Newly elected One Nation Ngadjuri MP David Paton has survived two serious cycling accidents, telling InDaily how it changed his life and inspired his move to politics.

The second leaving him with numerous injuries, ranging from broken vertebrae, a broken neck, two broken collarbones, a broken leg, 14 broken ribs, while both his hands were broken, and his pelvis was broken in six places.

It was 2011 when he had his first near-death experience.

The small business owner, who previously served as deputy mayor of Adelaide Plains Council before being elected to state parliament in the March state election, was returning to Hackney caravan park after riding a stage in the Tour Down Under in Willunga.

“We stopped at a set of traffic lights, and an elderly gentleman had gone through a red light and then hit me from behind into that wall headfirst,” he said, saying the collision sent him flying into the National Wine Centre wall at 60 kilometres an hour.

“There was a doctor who was sitting in his car at the traffic lights at the time … he got a blanket out of the car not to keep me warm, because it was 33 degrees that day, but to cover a dead body.”

Paton was rushed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where he received surgery on his shattered shoulder.

“We decided to drive home, and luckily, on about the Wednesday, seeing my GP back at home, I was diagnosed with blood clots in my legs, and if I had flown, I probably wouldn’t have gotten off the plane,” Paton said.

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He never returned to physical work after that first accident, taking six months to recover from severe bruising to the bottom of his feet, while it took more than a year of weekly physiotherapy to get movement back to his elbow.

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The accident has left him with a permanent physical disability; he can no longer straighten his arm and Paton was later diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety and depression.

“Everything you do, you do with a straight arm, you just don’t think about it; it’s affected everything I’ve done ever since,” said Paton, who now struggles to tie his shoelaces and pick up objects because of his injuries.

Paton’s life would change again on a fateful day in 2016 while riding with a group of mates in country Victoria on a route he had travelled thousands of times, when he was hit by a car travelling 80 kilometres an hour.

“Somebody this morning yelled out, ‘Kangaroo’, and there was a dead kangaroo on the road … Unfortunately for me, wherever I was in the line, the others all had enough notice to basically swerve and miss it,” he said.

“I hit the tail end of it, and that threw me onto the other side of the road. I was okay, basically just a fall, but as I was getting up, I got hit by an oncoming car.

“So, I got pinned under the driver’s side wheel for up to 50 minutes, and the reason I was there for 50 minutes was that they couldn’t just jack it as you’d normally jack a car because it’d roll, so they had to wait for the emergency services to come with a special jack.”

Paton was rushed in a helicopter to The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, where he was immediately taken into surgery with 11 surgeons.

He had suffered from a broken vertebrae, a broken neck, two broken collarbones, a broken leg, 14 broken ribs, while both his hands were broken, and his pelvis was broken in six places. He also had missing skin and cuts to the corner of his eye and his ear.

“Most of that time, I was under death watch. So, each morning the family get a meeting with the doctor, and he would say, ‘Well, yep, I’ve made it through another day’. The injuries were at a point they didn’t think I would,” Paton told InDaily.

Paton was placed in an induced coma for three days and stayed in the intensive care unit for seven. He spent 11 days in Alfred Hospital and was later transferred to Epworth for rehab, where he spent 14 weeks “basically learning to do everything again”, including relearning to walk.

“To be a grown man and knowing that you can’t even shower yourself and you’ve got to have six nurses and they’re showering you … that probably then saw the start of depression, which continued for 10 years,” Paton said.

While Paton’s life has returned to a degree of normality, he continues to feel aches during the cold and has to limit the amount of time he spends doing physical activities.

Paton told InDaily that his Christian faith and the support of his family were integral to his recovery process, including his wife, Kylie and his two children, Kaitlyn and Joshua.

He says the horrific experiences have delivered him a strong understanding for his political career in advocating for better regional emergency services and mental health care.

Kylie Paton has documented her husband’s accidents and recovery in the book, ‘Miracle Man’: One Family’s Journey of Survival.

“Both my accident, I look at and go, two of the best days of my life, and most people go, ‘You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’, and I go, ‘No’, because if I look at where I am now, I wouldn’t be sitting here now,” he said.

“I looked at the date (of the election), and I must have been on the phone or something, and when I did, it came up as a memory for 10 years ago of my accident, and it was at that point, we went on holy crap.”

Paton now sports a tattoo featuring a crucifix, wings of an angel and bike chains, symbolising the significance of the accidents to his life.

“My wife says that from that day, there’s an angel in heaven missing its wings because those wings were used to protect him,” he said.

Despite the two life-changing accidents, Paton continues to get back on the bike as much as possible, saying, “riding was always about the mental health”.