Radium resident who broke neck in horrific crash now on track to heal 100 per cent

By Steve Hubrecht

steve@columbiavalleypioneer

It was early morning, before breakfast. Spring sunlight filtered through the towering cedars. A perfect day, and Radium Hot Springs resident Kelly Kokolski was making the most of it, spinning along an easy, open mountain biking trail at a cracking good clip.

Kelly had gotten up early, as he always does, slammed back a cup of coffee and slipped quietly out of his family’s campsite in Kokanee Creek Provincial Park, on the shore of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. The family — Kelly, his wife Abby, and their six-year-old son Jasper — had come from Radium to Kokanee Creek for a mini family vacation. It was mid-May; before the long weekend. Abby and Jasper were still waking up, so Kelly decided to take advantage of the post-dawn, pre-breakfast stillness and go for a ride. He put on the new helmet he had bought at a Nelson bike shop just the day before, hopped on his bike and pedalled to the iconic North Shore trails network, not far up the mountainside from the campground.

Squeezing the most out of every hour, every moment of the day, is something Kelly does out of habit. It’s just who he is. This May morning ride was a perfect example of the benefits of an up-and-at-’em enthusiastic-for-life personality, and Kelly was enjoying it. At this point, he’d been riding the trail network with a good friend for several days and knew it well. He wanted a break from the gnarly technical black (advanced) trails he and his friend had ridden most of the week and chose instead a gentle blue (intermediate) trail. The trail — called Goosebumps — flowed well, and there was a fresh breeze on Kelly’s face. He came to a stretch that was wide, flat and straight, so he let his bike cruise with plenty of speed.

“I was ripping fast, like I normally do,” Kelly told the Pioneer. At 41 kilometres per hour, in fact, according to his odometer.

Suddenly out of nowhere, something — maybe a root, maybe a rock, maybe a twig on the ground, who knows? — caught Kelly’s wheel and set him sailing off his bike, careening headfirst into a cedar tree lying cut down on the side of the trial.

The impact knocked Kelly unconscious. “I was out maybe a few seconds. When I came to, I was lying on my side. My left arm was completely numb,” he said. Kelly is well versed in first aid, as a certified Wilderness First Responder. He knew immediately that his situation was serious. Very serious.

Kelly took a deep breath, exhaled, and — doing his best to keep his neck as still as possible (“super still. Super, super still”) — he slowly rolled over onto this back. Using his first aid training, he assessed each part of his body as he lay there.

“I knew almost immediately that my neck was broken. I had nerve pain shooting down my arm. My brand-new helmet looked like a sledgehammer went right through it. In fact, I’m certain that helmet saved my life,” said Kelly. He ran a finger down his spine to check for damage there. Nothing major. He took stock of his pelvis, pressing down on it with his right hand. It seemed intact, meaning he wasn’t at risk of internal hemorrhaging. But his sternum screamed with pain (“excruciating”), and he was having a hard time breathing.

Battle to get out 

Kelly often carries an InReach emergency satellite device, but didn’t have it that morning. Using his right hand, the one without shooting pain, he reached into his backpack and pulled out his cell phone. The battery was dead.

He guessed it was about 8 a.m. “No InReach, a dead phone, a broken neck and the breathing,” said Kelly. “It was very early, on a weekday, at a time of year when few people are using the trails. And there are a lot of bears in the area. Normally I would wait for somebody to find me. But I knew I could be waiting a very long time, maybe too long. I didn’t have many options: I had to get out.”

Kelly did his best to self-immobilize his neck and back, then (gently, so gently) rolled over onto his hands and knees. “It was a battle,” admits Kelly, owing to the searing pain. From his hands and knees, he carefully rose to his feet.

He realized walking normally was impossible, given the physical state he was in. So Kelly lifted up his bike, and using it as a crutch to support his weight, began to make his way — agonizingly slowly — down the trail. “It was tiny step, tiny step, tiny step. Really slowly,” he said.

