After my consultant said I’d never walk again, I sat in my wheelchair feeling utterly broken
Fri 1 Nov 2019 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 1 Nov 2019 06.57 EDT
I hadn’t planned to be at Westfield shopping centre, east London, on that day. In October 2018, I was a fourth-year medical student and had just finished an eight-week placement in Maidstone, Kent. A friend was driving back to London and dropped me off there so I could get the tube home while she went shopping. We parted at the central atrium. One minute I was looking down at all my bags, the next I was staring at a vast, bright ceiling. Then, just as you see in the movies, I started screaming that I couldn’t feel my legs.
I had been unconscious for seven minutes. A police officer and a group of medical students surrounded me. Despite my panic, I was pretty lucid, and could tell there was someone else on the floor nearby, also surrounded. I heard them telling him that he had fallen from a great height. That was how I deduced that someone had landed on me.
My parents and my boyfriend, Nathan, were called and I was taken to the Royal London hospital. My spinal cord was severely damaged at sternum level. Despite an eight-hour operation the next morning to fix my vertebrae, I was paralysed from just below breast level. My neck was fractured but, technically, this was lucky. Had it been a break, I would have been paralysed from the neck down.
I was eventually transferred to a specialist spinal unit at Stanmore hospital in north-west London, but it was another month before I was told anything more about the consequences of my break and injury. On the day of my diagnosis and prognosis meeting, it was the worst weather of the year. After my consultant told me I would never walk again, I sat in my wheelchair in the rain feeling utterly broken. I had finally realised that I was no longer “sick” – this was my life for ever.
I went through a period of denial. Climbing was a huge passion and I coached children every week. I was two years from qualifying as a junior doctor and had planned to visit my family in Australia at Christmas. Now I shared a hospital room with three other women in their 80s.
I still don’t know why the man jumped. He had been loitering in the centre for five hours beforehand, unnoticed by security. As far as we know, he wasn’t attempting suicide and when he was discharged from the same hospital as me, with nothing worse than a fractured leg, psychological tests apparently showed that he wasn’t a suicide risk.
He was jailed for four years in October, after admitting grievous bodily harm, but being angry is tiring, and so is replaying the event and thinking, what if…? If someone gave me a choice that an anonymous person would die or I could have this injury and they would survive, I would take this injury every time.
With the support of my family, I focused on intensive physio. As the weeks passed, I learned how to stand unaided, move parts of my legs and regain the strength in my arms and upper body. In January, I was discharged. Nathan and I found a new flat, I withdrew from university for a year, began to learn Turkish, joined a podcast called This Is Spinal Crap and committed to physiotherapy. I had known my climbing coach since I was 11, and he was by my side the whole time. We are preparing to climb El Capitan in Yosemite via a form of climbing called jumaring, where you pull yourself up with your arms using a harness. Doctors say that whatever recovery you make in the first two years after a spinal injury is the best you will get, but people surpass expectations all the time. I hope for more.
I get frustrated by people’s perception of wheelchair users. I know help is often offered with the best intentions, but I wish people asked themselves: “Am I offering help because they look like they need it or because they are in a wheelchair?”
I am back at university and once I qualify, I will specialise in paediatrics. I know this experience is going to make me a better doctor because I now understand what it is to be stuck in a bed with nothing to look at but the ceiling, to experience chronic pain, to deal with uncertainty, to feel vulnerable at the hands of healthcare professionals. I used to think medicine was a science. Now I know it’s an art.
As told to Grace Holliday
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/01/experience-i-was-crushed-by-a-falling-man
