“Just stoked. Technology, man, it’s pretty amazing,” a now-talking Makali‘i Andrade, a firefighter on Kauai, told Hawaii News Now after traveling to Tennessee to undergo vocal reconstructive surgery three years after a foil-surfing accident left him with a slit throat, severed trachea, and long-term vocal paralysis.
In December of 2022, Andrade, a Fire Rescue Capt., was tow-in foil surfing off Hanalei with a group of friends—which, fortunately for him, included none other than one of Hawai‘i’s most accomplished and celebrated living watermen, Archie Kalepa who, far from the first time in his life, played no small part in saving that of another.
“I saw Maka catch this beautiful bomb from the outside,” Kalepa told Hawaii News Now shortly after the harrowing accident. “And then I seen all the skis take off… We realized, OK … something serious happened.”
The tip of his foil wing had caught his neck. “I knew that it was bad because as soon as I went underwater the ocean was pouring down my throat,” Andrade recalled, the 26-year fire department veteran adding that he’d “never seen so much blood in [his] life.”
In short, Kalepa and company got him atop a jetski’s rescue sled and brought him ashore, holding his throat shut so he could continue to breathe, and, per Kaelpa, a trauma medic happened to be on the beach with supplies at the ready “by the grace of God.”
Though Andrade didn’t offer many details of how the injury came to pass, anyone who’s ever gotten so much as even a glance at a foil doesn’t need to employ much imagination to register exactly what happened.
The first order of business after the accident was, obviously, stitching the poor guy’s throat, trachea, and nerves back together, no doubt sparing him his life.
But healing all that complex hardware was another process. “My nerves [grew back] wrong. They were crossed,” Andrade said. “So this surgery, they had to cut those nerves out and they did four nerve grafts. So it’s like back to square one.”
In early May, he made his way to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee for the surgery, where the medical team documented the rare, six-hour surgery.
“We were able to require the nerves to the diaphragm that helps move the lungs, and then also require and strengthen the vocal cords to another nerve,” Vanderbilt U Otolaryngology associate professor Dr. Sarah Rohde told HNN. Dr. Rohde’s Colleague Dr. Alex Gelbard added that “Those nerves grow imperceptibly slowly, and they have to travel some distance from the branches that we spliced in.”
The Vanderbilt team says it’ll take at least six months for Andrade to see results, but then again, what with him already speaking enough and willing to give an interview, their work speaks for itself.
Technology is a trip, indeed—but so are foil fins. Fire Rescue Capt. Andrade is lucky to be alive, and speaking again, no less. Whether you’re riding atop or in and amongst the ever-increasing fray of them, watch yourself.
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