262: What if you were mauled by a grizzly bear?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I was sitting there thinking, do I just lay here and die or do I kill myself and let it end with because there's no way of making it out like this. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening, episode 262.

What if you were mauled by a grizzly bear? This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. I grew up with, I guess, a large family with four siblings, born and raised in Calgary, Alberta.

We were very outdoorsy people. We did a lot of traveling, hiking, fishing, hunting. My earliest memory of hunting was my dad and a good friend of his down in Wyoming antelope hunting.

Long days of walking through the desert, looking for antelope, eating junk food. And on that very same trip, I harvested a jackrabbit. And it was about the size of me. Learning how to skin it and cooking it up on the stove, on the back of our old 1980 Chevy truck with a camper on the back.

All the hunting I've done was just with my father. It was about the only time he was, he worked out of town lots and around hunting season he'd be home and that's a chance I got to bond with him would be going out hunting. So from quite a young age till as a young adult, that'd be the only time I really get to spend one-on-one time with my father would be out hunting.

When I came around to hunting season, I was pretty excited to leave school early, call in sick. I really enjoyed being out there, fresh air, the silence of the woods. You can't hear nothing, just nature. I'm able to take a deep breath and just relax and not have any worries out there. Most of my childhood was growing up, running around the wilderness like a wild man.

My parents were very supportive. They looked after pretty much anything Anita's parents do. I was a very outspoken child. I never shut up, I guess to put it blunt. I do have ADHD. As a kid, I struggled in school with sitting still. If the subject wasn't interesting to me, that was a struggle for me. And once we figured out what it was, it made a big change.

I was a pretty wild child. I got in trouble a lot, not for being a bully, just I was always an adrenaline junkie looking for just seeking that thrill.

You're addicted to the feeling of freedom. It's that second of, it's hard to describe. It just gets you excited. It's just that feeling. And I get that when I do downhill mountain bike riding, jumping out of airplanes, the same type of feeling. Something surprises you. I just like that feeling that you get. It's hard to describe.

When you're flying in the air, you know you're going to hit the ground. How are you going to hit the ground? Well, at that point in time, you're not concerned with that. You're just concerned with the feeling in that second of flying. It's that rush. When you're in that state of mind, I find things go slower. I'm able to freeze time. I seem to react better under very stressful situations.

As an adolescent, me and my dad would go hunting and camp out in a tent at 20 below zero or colder. And that would be no big deal. We'd build forts and our big igloos and sleep in that. Spending several weeks at a time hiking through the mountains, looking for sheep with little to nothing of comforts. That was just normal for me.

The first time I met my wife, I was in high school at grade 12. I wasn't a very popular kid in school. So I tried to sit beside her, talk to her, and one day I got enough courage to ask her out. We've been dating ever since now and been married for 11 years. After I graduated high school, I went to college to take electrical engineering technology. Once I got out, I got a job as an electrician.

I finished up my four-year electrical apprenticeship, went on and got my master's. I then got into more of a specialty field, high voltage terminations. When there was some kind of disaster to happen at a gas plant, I was one of the ones they sent in to try to figure out how to get things back up and running. That always excited me, that danger of working in, I guess, a hostile environment or an environment where things can go wrong pretty quickly. That excited me.

And then my wife at the time, she came to me and she was like, I really want to have kids. Both had stable careers. So we decided to start a family. We ended up having our daughter. That was a pretty big step. I was pretty scared. You don't realize what's happening until it happens. I remember the day when my daughter was born. I think I almost passed out. It was overwhelming for me.

And then holding my daughter for the first time, she was so tiny. You just don't realize how small they are. Now you got to take care of it. It's like, I don't know anything what to do. The first six months of being a father was quite overwhelming. But me and my wife weren't going to let that slow us down. We were very active outdoors people.

My daughter is about a month old and we got this chest harness and so every spring starting in February we go out look for deer antlers. So we're like well what do you do with a child now? We're like heck we'll just stop her to us and let's go. So in that year of 2017

The year my daughter was born, on August 23rd, I packed up all my gear for a four-day hunt to go hunt sheep. I was 32 years old at the time, was in really good shape. I just got a lightweight sleeping bag, a brand new pack.

