KEY POINTS:
In a St Mary's Bay apartment overlooking Westhaven and the harbour bridge, Doug the Digger is sitting at the table, broad fingers stabbing at a laptop.
I know he's the man behind the Doug the Digger books because he's wearing the uniform - a fluoro-orange vest over a blue T-shirt with the Doug the Digger logo on one sleeve and too-short blue shorts. I also couldn't miss his bright-blue truck outside, taking up half the street.
This is not the home of digger-driving children's author Alistair McIntyre, it's his publicist's. McIntyre looks as if he'd be more at home shifting dirt with his contractor mates up Whangarei way. He certainly swears like a contractor.
But there's more to him than meets the eye. He wears the shorts and T-shirt whether he's earthmoving, visiting schools as a Duffy Books in Homes role model, or attending charity bashes. His publicist says this is Alistair dressed up.
He leaps up and gives a firm handshake which is relevant because if he tried to shake hands from the wrong angle he'd be wincing in pain. And he's twice my size.
It's 21 years since McIntyre's right forearm was crushed when the refrigerated truck he was loading lurched backwards, wedging the arm against the beam of a shed. He nearly lost his arm, but the surgical team members at Middlemore Hospital were brilliant. They taught him exercises to stretch tendons and keep his hand going and, after three weeks in hospital, he was sent home to Whangarei to continue rehab.
But when he walked into Whangarei Hospital to have his dressings changed, they turned him away. They had no record of his injury or his admission to Middlemore a few weeks earlier, on February 7, 1986. This was the start of McIntyre's journey - a battle with officialdom and paperwork that reached a climax of sorts last November when ACC wrote a cheque for $611,910.96. He bought his Kenworth with it.
The backdated payment for loss of earnings is not quite the end of McIntyre's journey. He reckons the arrears were wrongly calculated. He also wants compensation for the 21-year nightmare which, he says, ACC's mismanagement of his file has caused him.
He'll get there in the end.
When McIntyre tackled ACC Whangarei about the basis of the backpay calculation, he says branch manager Barry Davis asked: "When are you going to get on with the rest of your life?"
McIntyre kept his initial response to himself but phoned Davis the next day and replied with a question: "When is ACC going to show me an accurate file?"
As things stand, the Alistair David McIntyre file is an impenetrable fiction, except to ACC. There is the claim opened for a home accident which McIntyre says never occurred; the records of payments for treatment he says never took place; the records of a Rotorua man with the same surname.
McIntyre knows the file intimately and can recite by heart 12-digit claim numbers and dates.
He draws air graphs charting the lasting impact of his 1987 accident, and his battles with ACC, on his physical and emotional health. They always plot downwards. He's been hospitalised with depression, been a "space cadet" on painkillers and steroids, been done for fraud, been suicidal. But there have been peaks amid the troughs, such as his first, self-published Doug the Digger book.
He has become very good with figures, quite a change for a kid who dreamed only of driving heavy machinery and decided he didn't need schooling.
"My Dad was a civil engineer. I would see him doing the paperwork but it didn't really register. But when I went out on a job with him he'd let me sit on the machines and pull the levers. At school, teachers would be going 'A, B, C ... ' and I'd be dreaming about riding a grader."
He wagged school often and left at 15, working as a shearer, landscaper and starting a pet food distribution business.
By his mid-20s he was making $1000 a week, big money in the mid-1980s, with his trucks and tractors. His mother did the books. "I think my highest marks in School C were about 12 or 15 per cent."
It's arguable his lack of education has contributed to his difficulties with ACC; it's equally arguable that the system should not take advantage.
At Bombay Pet Foods on February 7, 1986, while loading cartons into the back of his refrigerated truck, he signalled for his assistant to move the truck forward so he could close the doors. But when the truck started it lurched backwards.
He grabbed the truck canopy with his right hand to stop himself falling. His forearm took the brunt as the 10 tonne truck wedged against a wooden roof beam. His shoulder was severely wrenched but, dangling from the roof, he felt no pain until they freed him. "I'm just hanging about," he told rescuers.
It took several operations in Middlemore to save the arm. The main bones were pulverised, there was soft tissue damage and compressed nerves. Bone was taken from his hip to plate the arm. He recalls the excruciating pain after his arm and hand became locked in the fetal position and a doctor prised the tendons apart.
After he was sent away by Whangarei Hospital, family connections eventually got him enrolled there for ACC-funded physiotherapy. After 26 weeks, funding stopped and he was given clearance to return to work.
