Building a better life
Paralysed in a rugby game, Brad Hayward has used his disability to create barrier-free homes for everyone. Bess Manson reports.
Universal design recognises that there is a wide spectrum of human abilities.
Brad Hayward
On a bright spring day in Denver, Colorado, Kiwi rugby player Brad Hayward donned his team jersey and sprinted onto the pitch. The 23-year-old had been in the States only for a few weeks, playing for the Denver Barbarians, but the Kapiti Coast lad was in his element at hooker for the club team, living the dream.
Recalling that day in April 1993, he drifts back to the playing field where his life was to change irreversibly.
‘‘We’d had some messy scrums during the game. In the second half, another scrum collapsed and I went down. I heard a snap as my head and neck went forward. I knew immediately something was seriously wrong. I knew it was bad. It felt like my legs were up in the air but I couldn’t see them.’’
His memory around those first few weeks following his catastrophic injury is sketchy.
Bedridden and unable to move, his condition deteriorated to the point where his kidneys and liver started failing and he was put on a ventilator. His parents and two brothers rushed to his bedside.
He was hospitalised for a month in Denver, clocking up an insurance bill for NZ$800,000 before being well enough to travel back to New Zealand.
After a week in Wellington Hospital, he was taken to Burwood Spinal Unit in Christchurch where he would spend the next five months in rehabilitation.
It was here the news of how bad his injury was really sunk in.
‘‘I knew it was bad but I hadn’t really taken it all in till I got to Burwood.
‘‘The specialist came in and said, ‘You’re never going to walk again.’ I told him where to go in no uncertain terms. I said ‘you can’t tell me that.’ They were pretty dark days.’’
Having been incredibly active and being told he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, Hayward, 46, says he struggled. In the days and weeks that followed he considered suicide.
‘‘I contemplated how I was going to get out of this world. It took me six months just to venture out into public. I just didn’t want to know. I was real angry.
‘‘But you have to go through that. It’s like losing someone. You have to go through that grief. Unless you can get to the other side, you can’t heal.’’
It took Hayward two years to get used to his new life in a wheelchair. But since then, he’s never sat back and felt sorry for himself, he says.
‘‘It occurred to me that there were three ways I could deal with what happened to me: You can sit at home and mope about your disability, and who wants to deal with someone like that?; you get off this earth, or you make the most of your life. I had lost a lot of mobility but I’d seen how precious life was and I was going to make the most of it. And make a difference.’’
Hayward has been making a difference ever since, both in his career in the construction industry and with accessibility in the community.
At the time of his injury, Hayward had been studying quantity surveying and working as a building cadet with Mainzeal construction. He picked up his studies a few years later, this time in architectural drafting in Christchurch where he had moved to with his then partner. He later took a computer programming course.
‘‘I was trying to find something I could do.’’
But it would be almost a decade later, after his relationship broke up, that he really found his calling.
‘‘After living in a house for nine years that was freezing cold, I thought ‘nah, I’m going to build a new home’. So I moved back to the Kapiti Coast and got back into construction.’’
He began designing and project-managing residential building projects 14 years ago. Under his own company, 360 Degree Homes, Hayward employs universal design, which involves creating products and spaces so that they can be used by the widest range of people possible.
‘‘Universal design recognises that there is a wide spectrum of human abilities. Everyone, even the most ablebodied person, passes through childhood, periods of temporary illness, injury and old age. By designing for this human diversity, we can create things that will be easier for all people to use,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s about wider doorways and wider living areas, ramps instead of stairs and making it look good and not like a hospital. The key is a good design.
‘‘If something happens to you later in life, that house is designed so that you don’t have to leave. It’s set up for you for life.’’
Hayward has recently partnered with Lifemark, which sets standards for universal design and barrier-free homes. He has designed more than a dozen homes, including his own in Paraparaumu.
The bachelor pad is a spacious modern bungalow that looks like it’s ready for its own close-up. Original paintings hang on the walls – he’s an artist himself. The kitchen looks straight out of a design magazine.
His garden is a suntrap with raised vegetable and flower beds he can tend to.
In his garage is a self-drive car that affords him the vital independence for someone who, despite supportive family and friends, does not like to rely on others.
He was the first person to have a self-drive vehicle in New Zealand, although it took him two long years fighting bureaucratic paperwork and other hurdles to be able to do so.
‘‘At the time ACC would not fund the vehicle, but I could see the true benefit for myself. The only negative was having to take out a mortgage for $100,000 to afford it.
‘‘The great legacy of me doing that is that today a self-drive vehicle is a standard issue for ACC to fund for a non-transfer spinal injury client.’’
It’s a strange irony that the very thing that took Hayward’s mobility was the thing that brought him back to life: Rugby.
Two years after his injury he started playing competitive wheelchair rugby. He was inspired to get involved after seeing friends he had made at Burwood playing the game.
‘‘It was great. I was meeting other guys with disabilities who were getting on with their lives, getting fit, maximising their abilities, travelling around the country to games. Before that, I couldn’t see any future.
‘‘The guys take the piss out of your disability. That helped.’’ What doesn’t help is pity. Forget the sympathy, he says. There really is no need for it.
‘‘If someone’s going to be like that, I’m gone. I’m better than that.’’
He played for more than 15 years, travelling the country and helping inspire others with similar injuries to make the most of their lives.
‘‘There have been a few guys in my district who have had tragic spinal injuries and I have enjoyed meeting and mentoring them back into the community with great success.’’
That mentoring process has been as rewarding for him as for those he’s helped, he says.
He’s on the Access Advisory Group on the Kapiti Coast District Council, making sure the council considers the disabled community in every aspect of design from walkways to building access.
Hayward’s disability has not stopped him indulging in his love of fishing, which he does, often. A hoist he designed himself gets him on and off his dad’s boat with ease.
And he travels, a lot. Memorably, he met former All Blacks coach Graham Henry at the Rugby World Cup in 2015 while touring with the Gud Bastards, a group that travels the world to watch ABs play. They invited him along for part of the tour travelling in a campervan and larking it up around the UK as they followed the games.
A few months ago he travelled to Melbourne to watch tennis legends Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer contest the final of the Australian Open.
A trip to the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan is on the cards.
People with disabilities don’t need to be pitied, Hayward says. They are not stuck at home with no life.
‘‘We get out and maximise our lives, have careers, get into sport.
‘‘Going through a spinal injury is probably a bit like going through cancer — you lose a lot but then you realise what life’s about. It’s so precious and I’m grateful for what I have.’’