It was about 6 o'clock the night before. I was playing with Abby. We took a couple little selfies sitting there on the couch, poking her and making her giggle and smile. And I went to bed shortly after that because I had to get up at 11 o'clock at night to start the drive to get out to where I go sheep hunting. And the plan was to get out there at about 3 in the morning, get my sheep bright and early in the morning, harvest my ram, and then hike out.

I had four days, I had plenty of time. I was pretty excited. So that morning I got everything out of my truck, threw my backpack on. I started to make the ride into the mountains, down this old dirt road. And I got down to where the Outfitters camp is set up. Normally there's this older gentleman sitting there with his binoculars, with a little book, and well, he wasn't there this time, so it was very unusual. Didn't really think much of it, so I kept on going.

From where the Outfitters camp is to further down the trail, it was all washed out. There was really no trail. You kind of had to eyeball it. Got back onto the main trail again and was riding my bike up this steep part of the trail, up a mountain a little bit. There's this rock up here. It had grass and moss and a little spruce tree on it. It was like the perfect place to camp. My plan was to go into the very back boat, which is about another two to three kilometers from there into the back.

I was just going 10 feet at a time, really looking because I wanted to see the sheep before the sheep saw me. I got 200 yards, 300 yards, and I spotted the sheep. And then I went to reposition. I took my binoculars down and I repositioned. And as I brought my binoculars down, I saw a little brown thing run in front of me 10 feet away. Right away, I knew what it was. I knew it was a cub.

I then reached down into my backpack, which was, I had leaned against the frame of my bicycle to grab my bear spray. As I was reaching in, I heard a branch break behind me over my right shoulder. And there was Mama. She was about four feet away. Her left front paw was stretched right out. I could see her claws.

I could see her eyes, the white corners of her eyes. Her mouth was open. She was in a full charge. I only had a split second to react, so I took a step to my left and I grabbed my bicycle and I just dropped it in front of her. Her head went through the frame of the bicycle. Left paw got caught in the back wheel and her front paw was caught in the front wheel and she was tossing, shaking her head around.

I grabbed my pack and remember she shook that bike off and she came right for me and I smashed my pack right in her nose and her face. So she grabbed it and started violently shaking it. And then she's like, oh, and I picked the pack up and I smashed it over her head and just pushing her back with the pack.

She grabbed my right hand through the frame of the pack, her jaws clamped right through, teeth went right through my hand and into the pack. I kind of hurt. She let go. And then I was smashing her with the other side. And then she just kind of started to back up, turn and walk away. I started to back up, holding my pack. I was trying to get my gun off of the back of my pack. I was watching her and trying to get my gun off.

I took my eyes off her for a second to unclip one of the clips that was holding my gun, and as I lifted my head back up, she had turned around. She was coming back towards me. I threw the pack at her in her face, and then I decided to go run up the mountainside

So I probably got a good 100 feet or so up the hillside. I found a tree, grabbed it, kind of jumped off the higher end of the hill, got onto the tree. I was climbing up the tree and I can just hear her come behind me huffing. She was fast. I was climbing up the tree and I had my left leg up pretty high. I was pushing myself up with my left leg and my right leg was hanging low.

She stood up on her hind end and she wrapped her two front legs around my right leg, pulling it down to her. And then I just remember her guiding my leg into her mouth, just looking down, holding on to the tree going, this is going to hurt.

Her teeth sunk in right behind my knee. I could see her teeth, canines on either side of my kneecap. She crunched right behind my leg and just grabbed a hold. And I remember looking down going, why is this not hurting? And then she just yanked with her head straight down and just plucked me out of the tree like nothing. I hit the ground hard.

She wasn't holding on to me at this time, but I hit the ground. I curl up in a ball, wrapping my legs and arms around the base of the tree, trying to hold on and hopefully the brows of the spruce tree protect me. She just reached in with her mouth and grabbed me on the left side, kind of in the abs. I remember I felt that one.

She picked me up with her mouth. She just shook her head one way and she threw me. I must have went three, four feet or more. I hit the ground. I was kind of dazed. And then bang, she was right on top of me. I was laying on my right side, curl up in a ball in the fetal position. And her first bite, she came down and she grabbed me, her top two canine teeth on either side of my left eye.

Her one tooth caught me in the corner of my eye and her bottom jaw teeth were catching me on the bottom of my jaw. And she bit down and I just remember hearing all the bones in my cheek on the left side. Just everything just crunched like nothing. You just feel all this popping and I didn't really feel any pain. It was like a cooling sensation. It was kind of weird.

