Surviving a 15,000 Foot Freefall: Brad's Impossible Story

I often go shopping for the first day, and the platform does not make any problems.

“I have many problems, but the platform is not one of them.”

I have the feeling that Shopify is using their platform continuously. Everything is super, simple, integrated and balanced.

And the time and the money that I can never invest in there.

For all of them, in Vax.com. [Music] I did feel some anxiety, and I felt some fjords and jitters, but I put that down to just anticipating what I was about to do. [Music] I nearly get ripped out of the harness, because we're moving so much.

I lose the shoe. My 10th instructors are yelling at me to keep my feet down, so we can stay straight up together. [Music]

“And that is the moment that the panic started to set in.”

[Music] My name is Brad Guy, and this is what I survived. [Music] [Music] Skydiving.

It's built as a bucket list item that everyone should tick off at some stage in their life. And in fact, over 70,000 people in Australia each year will take that leap in a tandem skydive. Like anything in life, the sport comes, of course, with its risks. But it wouldn't be an extreme sport without it. If there was no jeopardy, there would be no fear.

No adrenaline rush and no excitement. But then when we do these things, I don't think we ever really actually believe something's going to go wrong. But what happens when it does? And how do you recover? How do you put yourself back together?

Okay. Do I gut you? Yay, okay. There he is. Brad Guy was one of those 70,000 in 2013.

Just like millions before him, a young 22 year old from country Victoria. Brad was a little nervous yet excited to take that leap.

However, he could never imagine that that day would change his life forever.

Jumping from 15,000 feet, Brad's instructors parachute would fail, leaving them hopelessly falling at 80 kilometers an hour towards the ground. By some incredible miracle, they survive. But the trauma of what happened to Brad that day would be his biggest battle. Turning a fun, loving, carefree guy into someone who would go on to battle severe mental anguish, guilt, depression, and constant nightmares. As well as even contemplating ending his own life.

My name's Jack Lawrence, welcome to What I Survived. Chapter 1, The Outgoing Kid from the Country. Brad Guy grew up in a small country town outside of Melbourne called Pylon, with a population of just 200 people. It was very much a rural country Australian community. And Brad says looking back, he loved it, and now feels it almost gave him the drive for adventure.

I always had an affinity for it.

I love country Victoria. I love rural Australia. Especially as an adult now, I can really reflect on the whole Australian area of my upbringing, especially my background. But I think at the time I always felt like a big fish in a small pond. Country keep with big city dreams, all very cheesy, but I was always ambitious.

So I saw my town plight along as kind of my launch pad to see the world. And whenever I saw people in movies or in TV shows travelling and going to these exotic locations,

“I always knew that's what I wanted to do.”

So Pylon felt very small at the time, and it's only been through living a really chaotic 30 years of life. That I think that'd actually be quite nice now to go and just not have anything to do. Brad would go from his small country school with just 40 kids to a private Catholic boarding school in a town called Kilmore.

Brad said he just never really felt that he could relate to the people around him, because of who he was.

I was an overweight gay emo. So I thrived. Yeah.

“I was peaked like my chemical romance, leather cuffs, not really knowing who I was,”

what my feelings were deep down inside. Could not really relate to any other boys in my school. And it was a football school that like Shane Crawford went to my school. Everyone loved him as like there's idol of the school and there's like former alum. But I could never ever relate to what the school really stood for, which was athletics.

So I didn't really feel like I fit in but I very quickly learned how to be that social kind of alien and how to assimilate and be one of the boys and one of the lads. Yeah. Thankfully, that's not really my vibe anymore. But high school was just very intense, very emotional.

But I do have treasured memories and I wasn't able to make friends at the time. But I wasn't really able to express myself. And that's still a lesson I'm trying to learn from the constant concealing of what I was in high school. To the person I am in an album. It's a crazy place to go to a private Catholic boarding school in the country as the person I was.

After finishing his education, Brad did what many young people do and traveled. He wanted to see the world, experience new places, meet new people, and that's exactly what he did. I've backpacked through Asia and Europe and I've fallen in love overseas and traveled the world just to meet some random person on the internet. I've gone around Australia. Even now, I'm like, I'll just get another credit card and I'll just go to Europe next year because I want to.

Which I literally did last week because I really want to go to Eurovision and I didn't really have the money. So I'm like, I'll just get a credit card and just achieve that dream who cares.

“How have you as that become stronger for you since what happened?”

I would say I've always been that way.

