The Soda Room podcast: Ian and Seb Steel on their recovery from horrific forklift accident
Seb Steel is lying crushed under a five-tonne forklift. His father Ian is first on the scene and must act quickly to save him.
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It’s every father’s worst nightmare.
Ian Steel is cradling 19-year-old son Seb in his lap. They’re on the floor of a giant industrial coolroom at the family’s refrigerated transport hub in Cavan.
Seb has just been run over by a five-tonne forklift. His right leg is mangled beyond description. There is blood everywhere. Seb is floating in and out of consciousness. When he’s conscious, he’s screaming in agony. When he loses consciousness, he stops breathing and Ian resuscitates him. Multiple times. The wait for an ambulance seems like an eternity. Every second feels like 10 minutes.
“It was just, just horrific,” Ian Steel says.
“I’m just thinking, I’ve just gotta save him, basically, just gotta save him. Save him. Save him.
“I was just telling him that I loved him and, you know: ‘We’ll be right’. (Saying) I love you as I’m holding him. Holding him there waiting for the ambulance to come.
“There was blood going everywhere and it was just getting colder and colder and colder. I’m just screaming ‘help me, help me’. It was just absolutely horrific – absolutely horrific.”
This terrible scene plays out in September, 2021. Now, 17 months later, Ian and Seb Steel have spoken together publicly for the first time about the incident and the harrowing months that followed.
The pair sat down with Mark Soderstrom on the Soda Room podcast and detailed the trauma the family has gone through, the mental health battles that caused both men to want to end their lives, Seb’s new passion of kayaking and his Paris Paralympic dreams.
Seb Steel admits he had a less-than conventional upbringing that truly opened his eyes about the plight of children less fortunate than himself.
Father Ian is a qualified builder and successful businessman. He is also the founder and driving force behind charity Kickstart for Kids, which provides meals and mentors for thousands of at-risk children across the state.
Seb grew up helping Ian fill the family ute with food and ferrying it to schools to feed students who might be arriving on empty stomachs. The charity has become a South Australian institution.
It serves about 60,000 breakfasts a week in more than 400 schools, and earned Ian Steel a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2017.
The Steel family also welcomed numerous foster children over the years and Ian and wife Georgie have an adopted daughter Billie who they met while distributing breakfasts to disadvantaged kids at her school.
Even as a teenager Seb did a lot of mentoring for less fortunate teens. He attended Scotch College and, like most teenage boys, loved sport and was a keen footballer.
He had left school and was working for the family business when his world turned upside down a few days before the AFL grand final in September, 2021.
Ian was working on the other side of the coolroom and didn’t see the accident but heard a harrowing scream not long after Seb arrived at work about 7am.
After running to investigate the scream, the trauma of seeing his son under the forklift sent Ian into a state of shock and he involuntarily started running for help. He describes “waking up” when he got to a nearby gate, wondering how he had gotten there and running back to Seb, who was still stuck under a forklift.
He tried in vain to lift the 5000kg piece of machinery so had no choice but to get onto the forklift and drive it back over off his son’s mangled leg, before holding him and trying to keep him alive until the ambulance arrived.
“I remember Dad being on top of me (saying) you don’t want to look at your leg, or you don’t want to look at anything right now, because it was all, obviously, everywhere” Seb says on the podcast.
“I remember feeling really, really uncomfortable. I’m guessing I was in a lot of pain but I don’t recall the pain I was in. I was like, nothing was … It just didn’t feel right.
“And then I remember managing to have a look and seeing just, like bone, really, and then it all kind of just punched me in the face and I started freaking out.
“And I started freaking out and I was like ‘Oh my god, what’s going on?’.”
Doctors later told them Seb’s leg had been ‘degloved’ – a graphic description for a horrific injury in which all of the skin, flesh, ligaments, muscle and sinew between his knee and ankle had been pulled from the bone.
“It’s like if you had a sock and on the inside of the sock was your bone, and you pulled the sock down – that was my skin, muscle, ligaments and all that,” Seb explains.
Seb spent more than a month in hospital fighting for his life. Ian and Georgie tag-teamed sleeping by his side, trying to help him cope with both the debilitating physical pain and the mental anguish of knowing his leg needed to be amputated.
The mental suffering was made worse by sometimes confusing information coming from doctors and surgeons. The duo recall being told bluntly one morning, without warning, the leg needed to be amputated. They were led to believe the amputation was going to happen that afternoon.
“I just remember looking at dad and just crying for hours and I didn’t stop crying,” Seb says.
“Not because of the pain, or anything, just because we felt so helpless. And just so continually let down and drained.”
This was all occurring during the height of Covid restrictions, and visitor numbers were limited. Seb recalls one moment between his father leaving and his mother arriving that he wished he could be voluntarily euthanised.
