Olly’s back on his board
It took Olly Mathers a year to learn how to smile again.
But when he emerges from the surf at Raglan’s Manu Bay with his board under his arm, he can’t stop smiling.
The 35-year-old Raglan man is back for his fifth surfing session on this Thursday morning, part of a 15-year journey to get his life back on track.
On the night of July 7, 2006, Mathers’ life changed forever.
He can’t remember that night or the 20 years before that. He retells his story from what others have told him.
‘‘We were at a party in Hamilton and had a couple too many drinks to drive home, so we were walking home and, as we crossed the end of Victoria St [near the Hamilton police station], we noticed a car coming towards us, and it was clearly speeding.’’
The group of about eight, including one of his brothers, began to run across the street. However, the driver lost control and hit Mathers at about 70kmh. ‘‘I flew about 17.5 metres. ‘‘My body shut down into a self-induced coma, the ambulance was there pretty quickly and my breathing was not good, so they put tubes up my nose. I got to Waikato Hospital and had a CT scan and MRI and my brain was swelling quite dramatically.
‘‘They flew me up to Auckland, I still wasn’t breathing that well, so they put a tracheotomy in my throat.’’
With Mathers’ brain swelling, surgeons were forced to remove part of the right side of his skull.
‘‘I was in a coma for sixand-a-half weeks, and it was a wait-and-see-how-it-all-goes. The chance of me waking up was low for a long time.’’
A month-and-a-half later Mathers did wake, and he was taken back to Hamilton for a seven-and-a-half-month stint in a brain rehab unit.
Epilepsy was one of the sideeffects of Mathers’ severe brain injury. ‘‘I had 54 grand mal seizures in the first six, seven years of my injury, and they are unpredictable.’’
Mathers hasn’t had a seizure in about seven years.
Over the past 15 years, Mathers has had to relearn everything – it took him a couple of years to learn how to walk up and down stairs, a year to tie his shoelaces.
Now he’s moved on to his biggest goal – surfing.
As Raglan locals know, surfing is in his blood, his older brothers surf and Mathers was getting into it in his teenage years.
‘‘I don’t remember surfing, I can look at pictures and I know I did surf good.’’
However, his epilepsy has held him back, knowing the risk of having a seizure in the water.
‘‘The main reason I have been scared is that fast movement causes seizures and when you are surfing you are jolting, and you
can’t help that.’’
To fulfil his goal, Mathers knew he needed help. Enter former New Zealand champion and professional surfer Daniel Kereopa.
‘‘I’m not even teaching him. I am guiding him through what he knows and, from the first time we went out, his body still knows what surfing is,’’ Kereopa says.
The pair had agreed Mathers shouldn’t stand up the first time out, however, in his excitement promises were forgotten, muscle memory kicked in and Mathers stood up.
Kereopa takes Mathers through all the basic steps from waxing his board, checking his leg strap, to getting him in the water before a session to make sure he’s present and his body is prepared. They also wear life vests used for big-wave surfing.
‘‘There is no rule book for it right now. I wear a life vest too for the worst-case scenario that he does have a turn and I have to get in there and just keep his head above water. We know the dangers of it, we just aren’t letting all the rules stop us doing it,’’ Kereopa says.
Mathers won’t always have Kereopa beside him when out on the water, so he wants to make people aware of his condition should he need them. At this stage, he can’t imagine surfing on his own.
But Mathers deserves the right to be back in the ocean, Kereopa says.
‘‘He’s shared with me that many of the [medical] professionals have told him not to go surfing and not to do all these things.
‘‘I have spent a lifetime of people telling me what not to do, and I did, and I achieved amazing results in surfing and I have surfed some of the biggest waves people have ever seen in this country because I was told not to do it.’’
Mathers has never confronted the driver that hit him. The man was charged and went to prison for seven or eight months.
‘‘It’s not something I look at. He made the mistake, it’s not like it’s acceptable, he was being an absolute idiot, and it shouldn’t have happened, but it did.
‘‘I accepted straight away as obviously I can’t do anything to change it. I am lucky I am strong and can do that because it wasn’t easy, none of it was, and to this day it’s been 15 years.’’
For now, Mathers is grateful to those who have got him to where he is – friends, family, locals and even strangers.