‘I’m one of the lucky ones’
Before his accident, Danny Bradleigh says he was ‘‘rotten’’, but it’s hard to believe looking at him now.
Twenty-eight years ago, two nights before New Year’s Eve, the former shearer, had shorn his first 200 sheep and went to the pub to celebrate.
Despite the protests of friends, he decided to drive home drunk and crashed his car down a bank at Tutira in Hawke’s Bay.
He knocked himself unconscious but was otherwise unhurt. He climbed from the car and told a man who had stopped he was OK. But Bradleigh then walked down the hill, fell down a bank and broke his neck.
I sit at the kitchen table in his Hastings home while the 58-year-old is at the sink making himself a cup of tea, something he couldn’t do 20 years ago.
An incomplete tetraplegic, he was once bedridden, couldn’t hold or grasp anything. He was on 14 different tablets a day.
Now he’s on one. If he really puts his mind to it, he can walk, as long as he has support.
He spots me gazing in awe at a giant stag head on his wall.
‘‘I hunted that,’’ he says grinning, ‘‘and that,’’ he points to a large boar head on the wall of his lounge.
‘‘After my accident. fish.’’
Istill hunt and
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But life beforehand was anything but easy for Bradleigh as he learned to adapt to his new life in a wheelchair and there were times he wanted it to end.
‘‘I just wanted to throw myself in front of a truck, things would get hard every year around the time of my accident,’’ he said.
One day he was adamant he would do it, but said his long-time carer, Lisa Ratahi, passed him a pen and paper. Before he made the decision she told him to write a letter to the truck driver’s family apologising to them for causing a tragedy and heartbreak. He then changed his mind.
‘‘She told me I should celebrate being alive rather than being sad. That was the turn-around, but it took a long time.
‘‘People say you take things out on the people you love the most . . . well that’s dead true. I abused them, I took my frustration out on them. But since I’ve had the accident I tell people I’m one of the lucky ones.’’
Bradleigh says Ratahi keeps him in line, along with the strong support of his family and friends.
‘‘My parents took a mortgage out to modify my house, they’ve just gone over and above. Before my accident I was horrible rotten. I was an abusive alcoholic. I was brought up cheeky and I used that as a mask.
‘‘When I was at Burwood Hospital, I was ready to give up. But I was sitting in the hall one day and I heard this voice behind me, a little girl who said hello. I turned around, thinking she was walking, but she was in a big trolley-like wheelchair.
‘‘She says, ‘beautiful day outside isn’t it’, then off she went pushing this great big wheelchair and I thought if she can do it, so can I.’’
A close friend also drove from the North Island down to Christchurch on his motorbike, taking it so far as to drive it up the hospital corridor and into Bradleigh’s room.
‘‘That was another thing that picked me up. If I didn’t have this kind of support, I’d be dead.’’
When hunting, Bradleigh uses a modified four-wheeler motorbike which he drives himself and was back hunting shortly after his accident.
Bradleigh says his body is compromised, rather than it doesn’t work and can still do things most able-bodied people can do, but in different ways.
Nine months after his accident, Bradleigh found out he had a daughter and the pair share the same birthday.
He has two grandsons, one of them born half an hour before his birthday.
‘‘This accident changed me – it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’’ he smiles.