COVER STORY
Since Matt Mingay’s horrific truck racing crash he has bounced back from a coma, obliterated jaw, paralysis and brain surgery — but the determined veteran stuntman’s battles have only just begun
Stuntman Matt Mingay is on the road to recovery after horror crash
SHEENA Mingay was not at all concerned when told husband Matt had just rolled his Super Truck mid-race. The 32-year-old partner of the veteran Gold Coast stuntman was trackside at the next corner to take his photo when she heard he’d tipped.
No big deal. It had happened plenty of times. The high-flying 600horsepower crowd-pleasers are designed to get aerial. When cornering they do so with a wheel off the ground, sometimes two.
Despite being able to jump six metres high and travel 30 metres through the air, the worst injury in Super Trucks’ three-year history has been a broken collarbone.
“I wasn’t worried,” Mrs Mingay tells Coast Weekend. “Those trucks roll over, it happens all the time. Matt rolls them over, the best guys roll them over. Usually you just push it back up. “They are designed to roll over.” But when no one would tell the Super Trucks official standing beside her what was going on, she admits she became a little anxious.
“No one would talk to this guy and let him know Matt was OK. He said ‘Quick, jump in the buggy and I will take you over’.
“It wasn’t until we got there the panic kind of kicked in,” she says.
“I asked if he was OK, if he was awake.”
The pain from the memory of what came next was etched in her face: “This guy just looked at the ground and then looked back at me ... and shook his head. “He said ‘No – it’s not good’.” Mingay, a professional motorbike stunt rider and drift car driver for 20 years, had died on the spot.
He was revived but the outlook for the 40-year-old was grim.
He was “unresponsive” as he was rushed to hospital.
The roof of the truck had been decapitated and a metal bar had gone up through the bottom of his jaw, literally shattering it.
As Mingay describes it: “When they pulled my helmet off, it was like someone had put a shotgun under my chin and blew it apart.”
The immediate concern was the amount of blood from his severe facial injuries swamping him and preventing him from breathing.
“They had to put an emergency airway into his neck because he was drowning in blood,” Mrs Mingay says.
“But it wasn’t the facial injuries they were so worried about. They thought he had suffered severe brain damage.
“They told me there was a chance he might not wake up,” she says.
He defied expectations – as he has constantly in the three months since – and woke up three days later.
But those first 72 hours were exhausting for his wife who was at his side constantly in the hospital in Detroit until the arrival of Mingay’s brother Christian and Gold Coastbased best mate Scotty Gregory.
Gregory did not hesitate to book a flight on the credit card. “I’d have swam there if I had to.” He’d been mates with Mingay since they met 20 years ago on the Gold Coast at Indy where Mingay was doing a motorbike stunt and Mr Gregory was in Police Academy skits.
Gregory recalls having a similar reaction to Mrs Mingay when he first heard about the crash.
“I thought he would be sitting up in bed with a broken jaw going ‘I stuffed up’,” Gregory says.
“But he was out like a light, had all these tubes hanging out of him, his jaw was all wired up. He was just starting to come out of it when we first got there.
“But when he opened his eyes he had one going this way and one going the other and I thought he was absolutely brain damaged.
“It was very shocking because he has been my best mate for a while.”
Gregory says one of the first priorities was relieving Sheena who did not sleep for the first three days and nights until their arrival.
“You could tell she was exhausted. But she kept it all together, she wasn’t crying, she told us what happened.
“And then we said ‘All right Sheena – pack up your stuff and get out of here’.”
They took turns to ensure a constant bedside presence. She did the days and the boys did the nights.
As the days went by and Mingay gradually recovered functions, a new challenged presented.
Mingay, his judgment clouded by trauma and head injuries, was fixated on getting out of bed and the hospital.
Coupled with the determination and stubbornness that he admits is part of his DNA, it made for a very difficult patient – and at times a danger to himself.
The bedside vigils became a critical part of his recovery.
“You’d think it was going to get easier but it kind of got harder,” Mrs Mingay says. “He went through a really angry stage because of the brain trauma. “He didn’t know right from wrong. “He was constantly getting out of bed and wanting to go home but he couldn’t walk. If he fell he was going to cause himself a massive brain injury – and it was close.”
Along with trying to get up, he was constantly trying to pull out the tracheostomy tube which results in a high risk of heart attack.
During one terrifying episode on the night shift, he partially removed from his neck the airway tube that was helping him breathe.
Gregory recalls: “When that happened, the alarm went off and we had about seven people in the room within a minute including the on-call medical doctor trying to insert the tube back in his throat because if that comes out they said it was almost impossible to redo.”
FROM P5
Because of his refusal to remain in bed and repeated attempts to pull his tube out, he ended up having restraints to keep him bed-ridden.
“It was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare,” Mrs Mingay says.
“It got to a point at one stage where there was myself and four others holding him down. If we had to leave the room he had to have a vest restraint, two arms, feet as well.
