Darryl King: from hospital to helping out

DARRYL King is the new president of Yea Rotary. He spoke to us about his life and the experiences which led him to take on the role.

Darryl has been in the Yea area for 22 years. He initially had a small weekender hobby farm on the Melba Highway, before moving to what would eventually become “a five acre garden” on Murrindindi Road.

His plans were delayed by a significant medical incident. He initially had pins and needles in his fingertips and toes, so he went to hospital to be checked. It took him nearly 10 hours to get a ward and in bed.

“At 5.30 in the morning, I woke up and I was fully paralysed,” Darryl said. “The only thing I could move was my face… It was really scary.”

He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. He described how “It eats all the coverings off your nerves and they give you a certain drug to start the growth back, but it’s a slow process.”

He ended up staying in hospital for 10 or 11 months. “The whole time, I was just thinking about my garden. I was solely thinking that this little duck is not ready to go yet. I would bore the nurses every single day with what I was going to plant, where I was going to plant it, how I was going to do it.

And they said, Darryl, I’m just exhausted listening to you. I said, I’m exhausted because I know I can’t physically do it at the moment. That was driving me nuts,” he said.

At one point, he caught pneumonia and was unconscious for five days on life support. He almost died, and the doctor told him how close he came to performing a tracheotomy on him.

During his time in hospital, he needed to be craned out of bed and fed by the nurses, and helped to drink water. “Everything had to be done because I could not do it. But I tried to stay positive the whole time. For anyone who is ill, just keep positive and there’s a better chance you can get through it. Not 100 per cent, but a better chance,” he said.

Darryl grew up around Heatherdale and then Lilydale, where his parents still live. He had a lot of involvement with horses for around 32 years, focused on Welsh Section A, as well as…