The incredibles

From near death and coma, family helps teen learn to live and farm again

SPENCERVILLE -- After getting off the school bus, he often never made it to the house. He dropped his books at the front steps and ran to find his father. Of the four Ruigrok kids, Dustin was always first in the barn to see if the calf had come or to find out if the field needed discing. He was a high-spirited teenager – in competitive hockey, baseball and high school football – who was riding his Yamaha motorbike in the wind at about noon on a hot sunny day when the lights went out. It was July 25, 2002.

A tractor pulling a dump wagon coming the other way turned in front of him. His bike smashed into metal. In an instant his neck was broken. So was one leg, a wrist, an ankle and his back in five places. A lung collapsed. He was 16-years-old. When he was brought into hospital, doctors determined he would be dead by morning.

But the boy kept breathing, was fed by a tube and silently lay in a coma for more than three months. Although his eyes were open, they were glazed and he didn’t blink.  His mother, Polly, was at his bedside in Kingston hospital every day. She talked to him, played music and read to him.

After six weeks, Polly decided she needed to teach her son to communicate. She needed to know if he were there. She asked him to move a finger once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’. Two weeks later a finger moved. “My husband and I went to bed every night thanking God for every little progress and asking for more,” she recalled.

When September came, doctors decided to put permanent feeding tubes in Dustin’s mouth. They talked about finding a permanent home for him at an institution. “They gave us very little hope for a long time,” she said.

But Dustin’s parents, Bill and Polly, refused to give in or give up. About three months after the accident, on what seemed like just one more day of silence Polly again showed Dustin photos of the family and asked him if he knew their names. She asked him for their home telephone number. Then she asked for his work number at Spencerville Home Hardware. He spoke for the first time, answering correctly. It was barely a whisper. Polly was stunned. She cried, asked more questions, then cried again and called his father. Bill drove up that night to hear Dustin whisper short one-word answers. The boy was back.

Dustin was then transferred to Ontario’s only rehabilitation hospital for children in Toronto, where Polly shared a room with her son for more than five months. Days turned to weeks and Dustin began to speak in sentences and to move. He learned to walk like it was his first time. He returned home in March after more than eight months in hospital and started going to school taking only two course for two hours a day. His parents dropped everything to get him into speech therapy and physiotherapy and the entire family spent countless hours helping him relearn basic tasks like brushing his teeth.

“As Dustin was his father’s right-hand man the future of the farm hung in the shadows of the unknown,” Polly said. “With much dedication and love of farming Dustin has spent the last six years coming back.”

When Dustin graduated from high school, his father wanted to find a future for him. “We’ve got to find something for Dustin to do,” he said.

In essence, the new heifer barn on the Spencerville farm is for him. He’s back at work in the barn. It just takes him longer to complete tasks and he tires easily. “I enjoy milking the cows and taking care of the heifers in the new barn that is going up,” said the now cheerful young man, with a ready smile.

Looking back, Dustin never thought he’d walk. “I don’t know how I did it but I’m persistent or stubborn. I don’t know which one it is. I won’t say ‘no’. I don’t know how to say ‘I can’t’. I say, ‘I will’. It just takes me a few more tries.”

He doesn’t remember the accident or the hospitals. He said the toughest part of rehabilitation was realizing the many things he knew how to do before the accident but his memory of them was gone. “When I got a refresher on how to do things I was good to go.”

Dustin is a testimony to perseverance that some call a miracle. He graduates from the University of Guelph, Kemptville campus, in the dairy herd apprenticeship program on April 4, the day he turns 22.