For Part 1 of Life after Lakeland, click here. For Part 2, click here.
John Engstrom still speaks of walls.
Three years after they caved in around him at Lakeland Mills, he isn't talking of the wall he lifted off of co-worker Aaron Bonnett, freeing his leg and saving his life.
Now, invisible, they close in around Engstrom, barriers that keep him from being healthy, and from living the life he wants to live.
"From the time I leave my house I am pushing myself. It's like I'm steadily pushing some kind of wall that's holding me back all day long," he says. "There's a person inside me that's just struggling, fighting to get the life I used to have back."
Some days are good. He might have two in a row where he makes it out of his house, walks at a nearby park. But often Engstrom's energy will spike down, his motivation gone.
"I find the next day I'm done for. I'm so severely depressed. I get more and more irritable," he says. "It's a very tormentful life."
Engstom is on lower doses of antidepressants now, but after the April 2012 explosion that killed co-workers Glenn Roche and Alan Little and injured 22, he was in deep depression.
"Right afterwards I didn't have much of a choice. I didn't want to feel suicidal the way that I was feeling months after the explosion. I said anything to make me not feel this way," says Engstrom, 50, who says he has post-traumatic stress disorder.
He also credits Prince George's Brain Injured Group for helping save him from "the devil in my head" - an expression his father used to use.
"If it wasn't for those people, I don't think I'd be here right now," says Engstrom, who is nine years sober.
He meets with a counsellor at the Brain Injured Group. For him, it's an oasis where people don't ask stupid questions and where he, in turn, doesn't feel stupid when he gets mixed up.
"We're carrying around an injured brain and that's hard for anyone to see unless they talk to us for a length of time. That's when we start stuttering, hesitating, losing words in mid-thought, mid-sentence."
For a man who once worked out religiously, the loss of that lifestyle has been difficult. He has a bad back now, his vertebrae damaged from dead lifting the massive weight off his friend three years before.
He watches cyclists pass by at Fort George Park and thinks of the mountain bike in his basement, tires flat.
"I've always had that survivor nature in me to keep going forward no matter what. I've had concussions outside the mill that never brought me down, never made me feel the way I do now."
About a year before the explosion, he fell off steps at the sawmill and knocked himself out. He was back at work a few days later.
"I was suffering badly from that fall then the explosion came along and compounded my concussions," he says, bringing the total to five.
The anxiety, too, traps him. It creeps in when he's around people, or as thoughts that nag and nag, raising his stress. It comes when he sleeps, waking him to a tightened chest, gasping for breath.
He and his wife sleep in separate beds in part because of his restless fits. He's hit her accidentally while tossing at night and has lost a lot of his sexual desire.
"There's a big part of me that used to be that affectionate person that's no longer in me," says Engstrom. In this instance, he's the one with the wall around his emotions. "That's why it's not fair for our families to be suffering when we're lacking that."
While he struggles to think of things that make him happy now, he says in some ways he's a better man.
"I am more compassionate with other people who are suffering from whatever because I know what it is myself to be suffering and no one's paying attention."
He has trouble remembering, and even when he writes things down, so sure he has it right, he'll walk into a doctor's appointment, and be told he's late. He'll have to reschedule.
When the cell phone resting on a picnic table at Fort George Park lets out a loud ring, Engstrom flinches.
"I used to beat myself up about it," he says, of the immediate reactions to loud noises or simple sounds like sneezing.
Those sounds were nothing compared to the days on end of fireworks at the Canada Winter Games in February.
"It just brings you back to that night of the freaken' oil barrels, the propane tanks going off one after another," says Enstrom, whispering "boom, boom, boom."
Images from that night remain vivid.
"He's walking towards me like a zombie...no sound came out of his mouth. All I can remember at first was his forearm skin hanging down in big chunks. I swear to god his glasses were melted into his face," he says, adding the air around him smelt like burnt hotdog.
"I can't get that thought out of my head, that sickening smell."
Engstrom never made it to the Prince George courthouse for the inquest, but says he can't help but follow it in the paper.
"It just brings out more depression and more anguish," he says.
Engstrom hasn't worked since the blast, after nearly 12 years at Lakeland where he was a log bin attendant.
Engstrom was taken off WorkSafeBC early last year and declared fit to work, he says, after being put under surveillance. He says they video taped him shovelling part of his driveway in the winter, going on walks and brought up a time he drove to the Ancient Forest with his wife.
In October the matter came up in B.C. legislature. Opposition leader NDP John Horgan called it harassment, a term that Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond objected to.
"To suggest that there has been harassment is an outrageous statement," she said. "We should be very clear, before any surveillance is initiated... there is a very high test before WorkSafe even considers that."
For Engstrom, he's still a ways off in his recovery.
"I think I was doing more right after the explosion than I am doing now and that's why I feel like I'm going backwards instead of forwards," he says.
"It's at a point of telling myself I'm not going to let this explosion take my life away. I've got to try and make something of it."