And when she's biting me, I could just smell her breath. It just, it stunk. It was such a stench. And you could just feel her nose and just breathing on you. She just bit down. And I'm laying there going, well, this sucks. At this point in time, I knew I wasn't going to make it. She was going to chew me up. I rolled over and said, hell with this. I'm going to fight. When I rolled over, she was standing. Her head was kind of like a 45 degree angle to my legs. She was coming from my feet on the left side.

She come down to bite me again. I punched her in the nose, grabbed the corner of her nose and my fingers started peeling it back. I was poking her eyeballs, grabbing her ear and she was chomping at my hand. She got a hold of it a couple times. She'd make a quick chomp and just stick my fingers in her nose and I could see her lips curl up. She was quite angry. Then she came down to bite me again in the face. At this moment, it was kind of like perfect. She made a mistake.

Your mouth was wide open and I had a perfect opening where I could punch up my left hand and I punched it into her mouth. And I remember as a kid when you had a dog bite and if you grab its tongue, it stopped biting you because it can't close your mouth. So I figured, well, this is what I'm going to try. So anyways, I punched my left hand into her mouth. I remember my fingers just sliding down her tongue. And at first you could feel like worn down bumps and like scars on her tongue and the

You could just feel it like leather all the way down. Then it gets kind of really bumpy and then gets to smooth again. I slid my index finger and middle finger down her throat and wrapped my whole hand around her tongue with my two fingers down her throat, holding on. Just her eyes also like lit up. And I was holding on and I remember looking at my forearm and three quarters of my forearm of my left arm was in her mouth. She was making a horrible huffing sound, almost like a screaming sound.

At this time, her back legs had shifted over to my right side and her claws were digging in to my right side. And that was pretty painful when she was standing on me. So I was trying to push her legs off me and my hands slipped in and I could feel belly. Like I knew the hair was much thinner and you could feel skin and

I reached right up as far as I could up the belly and grabbed what I thought was balls. And I twisted and pulled with all my might. And that's when she made a horrible sound, a very deep, deep squeal like a pig. And I could feel like she was throwing up too at the same time. She was hurting and kind of in shock.

So I let go and she took off running up the mountainside, just squealing like a pig. And you can smell her stench as she ran away. And it almost felt like she was defecating all over me as she was running away. So I got up pretty fast. I made my way over to my pack. And the first thing I did was take out my phone out of my backpack and I put it on selfie mode. And I took a picture of myself of what I look like.

At that moment, I was sitting there thinking, well, this sucks. This kind of ends my sheep hunt. I was kind of looking at it thinking, well, I think I'm good enough to go shoot that ram or I'm going to go bear hunting. It's kind of one or the other right now. And I was kind of ticked off because I put a lot of hard work, a lot of training, and this is my year that I was going to get a sheep.

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Presto! The car you've been wanting is now within reach. So hit the road and leave your calculator at home. Find your next car on autotrader.com. So I'm sitting there. I grab my pack and I have my gun resting against my left shoulder. And in my left hand, I had some shells. In my right hand, I had the clip of my gun and I was putting shells in the clip just like, wow.

So as I'm putting shells in, I think I got two in there. Putting the third one in, looking down at my hands, I just remember my hands just dropped. Like I had no control, like lost all feeling. And I can hear sound of ice breaking down.

She had come back and grabbed me by the back of the skull, and I could hear the crushing, things breaking. She drug me back into the bush, backwards, kind of like how a dog, when you play tug-of-war, you've got their paws digging in there, you can feel them pull, and go, I could just feel her body just lunge backwards and just drag me from the back of my head. She drug me in, don't know how far, it seemed quite a while. She took three or four good huffs and was pulling me,

I couldn't feel nothing. I couldn't move my legs. I couldn't do anything. I was like paralyzed. But when she stopped, I was sitting upright, leaning against one of her legs. I was hunched over and I just remember seeing her right front claw come over the right side of my face and catch me in the corner of my nose and mouth meet.