“But we had to be really careful too because when he did try to fight, because of the brain trauma, his head would just swell up and sweat would bellow out. You had to get a wet towel and put it on his forehead to keep him cool because it was really important his brain didn’t swell as it was already bleeding in the skull putting pressure on the brain.”
Mingay can’t remember any of it – he has a blank spot of weeks around the accident, the time in hospital and the flight back to the Gold Coast.
Despite being a “nightmare” to control, he was a model patient in terms of recovery rate.
The doctors had never seen anyone improve so quickly, with Mrs Mingay attributing it to him bouncing back from about 40 broken bones throughout his life.
“He’s been through so many injuries he just had that determination inside of him.”
Mingay has nothing but praise for how his wife dealt with the situation.
“She stuck it out and did so well. I’d be a mess if she was a zombie.”
Her fortitude continues now, making sure he keeps up his rehab exercises, eats properly and doesn’t over-extend himself physically.
After all, Mingay is a stuntman, a stunt bike rider, a Super Trucks driver and he’s determined to return to it at some stage, even if Mrs Mingay does not quite share the same level of enthusiasm yet.
“I’m petrified of him doing anything now,” she says.
“I have never been one to want to wrap him in cotton wool –he’s a stuntman and you have to take the good with the bad but I never would have expected this.
“I have been so protective to make sure he gets to this point where he is now without jeopardising anything.”
He has come a long way since those touch-and-go days in hospital.
He’s back walking albeit with a slight limp, talking with a bit of a lisp, suffers nagging pain down his right side which was temporarily paralysed and has a titanium rod for a jaw.
But his wife and Gregory say the same determination and stubbornness which made him such a nightmare patient is what will get him through his recovery, too.
Mingay credits his wife’s resolve: “She pushes me hard. When I have physio she writes it all down and when we get home she’s like ‘You’ve got to do this and this and this’. I’m like ‘Can’t we have a night off?’ and she’s like ‘No’.”
Mrs Mingay adds: “I’ve been pushing him harder than he wants to go. But anyone who knows Matt knows no one can push Matt harder than he can push himself.” He’s overcome so many setbacks. Early on in his recovery he was temporarily paralysed on his right side with no idea he’d recover, which he did.
When packing his bags to finally leave Gold Coast University Hospital two months ago, a doctor told him a cautionary MRI scan of his head had showed major bleeding on the brain.
He was rushed into surgery to relieve pressure that would have left him suffering seizures for life.
It sounds ridiculous but one of the most difficult periods of the whole ordeal for Mingay was a six-day stretch of non-stop hiccups, a quirky side-effect of the brain surgery.
Every three to four seconds, he would hiccup – he’s not exaggerating – for six straight days and nights.
He became so worried it wouldn’t stop he Googled record stretches for hiccups and found some poor bugger who had them for 68 years.
“I didn’t give a toss about what else was happening at that stage – I just wanted to get rid of the hiccups.
“It was the worst thing in the world ... oh mate,” he says, laughing.
“I was trying every single thing. I was holding my breath, giving myself a fright.”
He finally discovered eating and drinking water as fast as he could resulted in a temporary reprieve.
He’d do it about 11pm and get a few precious hours sleep before they started again, he says.
On the sixth night, he had the “greatest sleep I’ve ever had” and hasn’t hiccupped since. “Best thing in the world,” he says. Now his main concern is hoping he’ll fully recover his crisp speech after coming surgery to graft hip bone to be fashioned into a new jaw.
He now speaks with a lisp and says he struggled to pronounce certain words so didn’t use them any more.
“I sound like a drunken tool. A lot of people say you don’t sound too bad but they are people who have never spoken to me before and don’t know how I used to speak.
“I used to speak very fluently and very clearly, very crisply and in front of schools and kids.”
Sitting in his Gold Coast storage space for all his toys, he hungrily eyes drift cars and Harley Davidsons.
“When I see my Camaro, there is nothing more frustrating.
“This is the longest I’ve been in 20 years without putting a helmet on.”
In some ways, he feels lucky he wasn’t killed but very misfortunate it happened at all.
“I’m not angry, I’m not disappointed. I just feel unlucky.
“You win some, you lose some. I’ve been winning all my life so given what I do, I get unlucky every now and then.”
With his recovery in full swing, his Hot Wheels stunt team, which he runs, continues to perform.
The Mingays would not discuss exactly how the accident happened or whether legal action is planned.
As this story was going to print, Mingay – who intends getting back to stunt driving when fully recovered – texted to say he was set to go “under the knife” for the hip graft in four weeks.
He is fighting every day with a supportive family and group of friends right there with him.
“I’m feeling OK. It’s a long road of healing. The longest road I’ve had yet of all injuries unfortunately.
“But I’ll get there – if it’s the last thing I do.”
IT’S THE LONGEST ROAD I’VE HAD YET OF ALL MY INJURIES UNFORTUNATELY BUT I’LL GET THERE