“I was just like ‘there’s nothing for me, I’m done’,” he recalls. “I’ve never felt so depressed and just empty on life as I did at that point.”
He woke after that surgery, one of many he has endured, surprised to still have his leg. The family finally learnt that an amputation was unable to go ahead until skin that had been removed from his upper leg and transplanted as a graft on the initial wound had healed.
This healing process ultimately took more than six months, a time during which Seb almost died at least once. He also developed an addiction to the opioids he needed to manage the intense pain and was effectively bedridden the entire period.
“I was taking copious amounts of oxycodone to just get me through the day,” Seb says. “As a 19-year-old boy, that is never going to end well. That was six months of slamming through enough opioids to sedate a horse.”
A look back at Seb’s Instagram account shows he was, at times, able to maintain his sense of humour. A post just days after the accident included the line: “I am currently balls deep in my fourth bag of ketamine for the day and had more oxycodone than the Wolf of Wall Street.”
(Sidenote: Seb’s ability to laugh at himself remains obvious on his Instagram biography, which simply reads: Forklift 1 – Seb 0)
Around Easter last year, doctors finally amputated his right leg, from above the knee, during a 10-hour surgery. The surgery was supposed to be the start of a new chapter in Seb’s life and offer him a chance to move on from the pain and dismay of the previous six or seven months.
But he was still traumatised from his earlier stay in hospital and so, only two days after the surgery and high on the painkiller Ketamine, he checked himself out, despite everyone urging him not to. And so he had no medical support when the Ketamine wore off and the phantom pain (the sensation of pain on a part of a body that has been removed) kicked in.
“I’m lying in bed and it’s just like, the worst possible pain your brain can inflict on you,” Seb recalls.
“I remember just feeling like someone was just sawing through my leg again, except it was never-ending – it was just going and going and going and going and going. I couldn’t do anything about it because I hadn’t been in hospital long enough for anyone to teach me ways around it.
“So I’d be sitting there in bed and, you know, a metre away from my knee it feels like someone’s stabbing my foot or lighting it on fire or giving it a cattle prod or something like that.
“I can’t even explain that – it’s like the worst, horrible thing ever.”
Seb’s screaming, crying and repeated declarations that he wanted to die affected the entire house. A mate who came over to offer support was reduced to tears.
His addiction to oxycodone meant opioid painkillers were out of the question and it was only after a long stint in a Flinders Medical Centre amputations clinic at that the family was finally able to see some hope on the horizon.
But then someone introduced Seb to medical marijuana, a drug to which he also became hooked – an addiction that required more hospital visits to overcome.
Finally though, after a horror 17 months, the Steels are starting to feel like they are emerging from a dark chapter they will never forget.
Before the surgery to remove his leg, after months of lying in bed with no exercise, Seb had blown out to 112 kilograms – 30kg heavier than before the accident.
But he is now fit and strong, and has his sights set on competing at next year’s Paris paralympics. After a less than auspicious start to his kayaking career (“He kept falling out of the boat,” Ian says), he persisted and now trains every day. He has won a South Australian Sports Institute scholarship and did so well at national titles in Penrith last month he has been earmarked by Paddle Australia as an athlete with potential to achieve an elite podium performance at an international level.
“I lost the majority of my mates through the accident,” Seb says. “But I’ve made so many more friends out of kayaking and it’s just like a different world to what I was in beforehand.
“So I’ve set myself up, and my family has helped set me up, in a position now where I’m looking at a way better future as to I was looking at before, when I was 19 and driving forklifts and trucks every day, and going out drinking all the time, and doing all that.
“It’s just mental as to how quickly it can change, and then change again and … you know … just keep on persisting and you get there in the end.”
Ian Steel says he used to thrive as “the life of the party”. He was a former football coach, and admits he was probably the epitome of an alpha male. But every day for six months, he says, he thought about ending his life.
“Every day,” he says. “I knew how I was going to do it – didn’t do it because of my family but knew exactly how I was going to do it. And I’m only just starting to feel better now.”
He has made a point of apologising to all the mates who reached out to help only to be “pushed away” and has urged people, especially males, to talk through their issues rather than bottle them up inside.
When asked to describe what he’s learned about his son, now 20 in these past 17 months, Ian Steel is unequivocal.
“I’ve learnt that he’s become a beautiful human being,” he says. “(Before) this happened, would I have called him a beautiful human being? Probably not. He was an 18-year-old boy, right.
“I’m so proud of where he’s got to, but I’m also so thankful that it’s ended up the way that it’s ended up.
“I think that if he wasn’t as strong as he is, and has been, that it could have ended up a lot worse. He could still be lying in bed, smoking weed every day, feeling sorry for himself.
“But he decided to do something about it and stop it and, and be the best that he can be.”
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