Life Hero: I'm Thinking of You - Dale Elliott

• Yvette Neilson
• 15 April 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Dale Elliott, Director, I'm Thinking of You. Photo credit: Paul Curruthers

Before my accident, I was probably the happiest I’d been in my whole life. A week before my accident I was flying a plane from Adelaide to Melbourne at night. On taking off from Adelaide’s main runway, I did a turn to the left and looked down at all the lovely city lights.

I was captain of this plane, had reached my dream of being a commercial pilot and just went “Yee ha!”, like I’d touched the sky. Also, I’d just bought my dream car, I was into skydiving, snowboarding, beach volleyball and indoor cricket…

When everything changes…

When I came off my motorbike and hit the ground, I landed on my back and couldn’t move. I reached down and felt my chest and my stomach with my left hand, then put my left hand on my left leg and couldn’t feel it. After leaving school I’d gone into the army, so I knew a bit of first aid and was sure I’d broken my spine. At the hospital I learned I’d broken both my back and collarbone.

In just a moment, I had gone from being a singing, dancing, karaoke king and pilot to being a paraplegic – all I had was my left hand. As I lay there, my first thought was, “I’m going to have to tell my boss I can’t fly on Monday.” Next, I thought, “My wife is going to be here any minute.” Our house was just 200 metres along the road. That’s when it hit me that this was going to be really bad.

The ripple effect

My life had changed forever. I knew I’d never fly again, and it sucked my soul out to look down and see a wheelchair. I didn’t want to feel that so started trying to self-counsel, to come up with solutions. The sense of loss was just the worst feeling you can ever imagine. I was looking down at my legs and feeling really sorry for them, they’d always done a great job and now they were just lifeless.

The care I received in hospital was fantastic, but support for my family and friends wasn’t. Hospitals will tell you that it’s not their mission to care for all of those people – it would cost them millions each year if they counselled everyone. This doesn’t mean that they don’t consider this important – they just have a limited budget and have to prioritise their funds.

In the months that followed, as I got out of hospital and started re-assimilating with my family and friends, I became aware of what the people around me were going through because of my trauma. That’s when I started to become aware of the ripple effect of my injury.

My wife went into very bad depression, losing 12 kilos in the first two weeks. She was only a size 10 to start with. She looked like death warmed up, but I couldn’t help. I asked my social workers whether they could offer any assistance to my wife, but they didn’t have the resources. No-one else in my family could do it as they were all in much the same position. Also during this time, one friend had a dreadful car accident and another died from leukaemia. I saw the stress and depression that it caused to their family and friends.

What next?

I went back to work as a manager in the aviation industry, but it was hard on me being in the office, organising other pilots and listening to them complaining, because I really liked flying. I’d say, “Listen mate, I’d give anything to be up there on that flight you just did,” and realised my passion for aviation was slowly withering away. I found myself asking the universe, “I’m 27, I’ve got a lot of energy. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

Around this time, my wife and I went to a party out in the country and, on the way, passed an accident. Someone had been killed and Emergency Services was there. When we got to the party, my wife said, “I can’t get out of the car, Dale. What if it’s a guest from the party? I can’t be there.” She was having flashbacks to my accident – and I was too.

Waking to a new dream

The next day, what had happened played on my mind. I felt that I had experience and skills to share, and had been preparing myself to go into counselling mode if someone from the party had died or been badly hurt. Although the victim wasn’t anyone from the party, someone’s family was going through that grief right now. I started getting this glow in my soul, “Hey Dale, you’re onto something here. You’re worrying about something that’s good to be worried about.”

I thought, well, what do we all use to communicate? Could I have run around with a pen last night and got everyone’s names and phone numbers? Then I thought, “No, you’d use the net for that, or mobile phones…” I said to my wife, “Imagine if all you had to do was get on the net and write in a couple of quick comments, like, ‘Dale got into the wheelchair by himself for the first time today, he was absolutely rapt’ to send as an SMS or email?” When she replied, “that would be great,” I knew that I’d found what I wanted to do next.

I searched the internet for hours, Googling ‘online support’, and couldn’t find a service like this anywhere. I knew at this point that I’d found my new mission in life.

Make the dream happen

Where to begin? I knew nothing about building a website or anything about IT. I didn’t know about domain names, servers, what a web developer looked like, or what coding and hosting options even meant… I was a pilot and only used the net to get weather reports – that was it.

I had to pull together a huge amount of information very quickly, and learn a hell of a lot. I’m still learning, every day. I had a budget of $80,000 to build and launch the site worldwide with a big campaign and plenty of media exposure. I sat down and wrote a business plan, and set aside about $50,000 to build the website and do all the research.

Work with the experts

When I first went and sat down with web development companies, they all looked around at each other wondering how the hell they were going to build this thing – they’d never heard of anything like it before. I wanted the site to be fully interactive, very secure, and easy to use. If someone got a bit stroppy and said things they shouldn’t, comments could be added or deleted and, if necessary, people could be banned from the Care Zone. Then they wondered how the SMS function would work – how they could send a message to a specific, private Care Zone site.