Last year, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario saw 1,270 children with head injuries, 41 of those were related to tobogganing.
20-year-old Tyler Lisacek knows too well the devastating effect a brain injury can have on someone’s life. At 13-years-old, he was hit by a car while riding his bicycle home from swimming. Tyler had just taken his helmet off because he was hot.
“I had been hit by an SUV going 98 km an hour,” Lisacek was later told. “My head went into the hood of the car and I got launched 7 feet in the air into the ditch. Nothing has been the same since then.”
CHEO neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Vassilyadi operated on Tyler. “As a result of that, he had a severe head injury and had to be in the intensive care unit for a month,” says Dr. Vassilyadi. “All parts of his brain were injured.”