Trucker fights for life after brain injury

WINDSOR, ONT. • With decades of trucking under his belt, Leamington resident Mike Doyle probably never thought he was in mortal danger when he tried to help unload his trailer last week.

But now the 61-year-old grandfather is in a hospital fighting for his life after a traumatic brain injury.

“They don’t know. There’s a possibility that he will never wake up,” said Peggy Doyle, his wife. “If I start to cry, you’ll have to bear with me.

“It’s the unknown that gets to you. It’s the not knowing … I go up there every day. I turn the corner, go in his room, and I don’t know what I’m going to see.”

Peggy said Mike is being kept sedated and has not been conscious since the incident on Jan. 16 at a mouldmaking business in Oldcastle, near Windsor.

It happened after Doyle had driven a load to the company’s dock. He thought he would make things easier for the forklift operator by pulling a pallet from inside the trailer closer to the doors. But the strap that Mike was using to pull the pallet suddenly broke. He fell backwards out of the trailer doors and onto the concrete below — taking most of the impact on his skull. “It was a six-foot drop, they tell me,” Peggy said.

More than a week after the fall, Doyle remains in the intensive care unit of Windsor Regional Hospital’s Ouellette Campus. He’s unresponsive, and is now dependent on a ventilator and a feeding tube.

Peggy said Mike’s list of injuries includes broken ribs and a collapsed lung, but doctors are most concerned about his basilar skull fracture, and the bruising and swelling of his brain.

“He’s got a tube that’s draining off pressure,” Peggy said. “They’re telling me that until the swelling goes down, they won’t know the total extent of his injury.”

The Labour Program of Employment and Social Development Canada is investigating the incident. The federal agency is involved due to Doyle having a U.S. employer: The load was from a parts manufacturer in Sterling Heights, Mich.

Peggy said her husband started trucking when he was about 20. “He’s been doing it a very, very long time. Other jobs have come in and out, but he loves to drive a truck.”

Mike also carried newspapers for the Windsor Star for many years. In December 2005, while making his rounds in freezing cold, he came to the rescue of a 60-year-old Leamington woman who had slipped and fallen outside her home and couldn’t get to her feet.

Peggy and Mike have been married for 21 years. They each have two grown children from previous relationships.

A GoFundMe campaign has been started by one of Mike’s stepsons, Jason Barnett, asking for financial help for the household.