And then the accident, I lost that. I lost that zest for life for a very long time. And I feel like it's only really coming full circle now, the past two, two and a half years. Where I've really just buckled down and gone, you know what? It's been 10 years since I nearly lost my life in numerous ways.

I owe it to myself to do what I truly want to do and I'll figure out the rest later. Like money comes and goes, it flows. Yeah. Dad, because I'll pay it off eventually. Brad's determination and outgoingness would also extend into his chosen career path as he knew from a very young age exactly.

What he wanted to do. Always wanted to be a breakfast radio host. New exactly what that pipeline was. And ever since I was 18, 19, I had a full spreadsheet.

“Every single content director in the country, what their feedback was.”

How I should adjust my demo trying to really get my foot in the door. Because I was very delusional when it came to radio. I was like, of course I can do it. But I'll just get my foot in the door. It'll happen eventually.

I never had a single doubt in my mind at all.

And eventually it did happen. Brad would get his big break. His opportunity to work on a breakfast radio show. But before he would get to start his new career, he would experience a truly life altering event. [MUSIC]

Chapter two, sliding doors. It was just after my 22nd birthday. Except on my 21st birthday, I received a voucher for some sort of adrenaline experience. And there were a whole bunch of options to choose from. Typical me wanted to do the most extreme thing I could.

So out of that selection, I chose skydiving. And even through organizing it, I got to choose the day I wanted to go. The time of day, the location. There were a lot of variables that went into that. So I was just primed to have another crazy experience as per the person I was at the time.

I was 22. I felt like an adult. But I looked back at a 22 year old Brad 10 years ago. I'm like, oh, you heard your child. Baby, little baby didn't know the world that well.

And had you ever just wrote to? I had you ever done anything sort of like, you know, bungee jumping. I don't think like that. Before because you know, you're not scared of heights or anything like that. Obviously, you're an adventurous guy.

So this is certainly just another one of those things to tick off your bucket list. So to speak. Yeah, super normal. I had done bungee jumping once. And even that was scary and fun and a thrill.

But not something I would do all the time.

You know, a bucket list to do a once cool tick it off the list.

Never really thought twice about it.

“But at that time in my life on 2013, I had just coming out maybe six months earlier.”

I had gotten to a brand new relationship and had never been in love before. So they were all these amazing feelings going on. And I was still living in the country at the time with my parents. And I was looking at moving to the city because I just got an job at a commercial radio station. A commercial radio station in Melbourne.

And that was my foot in the door as a producer for a breakfast radio show for commercial network. So my life was about to begin really all this hard work I put into myself and to my career. Everything was aligning perfectly. And I was just on the precipice of just feeling really solid in my life and who I was. Life essentially could not have been any better for Brad at this moment.

As he says, he literally was on the cusp of finally starting that career that he's always wanted.

“He had come out and no longer had to hide who he was from the world.”

And he even had a new life in his life. This jump was just another exciting memory to add to his life. And in fact, he wanted to share it with his family. And that day, they were all there to support him. So when I came to the day of the accident,

I did feel some anxiety and I felt some fear and some jitters. But I put that down to just anticipating what I was about to do, which was jump from a plane. But also in typical Brad fashion, I brought my entire family there. We're very close tight knit group. So I had my mum, my dad, my three sisters, their husbands and my niece and nephew.

And my boyfriend at the time.

“It was a beautiful intention, but I ended up being quite tragic having them all there.”

From the very beginning, though, it appears that there are just so many sliding doors moments before he would make that jump. Another thing Brad said that he struggled with mentally after his accident. Even when we got to the airport, there were all these delays. They kept saying, "Oh, we're going to have to push your jump." I was the last one of the day and they said, "Do you mind coming back next week?"

I said, "No. I just want to get out of the way. I'm feeling nervous. My whole family is here." They've taken the day off. It's a Saturday, it's sunny in Melbourne, which is where let's just get it done. Sorry, that's another very bullet on top of all the other variables that went into what ended up actually happening. So many sliding doors moments, it's insane, really.

And it's hard to reminisce about all those choices. Yeah, but this is like a side note tangent, but I spent many, many years picturing these parallel universe versions of myself where I made different choices. Luckily now, ten years later, I feel like they've all kind of coalesced into the one thing. So I don't know if the worry about these had a timeline, it's not a multiverse, it's just one. If you've ever done a skydiving, the plane is tiny.

And I was the only one in the plane with my 10th and my instructor. You're on a tiny rubber mat, 15,000 feet in the air. The plane is rickety. It's scary, it's a scary thing. The door opens, we get to the edge. Very true one. And of course, the 10th and the instructor being the cheeky person that is leaps on two. And out the plane, we go.

