A HORRIFIC crash ripped a van in half 'like a tin opener' and sliced off half of driver Pat Baker's face.
But now just over a month later Pat and his family are celebrating his lucky escape and giving thanks to the emergency services who saved his life.
Pat was on his way home to Plymouth from work in Torquay when the four-vehicle pile-up happened on the A38 near Marley Head.
His EDF van was the smallest vehicle in the crash. The aluminium side of a six-tonne box lorry cut through the driver's side of Pat's van.
At first it was feared he would not survive, or be left with brain damage.
Surgeons had to rebuild the 54-year-old ex-Royal Marine's face. He lost his left ear, and still cannot speak properly because of a paralysed larynx and impact damage to one of the main arteries in his neck. He suffered a crushed eye socket and broken jaw in two places, which remains wired up.
Wife Sheena, who had to speak for Pat because the damage to his carotid artery means he can only whisper, said: "We want to give our thanks to everybody involved.
"They were fantastic — from the policeman who was luckily parked nearby who was the first on the scene, to the consultants and people who put him back together."
The Bakers have already thanked the Devon Air Ambulance crew and met fire crews from Totnes and Buckfastleigh to thank them personally.
Pat, of Greystoke Avenue, Plymouth, reads meters across Devon and Cornwall. When the accident happened he had been working in Torquay and was on his way home on Friday May 23.
Sheena was first warned by policemen who came to her door that he may have suffered major brain damage: "But by the time I got to the hospital they had done CT scans and X-rays and discovered he had no serious head injuries. It was just lacerations.
"The main thing was that the carotid artery in his neck was crushed, but not broken. If it had been, he would have died.
"He was the smallest vehicle in the crash. A piece of aluminium came off the side of a six-tonne box van and ripped like a tin opener through the driver's side of his van and took out the left side of his face.
"But there were no other injuries to his body. No broken bones. He was very lucky.
Sheena said: "He's an ex-Royal Marine and he never got a scratch in the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Turkey. Then he survived kidney cancer four years ago."
