Its been a long winter

Well I’m sure most people don’t know that I’ve been off my bike since last October and I’m sure nobody knows that I was in serious chronic back pain all last year. So I will start from the beginning where just before the Qashqai series, my back seized up and the doctors said it would take a few months before I could see a specialist so I endured the whole season with back pain.

Come fall I learned that I had a small bulge in my disc. Not a huge deal but I needed surgery to correct the problem, so I went down to the U.S. to get immediate medical care rather than wait 16 months in Canada to get it for free. So I got sorted from my doctor friend Sten Kramer and under I went, awaking to Kyle Strait picking me up from the hospital. So I spent a month or so at Straits getting healthy.

Three months pass and I’ve been rehabbing hard getting my body back into shape. Now that I’m healthy I’ve been riding my dirt jumper and doing some light down hilling and whatnot. Although the snowmobile season is almost ending the boys want to do a snowmobile trip way in the backcountry behind whistler in the little town called Brailorne. Off we go and all is well, we are having a blast, the snow is awesome, the weather is good and on the last night I was coming back from the restaurant, traveling about 65 km/h on my sled while taking a corner my ski fell apart and jammed into the ground, sending my ribs into the bars which catapulted me down the road.

It all happened in a flash. I was in the opposite ditch than my sled bleeding out the mouth and quite winded. My brother and friends roll up behind me on their snowmobiles wondering what had happened and quickly making sure I was ok. After self diagnoses I quickly realized that I had some broken ribs and that was about it, other than some good bruises and whatnot, so after taking some painkillers I went to bed.

I awoke in serious pain and still my breathing hadn’t worsened. My spleen wasn’t tender so I wasn’t too worried. We snowmobiled into the town so we called an ambulance to pick me up. So the ambulance team throws me onto a spine board for some dumb reason (I had no neck injury). I wasn’t looking forward to the bumpy 2 hour ambulance ride on a logging road.
It took half an hour for my pain killers to wear off that I had taken previously and the attendants wouldn’t give me anything other than laughing gas, which did nothing especially since I could barely breathe. Finally I got to the hospital, got my x rays and the doc says I have 2 broken ribs and there is a possibility that I have a punctured lung. So I get a friend from Vancouver to come pick me up from the interior. She and I and her father roll down the road back to Vancouver. Two days later my breathing worsened and my spleen got tender. I’ve been injured enough and know as much to as when I should go to the hospital, so in I went and in pain I was, once again the pain killers I had been taking wore off and of course the nurses wouldn’t let me take my pain killers that were working so they gave me theirs which didn’t work. It took all night to figure out how to calm my convulsions and spasms which was extremely pain full.

The doctor told me that my chest cavity in between my lungs and ribs had started to fill up with blood but not that bad so they kept me in for 3 days for observation. I laid beside Megan In emergency who kept me company the whole time enduring the gnarly sounds of crack heads going crazy and all the other wild stuff that goes on in emergency.

Day three in the hospital, I am scheduled to be released and the doc says oh wait did we get another x-ray? I said no. Doc comes back after getting the x-ray and says your chest cavity has filled up with blood and is collapsing my lung, so we need to stick a chest tube in your side, ok well that sucks but lets do it so they get a team together and put me on some mild sedatives which kept me awake but I didn’t feel too much. I come out of the sedative daze and see the test tube coming out of my side feeding a lot of blood into a box, creepy yes I know. One hour goes by and I am convulsing intensely my vitals have dropped to the point of where I am snow white and I cant even begin to tell anyone how much pain I was in. I focused on getting through each and every small breathe hoping that the next couple of seconds would be less pain full since they gave me a bunch of morphine that wasn’t working at all…they couldn’t give me anything else.

Doc comes back in a hurry and says this chest tube isn’t working we must have tore open an artery or a blood vessel and you are losing a ton of blood. At this point my mind is going into…well I don’t even know, I was there but I wasn’t there. A team of six or so starts getting ready to do this and the doc says we need to do this now with no sedatives since I’m fading fast losing so much blood that’s leaking into my chest cavity. The doctor rolls me over while I’m screaming in pain and says “this wont be comfortable” and slices open another hole for a test tube then proceeds to get the job done. There was one point where I looked back and saw a dude with a full face mask on splattered with blood and several nurses and doctors covered in blood up to their elbows, it grossed me out so much that I stared down at the floor and then saw that the floor was covered in blood. Not to mention the fact that I was sitting in a pool of blood in my gurney.

Awesome! Hard parts over right? Well think again, an hour goes by and I’m still in rough shape. Another doctor walks in and says we are going to have to get you in for surgery the chest tubes that we have put in are not working.
I will be cutting an incision about 2 inches long, and then I will suck out the blood and cauterize any leaky blood vessels. At this point I am beside myself since I thought it couldn’t get much worse so I said put me under doc and under I went.

I awoke with a 10 inch incision under my armpit and still two tubes sticking out of me with my girlfriend Megan at my side I laid in that stupid hospital till they released me. There you have it, my long grueling winter. Hope nobody has to go through what I just went through.

So as of now I’m back on the bike shredding and loving every minute of it.
Headed down to Utah in a week or so to film for my segment with New World Disorder then in the beginning of July I will be in Europe for 2 weeks. I then get to return to beautiful North West weather and start on my course for the third annual Bearclaw Invitational which will be happening on august 22nd and 23rd

Hope to see you all this summer and thanx for reading my story.

Written by Darren Berrecloth