After what felt like forever, Kelly came out the bottom of the trail to Highway 3A. The initial physical shock was starting to wear off and “now the pain was something else. Unbelievable.” He thought about hitchhiking, but doubted any driver would stop in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to pick up a stranger. And even if they did, Kelly figured trying to get into most types of vehicles could easily further damage his broken neck. 

The campground was only a kilometre along the highway, and mostly downhill. So he lowered his bike saddle, threw one leg over the bike, let this left arm droop down, and gingerly coasted back to Kokanee Creek, rolling right into his family’s campsite.

Abby and Jasper were finishing off breakfast, and seeing Kelly roll in, they knew right away that something was terribly wrong. “I said ‘Hi hon, I think I broke my neck’,” recalled Kelly. “I wanted to lie down, but knew that if I did, I wouldn’t get up again. I didn’t even want to wait the time it would take an ambulance to come out. Abby quickly cleared out our truck, so I could lie in it, my backpack and helmet still on, and we drove straight to the Nelson hospital.”

“Beyond lucky”

Within five minutes of entering the hospital, Kelly got a CT scan. The results were sent to a neurosurgeon. “The medical staff didn’t tell me the results right away. But I could tell from the way they were acting that it was not good,” said Kelly. “Eventually the neurosurgeon told me I was lucky. Extremely lucky. Beyond lucky. That most people who crashed like I did would probably be dead. And if not dead, then likely with total paralysis or other permanent neurological damage. The fact that I was alive and moving was a miracle.”

Kelly had suffered a number of injuries: multiple fractures in C7, including a left pars interarticularis fracture, breaks on the facet joints at C7, and to the pedicle on the right side of C6. “I also had what’s called anterolisthesis, which means that my vertebrae had shifted, and were pinching my spinal cord,” he said.

He was put in an ambulance and whisked off on a five-hour drive to the neurological department at the Kelowna hospital. Three days later, Kelly underwent a three-hour surgery to remove the disc between C6 and C7 and replace the disc with a polyetheretherketone spacer (PEEK) filled with demineralized bone matrix. The fractures were stabilized with an anterior titanium fixation plate and four screws. “This brought my cervical spine back into natural alignment and stabilized my facet joints,” he explained.

The next morning, Kelly woke and stood up out of bed. Later that day, he was able to walk to the X-ray room. Less than 24 hours after the surgery, Kelly was discharged and walked out the front door of the hospital. Kelly’s parents live nearby in Vernon and he, Abby and Jasper stayed with them for a few weeks.

Long road to recovery

Kelly approached his recovery through this past summer and fall with the same zest that he approaches much in life. This included: osteopathy, physiotherapy, massage therapy and a healthy diet. Growing (and consuming) kale and spinach and other vitamin-rich leafy greens in the family’s plot in the Radium community garden. Eating more eggs than normal for extra protein. And as much exercise as he was allowed. Only two days after his surgery he went for a 10-kilometre walk. He had to wear a neck collar for 13 weeks, but did as much walking and hiking as possible in it.

Not long after the collar came off, in August, he, Abby and Jasper went camping again. It was three days of family fun, mostly hanging out in hammocks. But Kelly had finally gotten the go-ahead to bike again, so he went for a ride on the Lazy Lizard trail, a gentle green (beginner) trail that winds, just as Goosebumps does, among soaring cedars.

To be rolling on a bike again, slipping softy between cedars “it was a joyous occasion. Lying there in the hospital bed, before the surgery in Kelowna, I wasn’t sure I would ever get to ride a bike with my son again. I didn’t know what the future was going to be like. And that didn’t sit well with me. So to be able to get back on my bike later the same season — that was amazing,” he said.

Kelly is back biking, hiking and otherwise active, but he is being prudent and cautious, dialing back the risk factor. “For two years, while that bone material grows in, I really have to avoid any other kind of catastrophic impact scenarios, be that from falling while biking fast or getting into a car crash. That would really be bad. So I’m mountain biking, but I’m not ripping black diamonds. I’m driving, but I’m very careful.”

