Brad Baylis doesn’t remember anything about the day last summer when he hit a moose while driving in northern B.C.
Indeed, everything the Prince George man knows about his close brush with death — not to mention the entire month afterward — he’s pieced together from friends, family and medical professionals who saved his life after the moose crashed through his windshield, sending Baylis careening into a ditch and trapped in his vehicle.
Baylis, 39, and the moose would be extricated from the vehicle and he would be airlifted to Vancouver General Hospital on life support. While he was in the intensive-care unit for a month, plastic surgeons would spend 10 hours perfectly reconstructing his shattered face and intensive-care specialists would make Baylis the first patient to get a new procedure called brain microdialysis.
With Baylis on the verge of dying from his traumatic brain injury, Dr. Mypinder Sekhon and colleagues deployed newly acquired tools that allowed them to frequently monitor Baylis’s brain-tissue chemistry so they could tailor the amount of glucose and other metabolic supplements he needed intravenously. They were also able to do real-time monitoring of oxygen and blood-pressure levels in his brain to deliver medications with doses tailored to his condition rather than giving standardized doses.
“The impact with the moose caused major hemorrhaging in his brain and he was suffocating from a lack of oxygen while emergency crews were extricating him from the vehicle,” said Sekhon. “It was a horrible, horrible injury with diffuse swelling throughout his brain. Often with this kind of swelling, brain death will ensue. We had no option other than to try the bolt.”
