Changing a life: road safety message after life-changing crash

Littlehampton man Yudhi Mohan-Ram was the last person any of his friends expected to be involved in a major crash. 

Obsessed with honing his motorbike skills, he focused on developing his ability to manoeuvre his bike safely.

So when his family and friends heard the then 35-year-old was in a coma after being “scraped off the road”, the news hit hard. 

“My memory is like this: I came off the freeway, I see the car coming (and think) ‘shit, he isn’t going to stop’, then boom he hits me and I’m out,” Mr Mohan-Ram said. 

“I wake up in the middle of the road and two paramedics are working on me and say ‘do you know your name?’, ‘do you know what day it is?’.”

Mr Mohan-Ram was riding home from work along a route had taken many times when a provisional driver failed to stop at a stop sign on Mt Barker Road and collided with Mr Mohan-Ram and his bike.  

“It completely blanks your brain, you don’t even know you’re in pain ... you don’t feel it,” Mr Mohan-Ram said. 

“But (when I woke up) I looked at the bottom of my legs and they were facing the opposite directions so I knew I couldn’t stand and I was bleeding.”

Mr Mohan-Ram was given a 10% chance of survival and about 15 days later doctors took him off life-support to see if he could survive on his own.

He couldn’t. 

Mr Mohan-Ram remained on life-support until he beginning of December – more than a month after the accident. 

“In terms of damage, I had no idea of the damage that had happened to me so the (medical staff) were going through all my injuries and it was kind of irrelevant to me because everything had healed,” Mr Mohan-Ram said. 

Mr Mohan-Ram said he was in good health prior to his crash and had a determined mindset, which helped him focus on rehabilitation, including beginning to stand and walk again.

“You step back into a role at infancy stage and try to understand where you’re at and just keep moving your boundaries ... until you work out where your (new) 100% is because you’ll never get back to (your old) 100%,” he said. 

Mr Mohan-Ram walked out of hospital in time for Christmas, but he was not the same man he was before the crash.

He has medical conditions that he will carry with him for the rest of his life, nerve damage and mental trauma. 

The medical equipment that kept him alive also damaged his voice box and nasal cavity, permanently changing his voice.

Due to the his ongoing treatment and surgeries he was also unable to keep his full-time job. 

Mr Mohan-Ram said the road safety message comes back to “attitude” and, while he understands people make mistakes on the road, those mistakes can have a lasting impact.

He said drivers needed to respect the road every time they travelled, because a split second decision could have a massive impact.