Being cautious, though, doesn’t mean being a couch potato, and what Kelly can do safely, he’s doing with his usual degree of energy and zest. Earlier this fall, when he had recovered enough to be able to run comfortably, he managed to trail run the 55-kilometre Rockwall route in Kootenay National Park. The Rockwall normally takes backpackers three or four days to complete: Kelly ran it in eight hours. The run was particularly poignant for him: “It was at that moment that I felt, yes, I’m back to my old self,” he said. “And, I have to admit, the Rockwall holds a special place in my heart. It was the very first long trail run I ever did, when I started trail running, and I’ve run it every year for the past five years. It’s become a tradition. With the injury, obviously I thought the tradition would be cancelled this year. But I squeezed it in, and that was really meaningful.”

A few weeks ago, in early November, Kelly had another appointment with his neurosurgeon and was told he was on track for a 100 per cent recovery. “They said I’ll be able to put this behind me. The X-rays looked perfect, the facet joints in the back with multiple fractures have fused, and now it’s just waiting for the vertebrae in the neck to fuse,” he said. “It was a major celebration for us.”

That night in Thailand

The time spent recovering has given Kelly a chance to pause, and reflect. “If you go through an injury like this, you feel lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to be moving. You have a new appreciation for everything,” he told the Pioneer, adding that the bike accident was, in fact, his second close call in life.

The first such close call came in Thailand, on Boxing Day 2004. Kelly and Abby (then his girlfriend) were backpacking through Southeast Asia, and had just landed on the famous vacation island of Phuket. They arrived by ferry in the morning, dropped their luggage in their hotel, which was set on a hill above the iconic west-facing Kata and Kata Noi beaches, then turned to go back to the shore, eager to sign up for a snorkelling tour. Walking downhill “we heard a massive rumble. We thought it must be a car accident, so we looked down the road. But, suddenly, there was no road. Just water. Powerful, churning water coming in rapidly.”

It was the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters on record, although Abby and Kelly didn’t know that at the time. All they knew was something horrific was unfolding. They turned and fled uphill back to their hotel, as more and more water surged onto the beach and town below them. Had they been just a few minutes earlier, they would have been caught directly in it. The tsunami came in multiple waves, leaving much of the western coast of Phuket in a jumble of destruction and chaos. Kelly and Abby spent that night huddled with dozens of other local and tourist survivors in the hotel lobby. They sat in the pitch dark, with power and communication to the outside world cut off.

“It was terrifying. A lot of people were crying. Some had lost loved ones. Nobody was really sure what was going on…it was a long night. It really made me think, deeply, in a way I hadn’t before. There were literally hundreds of people killed all around us. I think 5,000 people died on the beaches that day, and more than 227,000 died around the world,” Kelly told the Pioneer. “That night, it changed the whole way I look at life. Every day since then has been a gift. And I promised myself I’d make the most of that gift.”

This, Kelly says, is where his boundless exuberance for life, his irrepressibly positive nature, comes from. (The Pioneer can attest, based on multiple in-person interactions, that Kelly is likely the most ebulliently cheerful person in the Columbia Valley). That night in Phuket, he was given a second chance at life. And earlier this year, above Kokanee Creek, he was given another second chance.

And this time, starting second-chance-at-life number two, he made himself another promise. “Lying there in the hospital bed in Kelowna, trying not to focus too much on whether or not I would walk or ride again, I thought really hard about everybody — all the medical personnel and others — who had helped me through the ordeal. They had been fantastic,” Kelly told the Pioneer. “And vowed that I would pay it forward, somehow. That I would help other people who are in a similar situation as I was right then.”

As a first step in that direction, he’s now training to become part of the local Invermere chapter of the nonprofit Cycling Without Age, which takes the elderly and others with mobility challenges for free bike rides in specially designed, trishaw-like bikes.

“I want to give back, and make a difference for those who can use a hand. If I can help somebody else feel the wind in their hair on a bike, help make their days a bit brighter, then sign me up,” said Kelly. “People keep telling me I’ve got all this positive energy, well, I’m going to spend it. This world needs it.”