Nolan Barnes doesn’t sugarcoat his story.
He doesn’t preach either.
Barnes became a paralyzed from the waist down nearly nine years ago when he was ejected from the vehicle he was riding in when he was 18. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and the crash came on a trip to his home in Yorkton after a night of hard partying at a rave in Saskatoon.
“What happened to me wasn’t an accident,” Barnes said. “It wasn’t like a one-time only thing that I couldn’t see coming. It was a series of decisions that got me into a risky situation that inevitably caused this injury.”
Barnes spoke to students from Riverview and Cornerstone Christian School Tuesday as part of the Prevent, Alcohol, Risk-related, Trauma in Youth (PARTY) program at the Dr. F. H Wigmore Hospital.
He spoke candidly about how his partying in high school and drinking turned into using marijuana when his friend group changed. He then started to get into hard drugs like ecstasy and cocaine. He almost never wore a seatbelt. He got three seatbelt tickets in high school and it still had no impact on his choices.
Barnes was so high the night of the crash that he doesn’t remember parts of it. Nine people were in the vehicle as they returned from a rave and an after-party that Barnes had lied to his parents about attending. He was asleep when the vehicle rolled. He was ejected cleanly and woke up confused laying in a field. He would spend two weeks in a coma and had metal rods inserted into his back. His friend Jason Haas was ejected and killed. There were no other fatalities in the crash and the three people who were wearing seatbelts walked away relatively uninjured.
“I try in my presentation not to use the word ‘don’t’. These guys get told ‘don’t’ every day about something. I just try to relay how the decisions I made inevitably affected my life without me almost knowing it until I could look back years later. I think being honest makes it relatable and I think it makes it real,” Barnes said.
Barnes wants to be honest about what he was like and how he was living his life at the time of the crash. He was simply trying to do enough to graduate and was focused on drugs and partying despite the strain it was putting on his relationship with his family.
When he was in Grade 10, the PARTY program came to his school. Describing himself as “a D student kid that just wanted to have a good time and was a popular kid in school” he said he wanted to reach kids who are like younger versions of himself. He admitted that often when he had people come to school to speak to them, he found them to be “goody-goodies” and didn’t have credibility with him.
“You see the pictures, you hear the stories… I didn’t think that was something that would ever happen to me,” Barnes said. “I was actually pulled out of the PARTY program when I was in Grade 10 when the motivational speaker was speaking because I was goofing around - oddly enough - and now I’m doing the presentation.
“Hopefully I can reach those people who are like me.”
Shortly after the accident Barnes graduated. He had lost three classmates to impaired driving accidents and each of their mothers came up to him at graduation and told him how lucky he was.
“I thought “what do you mean I’m so lucky? Look at me.’ I didn’t feel very lucky,” said Barnes who added that the third time he was told he was lucky it finally started to resonate for him. “For me I’m upset, but everyone around me was so pumped to have me here because it could have very easily been another story like my friends.”
Despite all they had been through, his parents were nothing but supportive. His oldest friends were the first at his bedside. He said he understood the concept of ‘unconditional love’ for the first time.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to hold back my emotions when I’m talking about things like my family and how people felt. I go back and it’s real for me. I feel those feelings,” Barnes said. “It was probably the worst thing to ever happen to me in my life and it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
In addition to speaking to students and sharing his story, Barnes has become a member of the Canadian disabled water-skiing team and finished fifth at worlds in 2017.
