Johan Renier: “Part of my ribs were broken, I had a collapsed lung. My face was broken in several places. My mouth and my teeth especially, I now have a different bite. They reattached everything and put it back in place.”
Small miracle
It is a small miracle that Johan is still able to tell the story. At the beginning of this year he fell 21 meters from his hotel room on the seventh floor. He is then traveling in Pattaya, a tourist attraction in Thailand. Four months later he realizes that he was very lucky. “Actually, yes. Why am I still here, I think. There was an awning on the ground floor and on the first floor. And that probably slowed my fall a bit. I have a good guardian angel.”
Johan runs a catering business on the sea wall of Koksijde and was a professional football player at Club Brugge in the 1980s. His sporting past does help. “According to the doctors, this indeed plays a major role in the rehabilitation, especially. They also said that it would take about a year before I am normal again. We are four months further and I am almost normal.”
No drink or drugs
Johan had not been drinking that evening and he does not take drugs. Spicy detail: He fell down completely naked, without clothes. “I always sleep naked. And of course, when you sleepwalk, you don’t think about putting clothes on and then doing something stupid. So it’s just because of my sleepwalking that I fell. I got out of bed and jumped down or… I don’t actually know what I did.”
After the serious fall, Johan spent three weeks in a Thai hospital and also three months in the AZ Sint-Jan in Bruges. Despite the traumatic fall, he wants to return to Thailand as soon as possible.
