When Dave Patrick woke up in an ambulance in mid-May he had absolutely no idea why he was there.
“I had no clue,” he said in a recent interview with the Advertiser.
“I woke up, they were just finishing packing me in the ambulance and I said, ‘Where the hell am I?’ and they said, ‘You’re in Hamilton, you had brain surgery.’ I’m like, ‘What are you taking about?’ and then I could feel my head … and I was like ‘whoa.’
“Yeah, talk about a shock.”
Patrick’s wife Kristy found him lying on their bedroom floor at 4:30am on May 9 and to this day no one knows what happened. Patrick said he’s been told he may never regain his memory from the time between his fall and when he woke up in the ambulance.
The Fergus storm chaser was originally taken to Groves Memorial Community Hospital in Fergus, then to Guelph and on to Hamilton.
On May 12 his doctors decided they needed to operate.
“I impacted actually the back of my head so my brain bounced around and caused some bleeds and it swelled,” Patrick explained.
The doctors performed a craniectomy, which means they removed part of his skull so his brain could swell without being squeezed.
Patrick was permitted to go home for a few days at the beginning of July but he ended up back in the ICU in Hamilton when his fever spiked. Neither the hospital nor the Centre for Disease Control could figure out what was causing the fever before it broke, Patrick said.
However, the fever caused him to relapse to the point he had to relearn how to walk.
“I had to build up strength because I had to learn to walk before they would release me and because I lost I think 25 pounds,” he explained.
“Basically muscle mass was weak and that, so I had to basically learn how to gain the strength again so I could carry myself, which worked.
“I mean I had to start walking four and five kilometres a day just to get that strength back.”
After a total of three months in the hospital Patrick was released at the end of July, but his skull was still open to allow his brain to heal.
“It was just divotted in on both sides …” he said, describing his head. “So I basically wore a hat because people would get kind of antsy and questionable and all that, and I just didn’t want to deal with it all the time.”
On Nov. 21 Patrick had a cranioplasty, a bone flap replacement, to put his skull back together.
“Now my head’s all cut up and swollen and I’m in recuperation again,” he said. “It’s not nearly as bad as it was before.”
Despite all the surgeries and setbacks, Patrick was still tweeting and engaging in storm chasing chatter.
“It doesn’t leave your blood,” he said.
Patrick explained he was able to chase some storms in April, prior to his accident, but he missed out on the majority of the summer season and some international opportunities.
“I was invited to go see the hurricane down in Florida with a couple of my storm chaser friends with the Weather Network but I couldn’t go because a I couldn’t get insurance,” he said.
“So that’s not going to happen … I’m not going to go out there with no part of the front of my head on right … maybe next year.”
Patrick explained that with storm chasing it’s important to stay current and continuously study storms.
“You sort of have to follow it the whole time so you get an idea of what kind of patterns (there) are … it keeps changing,” he said.
However, Patrick has been chasing since 1993 so one season off isn’t going to change much for him. He says he’ll be ready for the 2017 storm season.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he said.
Patrick said storm chasing has changed over the last two decades. He remembers a time he was chasing in the United States and there were very few other people at any given storm. Now he says there are hundreds of people all chasing the same storm.
“Because (of) the influence of laptops and internet and radar and all this stuff you get a lot of these kid chasers,” he explained.
“They say they’re going to be the best in the world and they’ve never chased longer than three months.
“They’ve never gone through all the seasoning.”
Where the new chasers need radar to track storms, Patrick said he can look at the sky and read the clouds.
“There’s lots of things to see,” he said. “Radar’s been nice, like I can get right up to storms … (but) these little yahoo kids … they really haven’t had the training.”
Whereas seasoned chasers can anticipate.
“You just kind of have a gut feeling on where to go,” he said. “You just kind of realize the same patterns.”
Although Patrick is back to work now, the self employed specialty floor installer was off work for months and Kristy, also self employed, took time off too – and the community stepped in to help.
The Elora Lions Club gave the Patrick family some money and a friend started a Gofundme page to raise funds. Even the family’s neighbours rallied together, cutting grass and dropping off food periodically.
“It’s been a good support from a lot of people. Whether I knew them or not, they knew me from Twitter or my Facebook page or anything like that,” Patrick said.
“Now it’s just, to be honest with you, it’s trying to just get away from that and rebuild life.”
