Baroness vocalist/guitarist John Baizley took part in a revealing new interview with MetalSucks centering around his (and his bandmates) ongoing recovery from their August bus crash while on tour in the UK.
Some excerpts from that can be found below with the full Q&A available at the above-mentioned link:
“Was it a serious possible outcome that the arm or the hand would have to be amputated?
I was told it was almost a certainty if the break in my arm had been worse, because essentially the upper bone in my arm was turned into dust. At the breaking point they couldn’t tell what bone fragments went where through the scans, the results were so chaotic and everything was so misplaced. It was a clean break through, with seven or eight large pieces and a bunch of fragments. They did not know which pieces went where.
They ran a seam up the back of my arm, removed everything, broke my forearm bone in half — that’s where all the muscles in my upper arm attach — peeled all those muscles back, pulled them out, and they were left with just the broken bones. Then they pulled all the nerves out — pulled everything out — tucking it in my shoulder or leaving it hanging out.
It sounded crazy the way they explained it to me. What was supposed to be a three hour surgery ended up being an eight hour surgery during which, of course, I was under anesthesia the whole time. During the whole eight hours the doctors were telling my wife and my mother that they just didn’t know what was going on, it’d be another hour, another hour, and everyone was just getting really worried.
When I woke up they asked me if I could make a fist, and when it was no problem they were happy. They told me they were surprised with what I had been left with but unsurprised with what I had not been left with, which is feeling on the top of most of my arm. I can’t feel a thing there, probably won’t ever, because there has been pretty extensive nerve damage. The rest has been really banged up too, and there’s a constant electric pain in my hand. It’s not an easy thing to deal with but by comparison to no arm or a useless hand, sure, bring the pain on. That’s much preferable.
How are you doing emotionally? Certainly the tone of the letter you published last week seemed to conclude rather optimistically. At least your outlook on life and everything. Is that consistent with how you feel?
Definitely. I have to remain optimistic. I have to, or I don’t think I’m likely to see anything improve dramatically. I have high expectations of what Baroness is capable of and what we will continue to do and I’ve got some patience, but not limitless patience, with how long it takes us to get there.
I’d like to say that we’ll be back as soon as we’re physically capable. That will be a huge component in becoming mentally OK again. It’s like having a fear of flying. There’s no way to stay on the ground and completely deal with your fear; you have to approach it, engage it and overcome it, and not without some pain. I see this as the same thing.
If one of the after-effects of this is we all have reservations about touring or traveling by bus or whatever, if there’s some creative inhibitions or some fears about who we are and what we do or our worth as a band, the only way we can get tabs on that again is by touring.
So I see that, for us, as a major rehabilitation tool. I’d like to use that in order to make us better. If this tragedy has to happen to us, and it has, if we are caught in the backwash of this accident we need to see where everything settles and what we’re left with physically, what we’re left with creatively and spiritually and all that. Then the only option as I see it is to make an attempt with 100% of our being to come through this and benefit from it.
Find a way to turn all of this into something that elevates us, that pushes us forward. I believe that by first going through the physical rehabilitation we are going to show ourselves collectively that we’re stronger than we thought we were. Through getting back into shape as a band we’ll show ourselves mentally what we’re capable of in the future.
After we get our “sea legs” back we’re going to continue to write music. Its going to get better, it’s going to further the same goals we had prior to August 15th. There’s just no other option.
The only other thing we could do is just wallow in it. That’s not an option, not going to happen for me. I don’t have the time left in my life to wallow in some happenstance thing that happened to me. It’s random, it’s terrible and it shouldn’t have happened but it did. I’m not going to take any blame or fault for it.”