And I kind of knew what to expect based on the safety procedure that happened before we jumped, but that is a very euphoric feeling. And it sounds very simple to say, but it does feel like you're falling. You're free falling, it's happening and you feel heavy. And it's terrifying, but it's a thrill because you know you're going to survive and you're going to learn safely on the ground. Brad and his instructor are now in what they call "freful". For a 15,000 foot jump, this can last between 60, 70 seconds.

And after that, the route called is pulled to release the shoot for anywhere between a two to ten minute, a cent to earth. And everything was going to plan until Brad looks over his shoulder. I see behind me that there's just like this blue and yellow flailing sheet, which ends up being the parachute. And it hasn't opened correctly, so it's all crumpled together. And I can just feel my tandem struck to behind me, just throwing elbows and grunting and pulling on chords.

It's all this movement happening behind me. And once I look up again, that's when I can see two parachutes.

And just a split second flash, I'm not able to really look up because with the two parachutes tangled, it just leaves us shaking violently.

So we're shaking side to side. I nearly get ripped out of the harness because we're moving so much. I lose a shoe. My tandem instructors just yelling at me to keep my feet down, so we can stay straight up together.

This didn't feel like what was meant to happen.

“As they were to pass through 4,000 feet, Brad's instructor, a veteran of over 2,000 jumps, pulls the shoot.”

And as it opens, it tears, with the remnants of it now violently flopping in the wind. When jumping from a plane, you have two shoots, your main shoot and a reserve. Of course, for moments where the main, our functions are in this case, tears. However, as the reserve shoot in flights, it would become entangled in the remains of the main shoot.

My first initial emotion was guilt, even as I'm falling.

I fully accepted that I was going to die in that this was the end. Because even though we're shaking, we're still falling very, very fast.

“I felt like the speed you are in a car, except you're on the outside.”

Just the wind freshen you, the whistling, tandem instructor yelling. But I didn't have any cool sort of talk to angels experience or live flash before your eyes moment. Nothing like that. All I really felt was guilt because I felt like I could see my family and there were watching me die. Even though I'm sure it was only a few seconds, it felt like forever. It was elongated and it was a fall that also the perspective kind of felt like the earth was coming to hit me.

I was going to be smashed by a planet. So it's extremely disorienting just the frashing of it all, but before I could even really brace for it, we hit the ground. It kind of felt like my spine was getting ripped down on my body from my lower half. And I couldn't catch my breath at the same time, but extremely wounded, gasping for air.

The lake was so cold that I couldn't feel the lower half of my body because it was basically on the virtual hyperthermia.

I even had to convince myself from that moment that I was a paraplegic when I was coming through. I couldn't really make sense, I couldn't move my body, couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, started hysterically sobbing. And I am half covered by this parachute, but also realized as I'm trying to move my body to scramble it off me, I'm strapped to my autonomous drug that was unconscious and we are laying perpendicular to each other. With him being unconscious, I thought he was dead and was also a convincing myself that I was laying on top of a dead person.

And on top of that, the guilt was compounded by me also a convincing myself that I was the reason he was dead.

I've killed this person, my whole family, I've watched me die, am I even alive?

It's overwhelming. I've seen a amount of thoughts to be going through your mind to think that obviously by the sounds of it, you remember every moment of this whole entire... There's no point where you blacked out or anything like that, you just remember everything vividly. People are shocked by that and I am as well. I wasn't knocked unconscious, but my tandem instructor was and feeling my body on top of him and not being able to move myself off, it was trapping.

So my mind is racing and trying to make sense and comprehend.

“So that's what I feel like I get this person is dead for some reason I'm alive, possibly.”

It's disorienting and I think your brain is trying to make sense to that moment. The adrenaline is running, but even in reflection, these are the only emotions and the things I can pull out of that whole experience were the guilt and the convincing. I think the convincing came from trying to comprehend, but thankfully my tandem instructor does come to whom and they're also gasping for air. I was able to grab onto his hand and please wake up, please wake up. He's not really responding verbally, he's more just like coughing and spluttering.

Very intense imagery as well that I can still very much see when I talk about my story. Which is why I very rarely go through detail to detail because I feel like my DNA is now infused with all the imagery and the feelings and the sounds from that day. Miraculously though, we were discovered by some golfers who were golfing that day, so not that I could really see what was going on, but I get here two or three people coming up behind me.

Sorry, still thinking like this is the end for me, like I might be awake now, but there's more death to come, just like as I was falling, being convinced that I was going to happen.

