WHEN Dan Casey won an award earlier this month, he said although he was pleased, he wished he had never been eligible for it.
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The WorkSafe Award the former Hampden league star footballer received recognised the intense and painful journey to recovery that took over his life two years ago after an accident caused extensive damage to his feet and legs.
“It would have been nice not being up there accepting it,” Mr Casey, 33, said.
“I used to think that I was bulletproof, and you hear stories but you never think it’s going to happen to you.”
Mr Casey was determined to get back to work despite the traumatic nature of his injuries and the setbacks he and his family faced.
All up, he had 28 surgeries in 16 months – with more likely to come.
Mr Casey had his foot badly crushed in the grab of a bobcat bucket while working as a manager for a south-west transport company in September 2014 after he jumped in to assist at a Lake Bolac grain storage facility.
Heavy blood loss meant he was rushed to a Ballarat hospital by ambulance, where he was told his right leg might have to be amputated.
A stroke of fate meant a top Melbourne surgeon happened to be attending a conference nearby, and he organised for Mr Casey to be transferred to the Epworth Hospital in Melbourne.
“I said ‘there’s no way you’re taking my leg’,” Mr Casey said.
There he endured five months in hospital punctuated by a string of surgeries and uncertainty about his recovery prospects.
Mr Casey’s leg was saved, but his right foot had to be painstakingly rebuilt, in part using muscle and skin from his thighs.
He said the reality of what happened hit hard when he was alone in hospital beds after surgery.
“I went through a period there of just visualising it all the time and if I spent a period by myself I couldn’t handle it,” Mr Casey said.
“I always surrounded myself with people.”
He has worked hard at rehabilitation and maintained hope for a good recovery while accepting things will never be the same.
“One day I would like to think I would get back to running,” Mr Casey said.
The former Camperdown Football Club player and coach wants to make a symbolic appearance on the football field again, and his surgeon has promised to be there to cheer him on when it happens.
Being active had always been integral to Mr Casey’s identity.
He’s spent most of his life devoted to cricket and footy, and in 2013 he trekked the gruelling Kokoda Track with three mates.
“You go from being a really fit, active person to just nothing for two years,” he said.
Mr Casey said after the accident he noticed people would stare at his foot, and he still felt self-conscious about the changes his body has gone through.
“When I started going to the pool, I’d be in with the kids and people would be looking at you because I’d have footy shorts or something on and my legs are all just patchwork and scars,” he said.
Recently, Mr Casey got lost in his car without phone signal and said he started panicking.
“Everything came flooding back,” he said.
Friend Myles Geue, who bonded with Mr Casey when they walked the Kokoda Track, said the accident reshaped their relatively new friendship.
“I don’t know whether I was trying to be the older brother or that sort of thing with Dan, but I felt like he needed to have someone he could talk to,” Mr Geue, a nurse, said. “Having a medical background, at least I could understand a few things. I used to go down and drive him to some of his appointments in Melbourne.”
Mr Geue said he was struck by the positivity Mr Casey held to from the early days after the accident.
“Dan always used to say, ‘I can still cuddle my kids even if I lose my foot’,” he said.
Mr Casey said it was hard losing touch with people, particularly when his family was struggling. Two days after the accident, his wife Siobhan found out she was pregnant with their third child.
“People probably see the side that I’ve had to go through, but no one sees the other side – probably the darker side – for my wife, who had to stop everything,” he said.
“She was doing her PhD and had her own business to run and had a young family and she was active as well and then everything just stops. And it stops for a long period. Once you have a hit of a year or so – it takes ages to get back going again. It always seemed like bad news.”
Throwing himself back into things he loves has been crucial to Mr Casey’s recovery.
He was out on crutches coaching a junior Colac football team and back working at his old job for short stints within months of the accident.
Last year Mr Casey coached Alvie Football Club’s senior side, part of the Colac and District Football League.
Club president Gerard Barrow said Mr Casey brought something special.
“He gets the best out of players,” Mr Barrow said. “He has such a good relationship with them that they want to play for him, and they perform for him. He’s certainly well known and held in high regard in football circles and we’re lucky to have him.”
Mr Casey is back into full-time work after finding a job he loves in agriculture equipment sales.
“I was probably a bit nervous because … I’ve always just had work, so it was really daunting,” he said. “Anyone that knows me knows that I just like talking to people and helping people, so it just seemed like a good fit.”
Long term, Mr Casey has a vision to give greater sporting opportunities to young people from his area. In the meantime, he’s going to keep building his strength up and focusing on his family after their ordeal.
“We’ll probably look back in five years’ time and say ‘how the hell did we do that?’,” Mr Casey said.