His current GP, Andrew Miller, believes in the rush to save his forearm, the injury to his shoulder was forgotten.
McIntyre's file indicates Middlemore medics were not as skilled at form-filling as they were at treating his injuries. A pre-admission form wrongly records the injury as to his left arm, not his right. His first ACC form, filled out at Middlemore, has a tick in the box marked "fracture" but fails to mention the damaged shoulder or the severity of the crush injuries.
His lawyer Christina Cook suspects many of McIntyre's later problems stem from the original ACC form. "It may have been the misdescription of the injury, and once a mistake is made and that mistake is repeated it just carries on."
Once off ACC, McIntyre's then-GP put him on anabolic steroids and painkillers. He couldn't operate heavy machinery and the side-effects included anger flare-ups and severe headaches. He was hospitalised at one stage with severe post-traumatic depression and given more drugs. "I wasn't on this planet."
McIntyre says for 13 years he had little contact with ACC as he continued driving his refrigerated truck and subcontracting on Whangarei building sites - despite the permanent muscle, tendon and soft-tissue damage to his arm and his damaged shoulder. He would see different doctors who mostly prescribed painkillers. ACC says he received compensation periodically.
Doug the Digger gave him a positive focus. "At school I did a lot of bunking-off. It wasn't until after my accident, when I had this dream about writing a book, that I realised I needed it. I needed to face my fears."
Drawing on his childhood love of earthmoving machinery, his concept was to tell stories with positive messages about safety and paying attention. In 1997, he took some rough sketches to Whangarei artist Bevan Fidler and, with help from others, the first Doug the Digger book was launched three years later.
He has since visited hundreds of schools as a motivational speaker with Duffy Books in Homes and Infratrain, the construction industry training organisation. He connects with kids, especially the hard-case ones.
"I tell kids there are huge opportunities out there but they need to be able to read and write. Thirty years ago you could just hop in and drive a truck."
But while working on the first book, his shoulder was getting worse, the result of years of putting strain on it to compensate for his weak forearm.
In 1999, Miller, his new GP, recognised the extent of the damage and recommended physiotherapy, using McIntyre's 1986 claim number. If that failed, surgery was the next step.
When ACC told him it would not pay for physio because he was self-employed, McIntyre closed his business to concentrate on getting his shoulder sorted.
Physiotherapy sent him around the twist. He was sent to different providers then finally to the hospital where the regime included time on an Exercycle. "He gave me a work-hardening physical fitness programme, not specific treatment for a shoulder injury."
ACC says it had not at that time recognised the shoulder injury and was funding an "activity-based programme as part of his rehabilitation".
A friend saw how low he was and offered him work "basically to get me doing something".
When ACC found out, it put private investigators on to him and took him to court. He pleaded guilty and was fined $4400. In court, ACC went for the jugular. Even after the judge's ruling, officials wrote to McIntyre seeking sums they claimed he owed.
He admits he did wrong but wonders, if his injuries had been correctly listed in his file, would he have ended up in court?
After the physiotherapy debacle, Miller referred him to Auckland orthopaedic surgeon Tim Astley, but relations with ACC continued on their downward spiral.
Where was the evidence of a shoulder injury from 1986? ACC refused to fund an MRI scan and suggested he take a claim for medical misadventure against doctors involved in his original treatment. ACC then rejected the medical misadventure claim as it "did not meet the criteria". He was given a new claim number for a shoulder injury but he insisted on his original claim number.
"They were playing with claim numbers. They were saying the shoulder was coupled [to the original claim] then it was uncoupled - mindbending stuff."
"It was absurd," says Miller. "ACC tried to say there was no shoulder injury. By the time we got it refiled his claim number had been changed about five times. It was like a systematic undermining."
By early-2001 he was saving for his operation and contemplating suicide. "Tim Astley rang and I was bawling my eyes out. He rang back 15 minutes later and said 'come in and we'll operate'."
With ACC still not coming to the party, Astley operated anyway. He recalls: "We were prepared to do it for nothing, which is no big deal."
Surgery ended the pain that would send him to the floor. The shoulder still occasionally goes "numb and dumb - like you've been hit a couple of days ago. I just go and see kids and that gives me the energy to carry on."
The games didn't stop after surgery. ACC finally agreed to cover the cost - because the surgery had "confirmed the connection between the shoulder damage and the original injury" - but there was a dispute over McIntyre's invoices.