And she just ripped with her claw all the way up to my right eye, through my right eye, through the right side of my scalp. She just was ripping everything. You just feel the bones break. And then she started to gnaw on my head like a dog on a bone, just on the back of my head. You can just hear it crunch, crunch. And you just feel her teeth rubbing against my skull. And then she just was like chewing on me and pulling things and

Like, what do you do? I couldn't move. I couldn't feel anything. I could just hear it all. And so she stopped for a second and she shifted. I fell backwards onto the mountainside. I felt my back hit the ground and it just felt like everything connected. All of a sudden I could feel, I could move my hands and arms. It just like almost like energizing.

I remember looking up and I couldn't see at this point. All I was able to see was this dark thing above me with light around the edges. I reached my hand straight up while I felt the belly. I slid him up over my head and I could feel what I thought was the balls of the bear. Grabbed with both hands and pulled myself up like I was doing a pull-up. And I wrapped my legs around her neck and head and locked him in kind of like a UFC fighter position.

Whatever I had with my hands, I was trying to rip off. She made some really deep squealing sounds, very deep. She started bucking like a bronco, rolling around, and I was holding on for dear life. Then I could feel like she was running almost, and I could feel my back slide across the ground, and you could tell she was in total panic mode and freaking out.

I let go and you just hear a squeal and run through the bush, just crashing through everything. I sat there for a second, just kind of stunned like, wow, okay, now what? I went to go stand up and I couldn't even see. I was feeling my face. I could feel my left eye. My left eye was hanging out of the socket, hanging down. In order for me to look forward, I had to pick up my eye or tilt my head back. I was feeling the right side of my face.

I didn't have a right eye. I thought I didn't. I could feel my skull and like there was no skin on my face. I crawled down the hillside there and didn't have to go far. I found the trail and I was trying to determine should I crawl up the trail or do I need to crawl down the trail? So to find my gear, I ended up crawling down the trail and I found my pack right away. I was feeling around, panicking, looking for my gun.

I found my gun. That was kind of a saving grace. I got the gun and I had shells in my pocket. I was trying to put them into the chamber of the gun. My fingers were so messed up I couldn't actually get a shell into the chamber. They kept falling out. It wouldn't go in. I started to panic at this point in time. I was feeling around.

I found a chunk of my face. I believe it was my mustache and goatee and tail of the hair. And I grabbed that. I was feeling around. I found some more pieces of flesh. I found my ear. And then I found the clip. I was so happy when I found the clip. I slammed in the gun and I fired three shells at the first dark thing I saw. And I'm sitting there, you know, and I have all these pieces of my face. I couldn't really tell what I had. Sitting there just like, what do I do?

things missing and couldn't stand. I wasn't in pain. I guess it was more shock and I'm sitting there just like, what do you do? This was a very low moment in my life. I pulled out my phone and I tried to text my wife. I started to text her, you know, told her I loved her and I really screwed up. And I didn't think I was going to make it. And I knew she wasn't going to get these texts because I had no service, but I just did it anyway. So when they found me, she could see what I went through. And I was sitting there thinking,

Do I just lay here and die? Or do I kill myself and let it end with? Because there's no way I'm making it out like this. So I loaded up my rifle and I stuck it right by Jen. I pulled the trigger and it didn't go off. It was a ruffle. So it didn't go off and I was like, well, what the heck? So I lifted up the bolt, brought it down again, and I pulled the trigger and the gun went off and it kind of scared me. And I was just sitting there like, okay. So...

I just thought that, well, I'm not going to make it. At least I owe it to my wife to get it out or to get it making somewhere where they can find me right away so she doesn't have to wait a long time for them to find me or figure out what happened. So I said, well, I'm going to get up and I'm going to hike out. I took a sweater out of my backpack and I put it over my head upside down so the neck of the shirt was around my forehead, back of my head.

I folded open the shirt and I took the pieces of my face and I laid them on top of my skull and tried to make sure like the blood side down against the skull. I got him up there and I folded the shirt over my head tight.

My jaw was hanging down on the left side. It was ripped out, just kind of hanging there. All my teeth were exposed and all the skin from my face was hanging down, kind of below my chin and all my neck, the pieces that were still attached. I took the sleeves of the shirt, tied one underneath my jaw real tight to help hold my jaw up, and I tied two big knots in the back to help hold my head and neck up straight.

threw a sweater over top my shoulders grabbed my gun and whatever rounds I had and I fired a couple more off into the bushes I tried to stand up because of my gun to help hold me as a crutch and then I go to take a step and I'd fall over because my right leg just totally useless I had no control over it couldn't really do anything

I managed to get up and get about 10 feet, stumbling and falling. I think the first 10 feet, I must have fell over 100 times. It was so difficult just to get up. Finally, I got the grasp of it. I started down the trail.

