is, fk all has been going on. Worksafe finished their investigation in April 2019. Its now February 2020 and the next person in line at Worksafe has not even read it. SO while I have been waiting, its been sitting on someone’s desk doing fk all. While my mental state continues to deteriorate, the report sits on someone’s desk. My employers continue with their jobs, continue getting paid their wage, and continue with their lives like everything is fine. And for them it is. But for me that’s far from the truth.

Ive been using fitness, and the love for my family as a blanket to hide how I really feel. Keeping myself busy with enjoying the time I get to spend with them, and making them happy, or spending most of my free time training. Im not ok though. Im not happy. I have so many issues going on right now that need to be addressed. I am lucky to have had this revelation recently where I can admit it, and seek help. Now I just need to act on it to fix it and be able to deal with it. More on this later. Back to the story…….

Ive always had this weird thought in my mind about getting injured while in the construction industry. As most of my jobs were FIFO roles up north, the thought of lying in the sun face up, on the hot dirt has always been the one thing I would think of, if I ever pictured myself injured. Well I might not be up north, but here I am lying face up in the sun. Pretty glad to be face up actually. The fact that I didn’t break any bones on landing is amazing. A few degrees more and I could have landed on my neck. A few degrees less and I would have driven my big nose right into the dirt. But as luck would have it, I landed flat on my back in the sand. Winded and confused.

I asked my workmates to get me out of the sun, as I thought this was the reason I felt hot. My mate sat with me and held my head in his lap. He washed dirt from my face with his water and tried to clear the dirt from my mouth and eyes. It feels good to not be alone. I had one button left holding my shirt on, my pants were shredded from top to bottom with only my belt holding them on. Who knows where my gloves, hat and glasses had flown off to. I couldn’t move, but I was alive. Being alive felt like such a relief. Right now I was reassuring my workmates that I was ok, and at the same time I was panicking inside. The intensity of the heat inside my body was starting to increase. My adrenaline levels must be dropping, and the pain is increasing. “Am I in the sun” I asked? This burning sensation I could feel increasing was definitely not the sun.

I feel like it didn’t take too long for the ambulance to arrive. Thank god for that! Im not sure I would have kept it together for much longer lying in the dirt. They lifted me onto the stretcher and the pain was immense, but nothing compared to what was about to come. At this stage I still couldn’t open my eyes from all of the dirt, so I was just using images from my memory to workout where we were. As the ambulance was about to leave site, one of the ambulance officers said, “I hope we don’t get bogged”. That would be just my luck! Someone comes to rescue me, and they get bogged. We made it off site with no issues and set off for Royal Perth Hospital.

Now the pain was really starting to set in. I asked if I could have something to ease it off and I was told due to the type of injury, the ambulance officer was waiting for a call back from a doctor, to see if they could give me something stronger. Stronger being Ketamine. Its very hard to explain the pain I was in, as it wasn’t in one location. I felt it through every inch of my body. Its not like pain you would usually be familiar with. This type of pain completely took over any other feeling, and almost every other thought. It was like my body wasn’t there anymore, and my mind was just placed into a raging furnace where I could feel every flame lick my body. I feel like that doesn’t even do it justice. I know I wasn’t burnt by fire, but I have no idea how else to describe electrical burns. You just feel pain in its truest form, everywhere.

Around this time is where my memory starts to get a bit faded. Im not sure if that was because of the pain, or the drugs, or a combination of both, but when I arrived at the hospital there was only one thing I could think of; Dying. Not that I might die, but that I wanted to die. This pain was all encompassing and it just kept getting stronger and stronger. The drugs were not working at all. The pain still haunts me today. I am so fearful of that pain, that it gives me anxiety daily. My brain shows me trauma in the simplest daily tasks and my mind runs wild with images of bad things that could happen to me and those around me. It’s a prick to deal with.

While the doctors and nurses were trying to stabilise me, I was asking them to kill me and put me out of my misery. I had truly given up at this point and I was ready to go. Ive seen plenty of documentaries where people who have experienced trauma were asked what helped get them through. This was usually answered with “I thought of my family and that got me through it”. Nope not for me. The pain was that intense there was nothing on this earth that was going to prevent me from wanting it to end. I asked the doctors to call my family and tell them I love them. This was the end of the line for me. One doctor replied with “Is there anyone else you want us to call?”. Yeah wicked, this guy thinks I’m going aswell, thanks for confirming mate. At one point I was so engulfed in pain I literally could not feel anything else. The nurses and doctors stopped responding to me. I feel so bad for the things I was saying. I feel I brought trauma to those doctors. When they stopped responding I said, “holy fk, am I dead?”. One replied, “no mate you are still alive”. And again I continued to ask them to put me out of my misery. This is the last thing I remember of my time at RPH. I vaguely remember being transferred to Fiona Stanley hospital.

At Fiona Stanley hospital I recall having a type of goggle over my eye which was flushing out the sand. This had to stay on for 20 minutes and was extremely irritating. My family had now arrived and were by my side. One or two work colleagues had also arrived. I would later learn that work never called my wife or family to alert them of the accident. I like to give the benefit of the doubt and say that panic or shock took over, and therefore my wife wasn’t called. Call it human error. The first thing she knew about the accident was the police knocking at the front door. What a shock that must have been for her. And of course, you always get second-hand information with these things. My father and father in law both work in construction so when they heard a crane was involved, they thought I had been crushed. Then when they heard 132,000v of electricity was involved they really thought the worst. And rightly so. For I should be dead.