With Miller in the background, McIntyre was determined to get to the bottom of his difficulties with ACC and sought his file, believing he was entitled to "one file that's true and accurate".
He also launched ACC Forum, a weblog on which other disgruntled claimants swap stories. His blog is called Just a small fracture.
"When I started, people would give me the crappiest jobs around but if I started something I always finished it. No matter how hard it got, I always carried on.
"I made the commitment in 1999, when they were really knocking me. I just said: 'I'm going to get it sorted out whatever it takes'."
He was bamboozled by the centimetres-thick pile of papers. He found medical records which his doctor knew nothing about, while his doctor and lawyer had documents which he thought should have been in his file but weren't.
Years later, documents from other ACC branches drifted in. Files recording "null injury" were later updated to "fracture" or "shoulder injury". He discovered yet another claim, dated March 3, 2003, opened for an "accident at home" which he says never happened. (ACC says it accepts "that the statistical coding on this duplicate file is incorrect").
He found an email sent from ACC head office to the Whangarei office which starts: "This Beast". Some documents related to another McIntyre.
The arrival in 2004 of a new branch manager, Barry Davis, was a turning point. It culminated in ACC's acceptance, on November 24 last year, of the full extent of the injuries McIntyre suffered in February 1986. Injuries to nine body sites were acknowledged, the correct entitlements calculated and paid with interest: $611,910.96.
In February, Davis wrote to head office that McIntyre "still feels deeply aggrieved ... and I must say that, while a number of his concerns arise from a lack of appreciation of what ACC's responsibilities are and the constraints of our computer system, the management of his claim by the Whangarei office in the period between 1986 and 2004 has been far from satisfactory".
Davis requested an independent review, with a view to making a one-off payment to McIntyre. Barrister Param Jegatheeson is conducting the review.
But there's no stopping McIntyre, and no student like a born-again one. He believes the base weekly income used to calculate his backpay, based on his 1985 earnings, is nearly $200 a week short. While he awaits the review outcome, his lawyer will be talking to ACC about the discrepancy.
Meanwhile, he's working on a third Doug the Digger book and speaking at schools. He put a good chunk of his ACC arrears into his shiny Kenworth truck and two trailer units - one is being converted into a mobile classroom, the other into a motor home.
The Doug the Digger Roadshow is about to begin.
ACC responds:
"ACC accepts that aspects of its relationship with Mr McIntyre over the years have not been managed well. We further acknowledge that he has not always received his entitlements in a timely fashion. However, where problems have occurred we have sought to resolve them honestly and have compensated Mr McIntyre appropriately. We do not believe that our staff have acted in a malicious fashion towards Mr McIntyre.
"ACC is to a large extent reliant on information being provided to it as to ongoing needs, etc. There were periods when ACC was not kept up to date with Alistair's situation.
"Alistair has collected documents from many sources over time and ACC does not require these documents to permit compensation to be paid. He has also requested numerous copies of all or parts of his claim files and, depending on the nature of the request and the timing, the information provided will appear in different formats.
"The existence of duplicate claims with incorrect statistical information about the accident has led to misunderstandings between Alistair and ACC. These claim duplicate numbers have been used at times when Alistair has sought medical treatment and although all treatments have been paid for, their existence has caused Alistair considerable distress. Some years ago it was agreed with Alistair that all future dealings would be made on his main file.
"Non-diagnosis of Alistair's shoulder condition was one factor which did present a difficulty in payment of compensation. This was addressed when the relationship between the shoulder condition and the injury was confirmed by the treating specialist.
"Calculation of Alistair's entitlement to weekly compensation ... remained unresolved for some time as Alistair did not provide the necessary information.
" ... There was a memorandum with the words 'This Beast' on Alistair's file that came from ACC's Debt Management Unit in Wellington. It was not clear that the comment referred to any particular individual but an apology has been provided to Alistair.
"Alistair's claim file is not a mess and, apart from the matters on which we have had to agree figures to achieve resolution at mediation, all information necessary for compensation payments are present.
"Cases like Alistair's are extremely rare. Dealings with Alistair are not always typical in terms of ACC relationships with injured people, but this is due to his unique personality and his own personal issues.
"I have indeed spoken to Alistair on more than one occasion about what appears to be an unhealthy fixation on ACC and whether he might seek more balance in his life, parts of which are inspirational."
- Barry Davis, branch manager ACC Whangarei