“Even more incredible that one would survive this accident, let alone two.”

As the golfers weighed into the water, one would hold Brad's instructor's head out of the water, while another held his hand to try and reassure him that help was on the way. Not only was help on the way, but so was Brad's family. The golfers were able to separate us and they were trying to console me, still a little bit of tears. My 10th of a structure eventually starts talking, he is screaming in excruciating pain. And that's when I can start to hear my family, my family had come running towards me.

At the same time, an ambulance has been driven around us. I can't move my neck so I can only hear these things as I'm looking up at the sky. Of course Brad's entire family had been eagerly awaiting his landing at the drop zone.

“His sisters, mum, Julie, dad, Brian, nieces and nephews, and of course his new boyfriend.”

They would quickly realise that something was terribly wrong with mum, Julie, running inside the shed where the organisers were and begging staff to tell her what had happened. Eventually, they were able to tell Brad's distraught family that the two men had been found and they were alive. The entire family ran to be by his side. And as I'm getting lifted into the back of the ambulance, I can just hear my mum and my boyfriend and one of my sisters, they'd come running. It was probably like two kilometers. They'd seen it all happen. They'd seen where we had fallen. It was not near the airport at all.

And I could just hear my mum telling me that she loved me and everything that's going to be okay. And that's the hardest part to reflect on for me because I just felt like a burden. And sorry, like I done something to them and it was heartbreaking.

I didn't even put my own pain or feelings first because I just felt so sorry for my mum who's in a mid-60s who ran all that way.

God. And she's like typical touch-up lady full of love, classic Aussie mum. I've loved being able to memorialize her and my dad and my story as well because they were so pivotal to my recovery. Yeah. And my whole life. So to feel like I had scared them and frightened them with my mortality was extremely heartbreaking. To this day, although he's obviously healed in many ways, not just physically, it's obvious that Brad still struggles with this guilt from that day.

Chapter three, that parachute guy. So he's survived the unthinkable, but the battle for survival has really only just begun as ambulance Sirens Blair through the streets of Melbourne. He's rushed to the Alfred Hospital, which is located in South Melbourne. He's still unable to really feel much from the neck down apart from this searing pain and his spine. In the ambulance, he's cut from his clothing and injected with morphine to try and help with this pain.

There's not much he can really do except stare at the ceiling of the ambulance. A view that he would become far too familiar with over the coming days. The ambulance pulls up to the hospital and he's transferred onto a bed and rushed in. As doctors and nurses surround him and begin to work to find out the really extent of his injuries. I've just got injections, morphine, pills, water, it's mayhem.

And all I can see is the roof of the hospital. I don't know where my family is. I don't even know where I am, and I wasn't even sure what really had happened at that point. I didn't even know it was a free fall essentially.

“I think my mind was just like something really bad has happened, but not really thinking about the cause of it all.”

Eventually, mum and dad get there and I was just just unable to make it because they could only allow a few people into the room at a time. So mum and dad are there and of course they're hysterical, which makes me feel even worse.

And even my entire time in hospital, especially that first day, I was like, "Oh, you're the parachute guy."

And you had this god-obin accident.

And it was on my chart. So people knew I was the parachute guy.

“Even most instantly now, I've been labeled this thing that would obviously continue on then for, you know, well, even really probably to this day, I suppose.”

Mm-hmm, yeah, 100%. And it was everyone's reactions that really showed me the gravity of it all, excuse upon. Yeah. Everyone's reaction was disbelief and shock, and I had no answers for anything. Still, didn't really have feeling in my legs. They were able to put a neck brace on me.

I'm laying completely flat, and I'm on that many drugs.

I can't even film my body. And that first night in hospital, and a little bit, until the end of time, really in my entire life.

But especially in hospital and in my initial stages of recovery, every time I close my eyes, I could feel myself falling. It could not sleep. Especially that first night, but it could not sleep really, it should forever. And that's something I've really really gotten a grip on the past couple years. But I would get so disoriented by this very ago when I closed my eyes that I'm just ringing the nurse and like knock me out. I need sleeping pills. I need something.

But basically I had to spend that entire night relieving something that had happened to me. The eyes still really couldn't make sense of. [Music]

I think my initial reaction was just searching for answers, but always landing on this is my fault.

And I didn't even know what survival skill was at the time. Literally had no idea. But accepting that I had done something bad to myself, and I'm paying the price. Very strange conclusion to come too, because it doesn't make sense. And that is probably the number one thing people respond to most when I tell my story is, "How could you feel guilty of what's in your fault?" or "You did nothing wrong. Don't feel bad."

