How Wes Bruns Turned Surviving the Unsurvivable Into a Career Helping Others Rebuild
The Story
Wes Bruns has spent 34 years on the sidelines of Iowa high school basketball. For most of that time, he’s carried something most people watching him coach never knew about. He’s a carbon monoxide survivor — one of the rare ones who lived through an accident that killed four members of his own family in a single night. That story is now the center of his new book, When Life Changes the Game.
Basketball runs deep in the Bruns family. His father played at the University of Iowa, then spent decades coaching in small Iowa towns before landing at Prairie High School in Cedar Rapids, where Wes was born and raised. Wes tagged along to his dad’s practices as a kid, never planning to coach himself. Then the year he reached the final interview board for the Iowa State Patrol, statewide budget cuts froze all hiring. Not long after, a sophomore basketball position opened up at LaSalle High School.
“I got my first paycheck, and I thought, you’re paying me to do this. I thoroughly love it,” he says. That was 1991, and he’s been coaching ever since.
The Curiosity
The carbon monoxide accident happened on Christmas night. That night, Wes lost his mother, two brothers, and stepfather to carbon monoxide poisoning. Wes survived, along with his brother-in-law, Garth Lloyd, who had stepped outside for fresh air not long before things turned. Wes still doesn’t fully understand why he survived that night. He suspects his running habit and years of physical conditioning played a role.
The accident wasn’t the first loss Wes had carried, and it wouldn’t be the last. Before the accident, he’d already lost his father as a senior in high school, years earlier. Later, he and Holly lost infant twins, Ben and Ellie, born at 23 weeks and gone within four days. Somewhere across all of it, Wes started to believe his story was bigger than any single loss. It was about getting through grief, again and again, and finding a way to stay standing afterward.
“I think this book will catch not only carbon monoxide situations, but also people that lose loved ones,” he says.
The Effort
Wes had told pieces of the story before — once to a men’s group at a church, another time to wrestlers at Jefferson High School before districts. People kept telling him the same thing. “You gotta get this in a book,” one friend said. Someone else called it a movie.
For years, Wes simply didn’t have the bandwidth for a book. He was building a coaching career and starting a family with his wife, Holly. Reflection wasn’t something he made time for. His therapy was exercise — running, sweating, staying busy enough that he didn’t have to sit still with what happened.
When he finally decided to write, the self-doubt showed up fast. “Who’s this guy? They have no idea,” he remembers thinking. It took a conversation with a local sports writer, a cold email to a publishing team, and a 40-minute Zoom call before the idea stopped feeling impossible and started feeling like something he could actually do.
The Solution
Wes entered publishing with no background in the industry, and a story he’d never told anyone in full. “I’m totally just a rookie,” he says. “I’m a deer in the headlights.” He wasn’t sure how publishing worked, didn’t know how to line up a speech, and was unsure why anyone outside Cedar Rapids would want to hear from a small-town basketball coach.
What changed things was finding a hybrid publishing company built for exactly his kind of story. ShareYourStory, through its publishing arm Streamline Books, gave Wes a structure for a process he had no map for on his own.
Having a team walk him through it, from first draft to book signing, mattered as much as getting the words down. By the time the manuscript was finished, Wes wasn’t approaching publishing as an outsider anymore. He had a plan and a date on the calendar for his first signing at NewBo City Market.
The Journey
The writing process took about four months of Zoom calls with a collaborator on the Streamline Books team. Wes describes the process as intense. It forced him to go further into the accident than he had in 30 years, including hearing his brother-in-law Garth’s account in full for the first time.
Garth had gone outside to clear his head on a four-wheeler, and the fresh air likely saved his life. But surviving didn’t mean walking away untouched. When Garth finally told Wes his full account of that night, Wes described it as post-traumatic for him.
“It was very intense, but it made me dive into things and really get in depth,” Wes says. His wife, Holly, read the finished manuscript before anyone else did. Her reaction stuck with him: coaches, she told him, are going to see themselves in this.
The ROI
The messages started arriving before the book was even released. Author John O’Leary, who wrote Soul on Fire after surviving a childhood fire, messaged Wes directly after hearing his story, comparing his perseverance to the biblical figure of Job.
Wes has also lined up two podcast appearances, one with A Close Call With Death and an upcoming episode of Survival, and started posting on LinkedIn to reach readers beyond Iowa. For a longtime local coach, the book is already opening doors far beyond basketball.
What’s Next for Wes Bruns?
Wes is still coaching, still running, and still the guy other coaches call when they want to talk about defense or work ethic. His next goal is to speak nationally, particularly to coaches and to anyone who’s lost someone suddenly. He wants carbon monoxide detection to become as automatic as a smoke alarm — in homes, and especially in hotels, where he believes it should already be mandatory. Being a carbon monoxide survivor isn’t the headline of his coaching career, but it’s become the reason he’s finally willing to talk about all of it: the losses, the recovery, and the stubborn belief that you get back up and keep going.
When Life Changes the Game goes on sale August 20th at Wes’s book signing at NewBo City Market. Wes’s story proves that getting back up after grief isn’t just a saying. It’s a Post-it note on the counter. It’s a 5 a.m. run. It’s showing up to practice the next day anyway. His story is proof that surviving is only the beginning.