Well, the first part of the trail, it goes down to pretty steep drainage. And I got 20 feet down the drainage and I lost my footing and I tumbled head over heels a few hundred feet. All the way down the trail through like a little bitty cliff section into some big boulders and the drainage and that hurt. I got all tangled up.

I just hit the rock so hard I could hardly move. It was a lot of pain. I was laying there thinking, well, this is the end. I can't move. I was hurting pretty bad. And I remember I reached in my pocket. I pulled my phone out. And I was just going to play music so I could relax and fall asleep. And the things happened.

So I pull my phone out, and of course I can't see what I'm doing. I'm touching the screen. I kind of know what the icon color of it is. Anyways, I managed to get something up, and the song that came on was Baby Shark.

We used to play that for my daughter when she was having a rough night or trying to put her to bed. We'd play Baby Shark and she'd fall asleep. Anyways, I'm laying there and it got me thinking of her and how I was never going to meet her boyfriend or walk her down the aisle. That was a pretty tough moment laying there just thinking about that.

So I mustered up what strength I had, and I crawled up the drainage on the other side of my belly, just to the belly crawl up the drainage, through all the boulders up the little cliff section. Got to where I thought the trail was, and I crawled a straight line across that hillside. Got to some point where I could stand up, and I got up and started walking a bit, and I'd fall over, and I'd just keep crawling. So I got to the next drainage, and it was just as steep and nasty as the first one.

I ended up falling down that one, but not as far, and crawling up through. I got to where it meets up with the main trail. I was just so exhausted, so tired. Of course, Baby Shark is playing on repeat. Then I started my way down the main trail, and I was just going to make it to camp where the other guys are. Hopefully, they're there and be able to help me out. Just before I get to where their campsite is, there's a creek crossing.

I ended up falling down into the creek face first, laying in the creek, head underneath water, just struggling, fighting to get out. I got out, I had my rifle, and I fired off a couple shots when I was walking down there, hoping that they would be there and come out and help. Nobody was there, and I felt pretty defeated. I got to the edge of the campsite, opened up the fence, got into the first tent, opened up the tent, nobody there. I go to the next tent.

Nobody there. So I went back into the first tent. I was digging through all the bins they had on the one side, looking for a phone or a radio or something I could signal for help with.

I found this can, just the shape of it. I knew it was like a can of ham, like a Spam can, like a little triangle. I was so hungry. I grabbed another soup can and just started bashing the top of it. I got it peeled open and grabbed it with a chunk of the meat and sticking it through the left side of my face where my cheek is and kind of sitting on my tongue because I couldn't really move my jaws or anything. It tasted so good.

I found a couple of tetra packs of juice boxes and I was really excited. I popped one of them open and I got the juice box open somehow and squirted it into the corner of my mouth and it tasted so good. Blood kept dripping down on the table and just dripping all over the place. Like it was trying to eat and it just like drip, drip, drip onto the tablecloth.

I started digging through more and I found toilet paper and bounty sheets. So I wrapped the toilet paper and bounty sheets around my head, trying to stop the bleeding. I did something to my jaw and it just like clicked in and it felt really good. I could kind of move it, like almost chew again. And I could kind of talk. I kind of control it a bit. So that was cool.

Once I got all the bounty sheets wrapped around the toilet paper, I found it looked like athletics tape, but it was called vet wrap. I guess they use it for horses to tape up their legs. So I started wrapping that around my head to hold all the toilet paper in place and I

I remember looking down at my hands and the blood was just dripping out of them. So I wrapped tape around my hands and stopped the bleeding. And then on my right leg, I taped up over the holes just to kind of try to stop the bleeding and to hopefully give it some strength.

I found some paper and a sharpie. So I wrote a little note to the outfitter to tell him I was sorry for the mess I left. And kind of a goodbye note to my wife. Just told him to let my wife know that I tried and I wasn't going to make it. I lost too much blood.