“It's like, "Okay, cool, thanks." But I can't help when my mind went. And I think the desperate search for answers, that was the only thing that made logical sense.”

Because the actual event itself, because it was so confusing, I couldn't really accept that as the truth. Like there must have been something more going on. Like I played a stupid came and played a stupid price. Luckily, I don't feel that way anymore, but the guilt is still residually underneath everything I do, and it takes a lot of hard work to rewire your brain, where you remove your accountability from something that actually didn't happen to you. While in hospital, Brad would undergo every scan imaginable from head to toe as doctors looked at the extent of the damage.

He was still unable to, of course, walk or move his body from the neck down. Doctors would tell him that he'd broken his upper spine and fractured the lower half, as well as tearing all the ligaments in his neck and breaking a number of ribs. However, the doctors also noticed that it was obvious that there were more than just the physical injuries that would need attention. Still couldn't move any part of my body, you could only stare straight at the ceiling. Everyone that came to visit me had to hover over me.

It was still very demeaning, and one of the doctors suggested, because they could see me sobbing every five minutes, just like, "Give me drugs." They suggested I'd talk to a councillor, and even then I had this old school frame of mind thinking, "Oh my God, only mental people." Yeah, that's all I should say. Yeah.

“So I had a chat to this woman, and instantly couldn't keep my emotions inside, could it make sense of anything?”

It was a good way just to articulate, or learn, to articulate, start to finish the event. But I couldn't even get the words out to finish the story, which is what then she suggested that. Once I recover physically, I actually do go see a therapist, and everything started to compound then thinking, "I've broken my body, and now I have to get it with therapists." This must be a very extreme situation, which made me feel even worse about myself.

Everyone's trying to help, and I am grateful for that, but I accept the days as failures, and I have just destroyed my mind and body. I can't sleep, I can't go minute without crying, and my body is broken, I can't take myself to the toilet. It's all very dehumanizing and tragic. I was very scared to leave the hospital, because I felt like I was going to face the real world, and would have to start somehow re-entering the life that I had before, which I didn't really feel like I had the courage to do so, and even leaving the hospital in a wheelchair and getting weird out, I just felt so ashamed.

where the recovery really began. Chapter three, the dark recovery.

“So once I got home, and I split my recovery into lots of different segments, I would say module one is when I got home,”

and I was in an egg brace at back brace for four months. I eventually did see a therapist's once, and a psychiatrist, and I was diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and nightmare disorder, which is a type of insomnia.

And during this four-month period, I basically did leave my bedroom, didn't know how time of day it was, was on that many drugs that I couldn't really communicate.

Would not want visitors, I'd have my niece and nephew draw pictures, and I would just yell and scream and tell everyone to leave me alone, would need assistance eating, mum would take me to the toilet, which now we can laugh at that the time is very humiliating. I was a shell of myself and felt like a complete crippled burden. I did not see a future, everything felt so permanent, and during that period I did lose the will to live, and nearly made irreparable decisions.

“Which is also a hard thing to admit, because knowing what my life is now and what I was able to reclaim with my life,”

I started to think of that decision, that felt so very close, and almost peaceful in a way. But even though the guilt had burdened me so much, it was also kind of the thing that saved me as I've come to learn and retrospect. I didn't want to further my burden on my family, and you have much there with struggling. I thought a dead son is going to worsen their problems before it actually improves it, and through the past 10 years, my family and I've become so much more open about mental health, and I think this period in my life didn't encourage us all to get closer, even closer than we were.

But I saw how much they were struggling, and as part of the book I interviewed my mum, which was so sad, oh my God, because we're just big cry babies. And she just loves her kids, and what a blessing for us all to have. But in the book there's a segment where she talks about how she was able to cope, and she would see me struggling. I would wake up from a night terror, because I'm really living this experience, and it eventually divulged into dreams about getting steamrolled, getting pushed up a building, getting worn by guerrillas, and being stuck in a cage, or stuck in a room with a water filling up in my entire family as such visceral crazy nightmares.

I wake up, historically so I've been ripped, poachers down, I've thrown pillows, momma enough to come in and physically restore Amy. So with your recovery post this, was there a turning point or was it just a long, very long process of which you possibly are still going through now, like you're still recovering, so to speak.

“I think there's been many turning points for sure.”

The first one I can really remember, that felt very significant, because there were turning points and also a lot of setbacks.

