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Biography - The Stay in Hospital

As soon as I’d hit my head on the bottom I knew that there was something seriously wrong.  I had a splitting headache and my hands were floating just a few inches from my face, but I couldn’t move them (by the way, don’t try to swear or scream if this happens, no one hears when your underwater!).  After what seemed like a few seconds I passed out, but my brother and friends realised what had happened and fished me out onto the side.  Luckily for me, all those friends had been trained in first aid, some through St John’s Ambulance, and their care for me at that point has meant that I am a whole lot better off than I could have been.

The next few days were a blur.  I remember vague images and snapshots, which seemed to be from a bizarre play or movie.  Only problem was they were all happening to me!  Initially I was taken to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, but they transferred me very quickly, as they saw that I needed specialist care and could not deal with my severe injuries.  So, to Stoke Mandeville National Spinal Injuries Centre (NSIC) I headed.  This began 12 months of intensive rehabilitation.  I had broken my neck between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae, which had crushed the spinal cord when the bones had moved out of alignment.  This level of break has left me with no feeling below my nipples, and only limited use of my arms.  I cannot use my hands and I can’t use my triceps (these are the muscles that run down the back of the upper arm, and help with straightening the arm outwards), and this has made moving a wheelchair a tiring business.

The first low point I hit was just a few days after I had regained consciousness, when I rounded on my father and told him he’d got his wish.  Hurt, he asked what I meant and I replied that there was no way now that I’d get into the RAF (this is one of the only times in life I have truly regretted my actions). Another low point of my rehabilitation was within those first 14 weeks, I was not allowed to wash my hair.  This was because I had traction pins drilled into the surface of my skull, to hold my neck still while the bones healed themselves.  As you can imagine, this was highly uncomfortable in the extreme.

Rehabilitation was a constant round of physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and occupational therapy.  I quickly learned a simple fact of life though.  If you were a tetrapleagic like me and couldn’t or wouldn’t do sports, then being at the NSIC was just going to give you the basics.  I know this sounds hard and ungrateful, but there are some good reasons for my attitude.  When I entered the NSIC they had in my opinion only recently been able to give tetrapleagics a better quality of life (read life past fifth to tenth year, and bladder and chest infections used to kill quite a few people until drugs and awareness of the help available improved).  Up until then the NSIC had been set up after the war for sports being the best therapy for parapleagics.  This doctrine was changing, and I was I guess at the middle of this process, but it has taken years to implement fully.  I don’t know if the food has improved, but I hated it.  I dread to think the amount of money I spent on takeaways!

I did have high and low points while in the NSIC, the darkest being when I contemplated suicide.  I sat at the stairs at the end of the ward and thought “Why not, what the hell do I have to live for…” and I came to two conclusions;

1.        The stairs were not that long, and if I had pushed myself off, there were no guarantees that I’d accomplish killing myself.  I would have probably just ended up in a worse condition, and things were bad enough already.

2.        I was eighteen.  I had still a long and possibly eventful life ahead of me, and anyway, who gave me the right to extinguish a life.

I have always over-analysed things, and I guess this one stopped me doing something really stupid. It’s strange now that I look back on it, but this was the turning point in my life, and not the accident itself.  From that point on I decided I was going to live life to the full, and so far everything has worked well for me.  I also believe that becoming that low was in a funny way part of the healing process, and that I had to go through it and come out the other side. 

I refused to have the anniversary of the accident held within the hospital walls.  My parents had built an extension onto the back of their house, which was going to be my new bedroom.  Although the fabric of the building work was finished it still needed carpets and a bed just a week before I came home.  We managed to have the bed in place on the day I was released, but no carpet, three days short of the year (I can’t help but think of leaving the NSIC as a release.  Not like a prison release, but the first real step back to a normal life).

Two days after release my parents and I went camping.  I was now in the frame of mind I’ve tried to keep ever since; life’s too short, so make the most of it.  This camping trip was a yearly ritual for my parents, which allowed them to catch up with all the gossip, news and new techniques for leaders within Scouting.  It is only open to those leaders who have gained the Wood Badge, which is the training award for Scout leaders, and both my parents hold the award.  It was a great weekend, and the first normal thing I’d really done.

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