There was a time in the life of Nolan Barnes when he would have rolled his eyes – or worse – through a presentation by PARTY, the organization formed to Prevent Alcohol & Risk-Related Trauma in Youth.

In fact, Barnes admitted he was once taken out of a presentation by PARTY when he was in high school, a testament to the idea that young people often see themselves as invincible and their decisions have little to no consequence.

“I was goofing around, oddly enough. Now I’m doing the presentation,” Barnes said. “I hope I can reach those people that were like me. I feel like sometimes, and I hear speakers all the time, I felt like I was a kid like a kid that I’m talking to.

“I felt like it was someone that didn’t have that experience... and that they didn’t have the credibility to me. I think that by me telling that kind of story, that D student kid that just wanted to have a good time, popular kid in school, that it happens to everybody.”

At age 18, Barnes was a sleeping passenger when a vehicle with nine people that he was in rolled on the highway very early one morning. He and some people he knew, in various stages of drunkenness and coming off of drugs, were returning home to the Yorkton area from a Saskatoon rave when the rollover happened.

Travelling without a seat belt, Barnes was flung from the vehicle into a ditch. Waking up, unable to move his legs, he heard shrieking around him. He was taken to Saskatoon hospital and after months of rehab and recovery, has been able to live a full life despite not having the use of his legs.

A former student-athlete in Yorkton, he slid into a life of alcohol and drugs over his high school years, until the accident.

Barnes spoke to kids from Riverview and Cornerstone at the Dr. F.H. Wigmore Regional Hospital Tuesday with the PARTY program, having attended their mock crash near the hospital grounds.

“It’s sometimes difficult to hold back my emotions when I start talking about things like my family and how people feel,” he said. “If you hear my voice, you can hear me kind of crack up a little bit. I go back and it’s real for me. I feel those feelings, and I want that to come through when I’m telling my story.”

He recalled when his parents found out about the crash he was in, and they rushed from their Yorkton-area home to his hospital bedside, that the first thing he said to them was that he was sorry. He said they were glad he hadn’t died in the crash, as his mother’s parents had also died in an auto crash years before.

As his months of recovery went along, he found friends he hadn’t talked to in years were visiting him in the hospital. While he thought no one cared what happened to him over the years that he was in stages of drug abuse, he found family and friends were there for him.

“Having those people hold you accountable is a big thing,” Barnes said. “I think everybody in life needs someone to hold them accountable once in a while. It has a negative and a positive effect.”

Barnes participates in three sports, downhill skiing, sledge hockey and water skiing. He’s made it to the top three in the world in disabled water skiing.

He feels that how honest he is with the students he talks to helps build that ability to relate to them.

“These guys get told ‘don’t’, every day about something,” he said. “I try and just relay how the decisions I made affected my life without almost knowing until I can look back years later. I think being honest is super important. I think it makes you relateable and makes you trustworthy and I think it makes it real.”