And that's one thing I'm very transparent about when it comes to healing and recovery, you are going to fall down, because healing is not linear at all. And I still grapple with that, because I wish it was just like tick, okay, module to be complete onto the next stage. But it doesn't work that way. So the first turning point was trying to get back into my job in radio. I was still a very, very crippled person once I got the neck brace and back brace off, which lasted for four months, so the December of that year,

knocking the door back at the radio station thinking, I'm finally going to get back to work and I'll be a normal person.

I emailed them and said, maybe I need this sort of chair and maybe we have to work with juice hours, but I still really want to come back. Because I thought this was a life line for me to actually live a normal life and everyone knew what happened to me. So it was very daunting going into the office knowing that I and the parachute guy, I was on the news. It was palpable, the tension in the air, but I get brought into the office and I was made redundant, so I lost that job, and was back at square one.

Seven months, though, after his accident, he would be given the all clear by his physio to walk, and assisted, which of course was a massive turning point in his overall recovery and getting his independence back. He's dehumanizing and I don't want it to sound too negative, but when you can't walk for yourself as a young 22 year old who was just living the best life before all of this, it's very easy to feel defeated.

And I took that and ran with it almost literally, and that's one of my manches now, at least emotionally put one foot in front of the other. So when I started to walk again, I would try to get to the end of my driveway and then eventually get into my street and then eventually to my sister's house and then to the train station, just getting further further each time until I was able to walk long distances unassisted and feeling a lot better about my capability.

“And then it was about 10 months after where I got the OK to drive again, because legally you can't drive if you can't do a proper head check.”

So I was able to drive again. So all these little achievements started to be my main focus.

Are you getting independence back slowly? Everything's coming back. Everything's working. Like obviously still mental and probably not really emphasizing my mentor recovery and putting that in the back burner, but I was at least able to move around. As independence came back, so did an opportunity to get back into his dream career of radio.

“The position was as part of a country radio breakfast team and Brad felt that he just couldn't let this opportunity pass him by.”

And although his body may have been in a place for him to start work and this new chapter in his life, his mind was not. Unfortunately, a culmination of late nights early mornings, a bad romantic relationship, as well as a poor relationship with his boss at work, the house of cards would come crashing down. Everything just came to such a huge boiling point that I had. Well, I can only describe as a full bone mental breakdown at the end of that job. I'd been cheated on. I had a job that was going nowhere. That was triggering a relationship that was torturing me.

My mental health wasn't right. I don't think I've had a proper sleep for a year and a half to two years. So I had this really crazy mental breakdown at a family Christmas, which I can also love that because it's so so dramatic like it actually never ends. And I was just in my sister's wardrobe just like throwing shit everywhere. Like her jewelry and like courting as I was like, nah. And it was all just because one little comment for my mom saying, go easy on your boyfriend. All right, because I'm sure I was being like snappy and very frustrated.

So thank God I had the mental breakdown because it was a way to punctuate that time and by life in breakfast or radio and that relationship and living in gypsies land. So I moved back to Melbourne and got a new therapist and started to live through rest of my life and put my mental health first and that was a start of 2016. So two and a half years later, I hadn't actually properly looked at my brain and what it was doing to my life because it was destroying it from within. So that was another turning point. Probably one of the bigger turning points in the whole ten year saga really.

In 2021 Brad would finally document his experience in a book entitled "Freeful, the luckiest man alive."

Through doing the book, I realized that the healing is infinite and goes on forever and I will never ever stop learning about what happened to me that day and the impact it's had on my life.

And that's not a bad thing that's actually a good thing. I don't ever want to stop learning or growing. And that was kind of a bitter pill to swallow, I was like, oh, this is going to be a part of my life forever. But it's a beautiful thing. I can't picture my life without the lessons that I've learned from it. And that wisdom has given me such, like so many gifts in my life that now I feel like the scars are the price to pay for the wisdom that I've been able to gain. And now to turn it around and use that wisdom to show other people that there is another side of trauma and that your trauma doesn't define you, but your reaction does.

And that it's okay to have sex and to fall down and to have you mum take you to the toilet. This is all part of healing. And you've got to embark on that journey to live the rest of your life. [Music] Of course, Brad's recovery is so extensive and so many important people were part of his story.

“We can't fit it all into one episode, which is why you should grab a copy of his book, the link to which is in the show notes of this episode.”

I want to say of course, a huge thank you to Brad for reliving this traumatic experience and talking me through his incredible story.

And of course, if you or someone you know is struggling, you can find a link to some helpful services as well in the show notes of this episode.