I had three rounds left, so I fired those three rounds in the air. You know, I had five miles to go, and I had five juice boxes. I was going to drink one juice box every mile, and so I made it to the top of the hill. I remember kind of looking down at my feet, and I noticed these two rocks sitting there. I was so happy to see those rocks. It was just a very joyful moment. It was like I knew when I got to those rocks, I was going to make it. The rest of the way, it was downhill to the truck. I wasn't far away. It was about a kilometer away.

I had one juice box left. I sucked that juice box back. I kissed my hands and touched the rocks. Made my way over to the other side down the trail. And I stumbled over to my truck. The first thing I did, I didn't want to see what I looked like. I pushed my driver's side mirror all the way forward so I couldn't see. I opened the door of my truck and I took my rear view mirror and I just turned it way away so I couldn't see. And I closed the door and started up the truck. Everything was so blurry.

I rolled down the window and I couldn't even see the ground or tell where the ground was. Out the windshield, I could just see like a light spot down the middle. I aimed for the light spot, figured that was the middle of the road or at least the middle of the opening of the trees. I drove about 20 kilometers or so, 16 to 20 kilometers-ish down to a little resort there that's called Panther River Resort. I drove right up to the main lodge.

I open up the door, I hear this kid's voice say, Grandma, Grandma, someone's trying to play a prank. They thought I was a zombie walking in and of course I'm missing all the skin off my face. Two ladies are standing there, they're like, oh my God, and I walk in and I handed them my wallet, my phone, and told them my name and what happened, and I need help. And then they asked me, is there anything I need?

And I said to him, I need a glass of medium temperature water with no ice and a straw. And he gave me that. And I was sitting there on one of the long tables drinking my water. And I could kind of hear them freaking out, calling 911. And blood's dripping out everywhere. And I grabbed some napkins off the table. And I started to clean off the floor of the table. And one of the ladies was like, don't worry about it. Like, what are you doing? And I was just trying to clean up, I guess.

conservation officers ended up showing up. One of them put a towel on my face and I freaked out and it hurt a lot. The other one came around and I turned, I guess, looked at him and they got very sick and started to throw up like it was, I guess, not a great scene to see.

I remember Amanda, one of the owners, she'd come over and she said that somebody's on the way with a helicopter to get me out. And they're going to be about a half hour. And I said, well, I'm going to go fishing while I'm waiting for the helicopter. Like there's a perfect, you know, path to rivers right there. This is a perfect Voltron stream here. I'm going to try and catch some fish before they lift me out. And she's like, no, you're not. And, you know, I was going to take off my boots. She's like, no, leave them on.

The helicopter landed and it was actually her dad that owned a helicopter and flew in to help out. We take off. I'm trying to look out the window and I feel a sharp poke in my side and I turn to look and Amanda would be looking at me and I turned to look at her. And when I did, blood would squirt out out of my face and everywhere and get over the helicopter. So she was holding up the tarp to protect herself and try not to get the blood over the helicopter.

It was a quick flight. We got to Sundry Hospital. That's when panic set in. Everybody from there just went crazy. They threw me on a gurney and rolled me right into the Sundry Hospital, into the emergency room.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Rocketmoney.com slash wondery. They started to try to play with my bandage and in on my head and I was fighting them off for that. I told them don't touch it. There was so much pain. I was yelling at the doctor and telling him to leave me alone because, you know, I was screaming in pain and

We zipped into Calgary, Foothills Hospital in Calgary. They said they were going to take me in for surgery. Is there anything that I needed? And I said, yeah, I wanted to talk to my wife before I went in. And they said, well, get her. And I told them, well, I need you. You got to cover up my face. I don't want my wife to see me like this.

They brought her in, they covered up my face, and first thing I did was I told my wife that I was sorry that I screwed up, that I love her, and to make sure she takes care of Abby, because I was really afraid to be put to sleep. The first surgery was about 13 hours. When I woke up in ICU, I couldn't move anything. I thought my left arm was missing from the elbow down, my right arm, I thought my hands were gone. I was kind of, you know, in shock, and I thought my face was gone.

I couldn't see at all. My eyes were swollen right shut. I couldn't even open them. Barely here. I would drift on and off to sleep, just being exhausted. I'd constantly go into a flashback right away. I had a good friend who was a social worker. He would be at the foot of my bed, and it was only my left leg that had nothing wrong with it. He would grab my foot, and he would massage it, let me know that I'm in a safe place. It's all right. You're in a safe place.

