Brad Baylis likes to say he won a head-butting competition with a moose.
On Aug. 26, Baylis, 39, was driving home to Prince George at about 9:30 p.m. when the vehicle he was driving collided with a moose near Fraser Lake on Highway 16.
The impact sent the animal into the car through the windshield, breaking every bone in Baylis' face and leaving him near death.
Quick action from a resident living along the highway who heard the horrific crash, along with others who stopped to help, pulled the dead moose from the car to get to Baylis, who was airlifted to Vancouver General Hospital.
A cutting-edge medical procedure called brain microdialysis saved his life (as last week's 97/16 cover story explained).
Sitting down to talk about his ongoing recovery a short five months after the accident, Baylis was emotional in his gratitude for everyone who has helped him, from the man who came out of his house when he heard the crash, first responders, emergency personnel, Prince George medical staff, Vancouver General Hospital staff, physiotherapists at GF Strong and family and friends. He is especially grateful to his partner of two years, Carla Lewis, who works for the First Nations Health Authority as a traditional wellness specialist. She helps integrate alternative and traditional wellness into the mainstream healthcare system, lives in Burns Lake and is a member of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation.
"I was very fortunate to have the people around me that I did, especially Carla," Baylis said.
"We had tons of support and I can't imagine going through something like this without it," Lewis said.
Taking a step back to think about how far he's come, Baylis only knows what happened after the accident from what he's been told.
"I don't remember the accident or a month and a half after it," Baylis said, who suffers from no other injuries except those to his head.
There were a lot of factors involved that contributed to Baylis' healing including his age, that he was healthy and the fact that he was rescued right away.
"First responders treated it as a brain injury immediately," Lewis said. "And without that care Brad wouldn't have even made it to the microdialysis. When Brad got to Vancouver General doctors told us he had a 50 per cent chance of survival just to be nice and then later they admitted he actually had less than a 10 per cent chance."
Even after Baylis, a pipe fitter and quality control officer for a local company, was stabilized, his prognosis was uncertain.
"Doctors said they were going to take him out of the induced coma after a week and they had warned me that he might never come out of it or it could be months or days, they just didn't know," Lewis said, who had told doctors she wanted to be there at the time they took him off the medication.
It was only a matter of a few hours when Lewis saw Baylis struggling to open his eyes. As soon as she saw that movement she immediately started to talk to him to let him know where he was and what had happened. His eyes popped open and he looked terrified, Lewis added. She called in the nurse who couldn't believe Baylis was awake.
"She told him if he was okay to give us a thumbs up and Brad gave us a thumbs up," Lewis recalled. "After that it was a very slow progression - the first couple days he was awake for five to 10 minutes and then gradually he was awake for 15 to 20 minutes and then a good month and a half later he was awake most of the day."
Baylis said he doesn't remember anything from those early days in hospital. His children, Holden, 9, Bodie, 8 and Grier, 6, came to visit early on in his recovery and he has no memory of it but he remembers what someone told him his oldest son said before he went into the room to see his dad for the first time.
"I guess it's too early for moose jokes," Holden said to those left in the waiting room and Baylis loves knowing that his son had a great attitude going into it.
Lewis said that not only could they credit Baylis' recovery to modern medicine but also to alternative healing practices that saw her consulting with his specialists to introduce supplements to enhance the healing process, including mega doses of melatonin, which contains high amounts of antioxidants that fuse to brain cells and can actually repair them, according to Lewis's medical journal research.
When it was time to reintroduce foods to Baylis, Lewis said she'd bring homemade meals to him for optimum nutritional value. Baylis said he didn't like the hospital food much.
"I will never forget this - I was on a puree diet and they pureed my toast and I had finally had enough and so I looked at the nurse and I said to her 'how the heck is a man supposed to put peanut butter on this?'"
Lewis said they also did reiki, a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing.
"I had my cousin come in and do Reiki on him and that was when his brain was hooked up to the monitor and you could actually see all his levels changing, which was really cool," she said.
There was another healer that came to help Baylis in the hospital.
"We had (Tsimshian and Haisla) healer Tom Smith come in and the things that he did were just mind-blowing miracle-level stuff," Lewis said. "He also fixed me up. I was just walking around in an utter state of trauma and I felt like I was just barely holding it together and I went into a session with him and he put me back together."
Baylis said the only real pain he experienced during the whole ordeal was because he had broken his palate bone that had been wired in place.
"As soon as they took the wires out, the headaches stopped," Baylis said.
"And that's pretty crazy," Lewis said. "Because even with people who have mild concussion deal with headaches," Lewis said. "So he hasn't had headaches, noise doesn't bother him, light doesn't bother him."
"I think I've maybe had one headache, maybe two, since I've been home," Baylis said, who was discharged from Vancourver General on Oct. 4.
Lewis said some family members, guided by an elder of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation, went to the accident site to call back Baylis' spirit while he was still in the induced coma, using a sacred bundle, which included spruce, cedar and juniper. It was then brought to Baylis in Vancouver and placed under his bed.
"And that was done the night before he woke up," Lewis said. "So that was pretty amazing."
It took a month for Baylis to be able to move and his first attempts saw him sitting on the edge of the bed and flopping back down because his brain couldn't make the connection to the rest of his body. It took a couple of weeks of that before he could stand and then he started shuffling his feet.
"Then day by day his steps with the walker got bigger and bigger and by the time we left the hospital - it had been a month and a half - he used a wheelchair to get around - but he could get up and walk down the hall," Lewis said. "His progress after that was really rapid."
After being released from hospital, Baylis attended rehabilitation at G.F. Strong and he went from a wheelchair the first week, to a walker for a week and then left that behind.
"The first day he got off the walker, we walked around Stanley Park, that's eight kilometres," Lewis said.
Both Lewis and Baylis believe some of his quick recovery was due to the fact that Baylis was an avid mountain biker before the accident that saw him at a peak fitness level. Baylis said he hopes to get back to it eventually.
"Today Brad has no weakness in either side of his body," she said.
"Except my vision," he said.
Baylis has lost 100 per cent of his peripheral vision in both eyes but still has 20/20 eye sight.
"We're hoping that gets better because that's going to be the difference between him driving and getting back to work or not," Lewis said.
Little things that should improve over time is the loss of a significant amount of his sense of smell and the dozen titanium plates used to help reconstruct his face makes him more sensitive to the cold when he's outside.
"The plastic surgeons said they could do something with my scars," Baylis said, who has barely visible scars all around his eyes and nose that are the only indicator of the entire facial reconstruction. "But I'm just going to leave them. They tell the story and I'm keeping the scars."
