0:12  
They went out with a couple friends and we were boarding over to another friend's house and I was in the back of the line of three. I don't remember any of this but apparently someone said car and I was over in front of him and the van didn't break. Apparently saw me didn't break and hit me from behind and I went flying 48 feet, cracked my skull. The ambulance came and they took me to the hospital in Peterborough where for a couple hours, they realized they weren't gonna be able to treat me. So an Orange Air ambulance flew me in there, flying me to Toronto. And then nowhere had room for me so they're gonna have to send me to Detroit, but the air ambulance said that I wasn't gonna survive the trip. So, they made room for me and St. Mike's in Toronto.

1:08  
And when he finally arrived at St. Mike's it was some seven hours between his injury and when he arrived. I think was eight hours before the surgery. It was it was an absolute nightmare. I was allowed to go in with him. And he was unconscious, of course, and they were inflicting all this pain on him, you know that they could to try to see get a response out of them. So you're standing there and watching them do this. Meanwhile, I'm trying to talk to him and say, I'm here, you know, and you're going to be okay and didn't know if he could hear me or not. And then they took him away for the for the surgery. And he ended up being at 48 days in ICU, and battled not just the brain injury, but he got severe pneumonia. And I really felt at some point it was going to be the pneumonia that was going to kill him. When I finally got to see him after the surgery, it was just awful. You know, his head was all bandaged up, he was bruised. I mean, he had a catastrophic brain injury. Then when they called us into a meeting, they basically said that he either wasn't going to make it and that if he did make it, chances are he wouldn't be able to, to cope, you know. He'd be hospitalized to institutionalized or something like that.

2:23  
But that lasted a whole month and a half, where I was in the chemical induced coma. Well, I guess I woke up several times and kept asking the same questions. And then every now and again, I just kind of like, look over curiously at mom and ask, why am I here? And then she would tell me the whole story apparently several times. And I just remember December 1, because that's when they finally took me out of ICU and put me in the ward and some doctors and nurses and would come in the morning and ask several questions. And one of the questions is still what date it is, and our way around, that was put a calendar up on the wall. And as you exit out what day it was so.

3:03  
You cheated, I guess. I cheated the system a bit. He needed, you know, like a feeding tube in his stomach and all that sort of stuff. So for me, it was so hard, he had to have a trach put in. So almost every day that I was going to the hospital, they were saying that we need to do a trach, we need to do this, we need to put a shunt in, we need to. So I had to keep signing for them put more and more tubes and things in.

3:27  
I had a lot of dreams when I was in a coma and in all my dreams, I was lying down. And I was held down by cords of some sort and that would have been all the tubes going into in the needles. I had so many dreams where I was on a cruise ship. It was like I was on the Titanic, but I was down in like a hospital ward. And the lights went out and they just tell me the ships going down and you're going to die. And I just had countless dreams where I've just lying on different ships in different areas and just knowing I was gonna die, and I had nothing to do and just kind of waiting for the water to come. So I'm not really big on going on cruises now.

4:08  
So I do things in the early periods when I would sing little songs that I'd made up for him when he was when he was a baby and I thought well, they worked then he was really happy baby when I sang to him. You're my baby. Yes, you are. You're my bright and shining star. I love you the way you are. As you work through, you know your own fear and everything you had to feel that we were doing something something constructive. You know, you couldn't just sit there and be a witness to this as Garrett's gonna come back and thank you for all of this. And they looked at me in total disbelief and I said he will he'll be back because they said to me that very seldom anybody went back to to see how they were doing. I said, Garret will come back and he did. You're my baby. Yes, you are.

5:01  
I started off initially in a wheelchair. But because my right arm was so bad, I just end up going in circles, so it was a bit of a struggle. So as I continue to get better and better I'd started walking with a person on each side and he helped me then one person and then the walker cane, and then just holding the railings. I started walking on my own. And I kept pushing, kept pushing and kept what my mom to take me out on walks. I kept getting faster and faster and I started leaving her behind and then I started running again. And before a year was out I ran a 10 k race in 41 minutes after it was incredible, possibly not being able to walk again. So So

5:48  
And I stood there in the parking lot when he was coming back from the tank a race and I'm sobbing and sobbing and everything because I was just I couldn't believe that he was able to do it. So everyone I think was looking at me kind of strange. Watching my son come across the finish line and I've just dissolved in tears because it was it was unbelievable when he went from catastrophic to a year later, I'm running a race. Like it's a miracle. We launched heads up Durham. So I was kind of the lead in it, but certainly if  Garrett didn't give me permission to share his image of him in the hospital and tell his story, there would never be a heads up Durham. So it's been really well received and I think we've been able to shine a light on what they call an invisible disability because people just don't know enough about brain injury.

6:37  
I spoke at the launch and there was important people from the neighborhood there and a few lawyers and someone else from the law firm that represented me said how grateful I was for all the help and how it's probably gonna be a struggle now having five years of nothing on my resume. And then a few days later, the lawyer who represented me, he messaged me and said, we have a position up I think you should apply. And that's now where I work. And it's been three and a half years that I've been working at the firm and do my best to help out for other people that have gone through the same situation I went through.

7:16  
I'm just so so grateful that Garrett's doing as well as he is that he's, you know, living the life he deserves. He's, he's though he's a wonderful man.

7:26  
Eventually, I'd like to finish my degree. I don't have a specific plan of somewhere I'd like to work. But I'm very happy that the firm that I work at now has allowed me to continue to work there, and I'm hopeful for my future.