He would do that every time I'd have a nightmare and he would rub my feet and he would try to get me out of it. And he taught my wife how to do that because she stayed with me. They took me in again to do another 12-hour surgery where they put my ear back on and stitched a bunch of stuff on my face. After that surgery, they moved me into a private room because I was going in and out of nightmares and flashbacks every few minutes.

It was horrible. They always had to have somebody in the room with me. During the day, my wife and my good friend was there all day. And then at night, my older sister was there. My mom would spend the night with me too. They were just there to wake me up. During a nightmare of flashbacks, it would just be horrifying.

The nurses were there. They didn't know what to do, so they tried to hold me down because I'm tossing and turning. They tried to hold me down and calm me down, and that would make it worse because that's what the bear did. The bear pinned me down, so I'd freak out even more. It was a very hard time. I know my family members were really affected by it. My older brother came to visit me. It was about two and a half weeks in when I was first able to walk.

He came in and I managed to walk out a little bit and come back with him. I was standing up at the side of the bed and a bunch of fluid pusses off my face started flowing out. It made me light-headed. I was standing up and I passed out onto the bed. As soon as I hit the bed, I went into a very violent flashback, thrashing and everything. He didn't know what to do. No one knew what to do. One of my sisters was there. They grabbed my feet and started to squeeze them to tell me I'm in a safe place and

I just remember waking up from that and just seeing the look on their face. They were devastated. It's always hard to see a family member or somebody you love with that much pain or that much distress, and it just tore you apart. I didn't want them to hurt as much as I was. When I first was woken up, one of the first things I asked for was for psychiatric help. Everything was, I guess, very emotional, and I was afraid of the bear coming to get me again.

I was terrified to look in the mirror. I was in the hospital for a good three weeks. Before I looked in the mirror, I thought I was missing, you know, my nose, my ears. The nurses covered up the mirror and the washroom didn't have any mirrors in the room and everybody respected that. We planned the day I was going to look in the mirror and how we were going to do it. They were going to take a picture of me with my phone and show me that.

That was a pretty special day. A couple of the nurses came in and shaved my face, fixed my hair up, and my wife got me a nice plaid shirt. They got me all dressed up and cleaned me up. And then the psychiatrist came in and we did the picture, took it. I was actually quite surprised that most of my face was intact.

I had a spot above my right eye that was missing. It was just bone and plate and open wound. That was a very special moment.

Another time, the physiotherapist came in and they brought a walker in. So they got me standing up and I got on the walker. All they wanted me to do was just to walk from the bed to the door of this giant walker. And my wife wasn't there and I really wanted her to see me standing up because I wanted to show her that I was doing good.

So I got to the door and that's all they wanted me to do. But I pushed through the door, got through the doorway to the hallway. And then I started walking down the hallway towards where I thought my wife would come up. And it was, I got about 10 feet from my door and she come around the corner. I just remember seeing her face all light up and she was so happy and so excited. Just give me a hug and got turned around back to the room. And that was pretty much for that day. It was really exhausting.

At the three weeks mark, I had no more staples or stitches in my face. They were all taken out at this point. The only thing that was left was the top of my head on the right side. There was a large chunk of scalp missing. They were unsure what to do with it, so they just left it covered up in bandages. But for the majority, my face was still pretty swollen, but lots of scars, but no staples or stitches.

Both of my eye sockets were completely crushed and replaced with titanium eye sockets. There's chunks of my forehead that are titanium. Lots of screws and pins around my eyebrows, sides of my face, between my eyes and my ears. Week four, I was pretty much self-sufficient. I could feed myself, walk around by myself.

Week five is when they did the last surgery where they patched the piece of scalp that was missing from my skull. I was in the hospital for five weeks. It was constant nightmares every night during the day. Anytime I fell asleep, I'd wake up four or five times a night. When I got out of the hospital, it was constant every night.

At work, I had a couple of major ones at work where I was at my desk. Someone found me underneath my desk crawling with a broomstick. I was telling them that a bear was coming. A couple other times later that year where I woke up outside crawling through the yard. It was very difficult for quite a few years. My wife was always on the edge. She'd be there when I'd be in a nightmare massaging my feet, trying to tell me I'm in a safe place.

