The hidden road toll
Behind the headlines of those killed on the roads there lies a hidden toll of people left to deal with injuries that take months to heal and the mental scars that never will. Phillipa Yalden reports.
Darren Mitchell sat bleeding, unable to feel his legs while a man screamed outside his window.
Both his femurs had snapped. His upper body had folded closer to his knees.
In the dark chaos on that Waikato road, Mitchell tried to wiggle his foot. It was trapped amid the mangled metal dashboard.
‘‘I was screaming at the top of my voice in pain,’’ the 41-yearold recalls nine months on.
‘‘I was awake the whole time and scared, scared that I would never walk again.’’
Last week the drunk driver who smashed into Mitchell, changing his life forever, was sentenced to 22 months’ jail and ordered to pay $5000 in reparations in Hamilton District Court.
Mitchell remembers everything about that fateful Friday night in October last year.
He and his wife Jane had put their house on the market in Whangarei and were moving back to Mitchell’s hometown of Kawerau to be closer to family.
The engineering branch manager was making the fivehour journey south after work on Friday. He planned to play lawn bowls with his brother in the eastern Bay of Plenty town the next day.
As he headed south along State Highway 1 not far from Karapiro, a drunken Trent Heathcote was coming the other way.
In his inebriated state, Heathcote, 26, crossed the centreline on a moderate bend, crashing head-on into Mitchell.
The impact spun Mitchell’s ute 90 degrees into the centre of the lane where he was struck again by a second car unable to avoid the crash.
‘‘I remember the crash, I remember the bang, I remember bouncing back, hitting the wall.
‘‘I remember sitting there
hearing the witness outside my window screaming ‘This is bad, this is bad!’
‘‘I couldn’t feel my legs, and started looking at my injuries. I was freaking out about being able to walk again.’’
Mitchell doesn’t know how he feels about Heathcote’s sentence, but he hopes he’ll learn from his illfated mistake.
‘‘It’s light considering my injuries – at the moment I don’t know how good I’ll ever get. I’ve been going through hell with pain.’’
People say Mitchell was lucky to survive. But he doesn’t believe in luck. He’s been left with lifealtering injuries.
The crash broke nine of Mitchell’s bones – his tailbone, shoulder, wrist, hip, ribs and both femurs which meant he has had to learn to walk again.
Months of rehabilitation followed. It was January before he could take two steps with the help of a walking frame. A few weeks later he managed a painful few more.
‘‘I felt so unlucky.’’ Mitchell spent four months in hospital. Painkillers gave him hallucinations and nightmares. His wife spent her nights sleeping on a LaZ-Boy chair at Waikato Hospital.
‘‘My wife had to pack the house, move, do the paperwork while she was caring for me in hospital. She’s pretty much become my fulltime carer.’’
Today Mitchell can’t walk 10 metres around the house without crumpling in pain. He relies on crutches and a wheelchair to get around.
At night he has terrors that leave him waking in sweaty screams. ‘‘I thought I didn’t want to live.’’
Once a branch manager for Saeco Wilson engineering company in Whangarei, Mitchell has been unable to work.
He’s thankful to have
accommodating employers who have given him a job in purchasing so he can work from home. In four months he hopes to be back working.
‘‘At 26, you’re old enough to know what’s right and wrong. There’s a big difference from having a beer and driving home and being three times the limit.’’
Waikato police’s Serious Crash Unit’s Sergeant Steve Jones said it was incredible that Mitchell survived.
‘‘A head-on impact between two vehicles at the open road limit invariably ends in tragedy,’’ he said, in the wake of a killer week on the nation’s roads.
‘‘The human body is not designed to sustain those impacts and for him to sustain a second impact side-on, he’s quite fortunate to have survived.’’
Impact at 100kmh can rip the heart from the aorta and push the brain against the skull.
‘‘Stopping in an instant is catastrophic to the body,’’ Jones said. ‘‘Darren was fortunate he was driving a modern vehicle with safety features that saved his life.’’
Drink or drugged driving was one of the biggest killers on the region’s roads, Jones said.
‘‘To cloud your judgment with alcohol and drugs – you are dulling your senses and driving outside your capability. Drinkdrivers think they can drive home safely, most drivers feel that way right up until . . . they crash or kill someone else.’’