One day I fell asleep on the couch and my daughter was about around two years old. My daughter ran in there and saw me laying on the couch. She just wanted to come play. She jumped on me and I went into a complete flashback, knocked her across the room. I remember coming to and of course my daughter's crying, my wife is freaking out and I'm just totally destroyed that that happened. It was very rough, very rough.

I had psychiatric help after it was working with me about PTSD and trying to find the triggers. Got to the point where I was sleeping about 12 hours a week. It was just constant nightmares. Constant. It wasn't up until last year, end of March of 2021, where I got into a special trauma therapy called ART.

ART therapy stands for accelerated resolution therapy. I got in for a 45-minute session, and you're sitting there in a room, and the therapist is quite close, and they move their hand in front of your face, and you replay the scene into your head.

When you were playing the scene in your head, you think about what kind of feelings you get, you know, like anxiety, scared. Then you'd pick one of them and you would tell you to breathe into that space until it kind of goes away. Breathe into that and release that. It's like a brain reset. That night was the first night I slept for eight hours solid, no nightmares, no nothing. I actually went most of the week and didn't have any nightmares. It was such a relief.

I did three more sessions with her. Since then, it's been absolutely amazing. I haven't had any nightmares, flashbacks. I was relieved. Once I was able to sleep after ART, it made a huge difference. I was able to perform better in all aspects, work, home, relationships. It just turned everything more into a normal person.

I was doing much better at work. I was not as moody or as touch and go. Able to think through complex situations and correct them. I mean, it's amazing what sleep does. It's been a little over five years now. With putting together the book and writing the book, putting the thoughts down, actually telling people about my low point in time where I wanted to end it.

I never told anybody that until I put it in the book because I've never been strong enough to share that. The mental side of things are a lot better now, way better. Asking for psychiatric help is not a sign of weakness. You know, everybody needs help. On the physical side, my eyes don't close fully. I don't have quite control over my hands. I'm not able to make a fist as strong as I was previously.

I don't have a lot of feeling in my body, my fingertips. My right leg is all numb all the time. Large chunks of my face are numb. Spots on my head are numb. There's been lots of journals and medical papers that have been written about me

But overall, trying to get back into shape where I was pre-bear attack, it just takes me a little bit longer. But I'm getting there and I don't use it as an excuse. If anything, it's giving me strength.

When you make many goals, you can achieve such incredible things at the end of it. If it wasn't for me just thinking about making it to the next trail, I would have never made it out. If I was thinking about making it to my truck, I don't think I would have made it out. But as I broke it down to such many things and I accomplished them, that just gives you more and more courage to keep going on and you're taking more and more bites out of it.

I've actually been back to the location where I got mauled three times. I was there on the one-year anniversary, the third-year anniversary, and just on the fifth-year anniversary. And also one year after I was mauled, I was up in that same mountain range hunting sheep again, and I shot a non-trophy sheep, which is a female, a ewe, on that next mountainside over. It feels great to be out there. It's still part of who I am. I still seek adrenaline.

I do a lot of things differently now. I've got an in-reach unit, so somebody can track me 24 hours a day, and I can send signals and help and that. I go with a friend. I always carry bear spray, obviously, on my chest where it's readily accessible. But it's just more coming home to my family, my kids, making sure I'm there for them.

The hardest part through this whole period of time is watching my family, watching me struggle through the emotional side. It's very hard, very traumatic. Physically, limitations are easier to get over than the mental side. And watching my wife go through the last four years of hell trying to help me out,

What changed me the most is my kids. I've got two young kids now, a daughter and a son, and I want to be around for them. You know, I want to be there for them.

Today's episode featured Jeremy Evans. You can find many more details about Jeremy and his story in his incredible memoir, Malled, Lessons Learned from a Grizzly Bear Attack, published by Rocky Mountain Books. To contact Jeremy, you can reach out to his publicist at genevieveatrmbooks.com. That's G-E-N-E-V-I-E-V-E at rmbooks.com. ♪

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In a new weekly series we've launched called Advice Line, I'm joined by some legendary founders and together we talk to entrepreneurs in every industry to help tackle their roadblocks in real time. Everybody buys on feeling, Guy, like everybody. So if you don't give them the feeling that they're looking for, they're not going to buy. A lot of times founders will go outside of themselves to build a story. And

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