Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Melanie Reid 2019

Foreword copyright © Andrew Marr 2019

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Melanie Reed asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

Naomi Shihab Nye, excerpt from ‘Kindness’ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books). Copyright ©1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

T.S. Eliot, excerpt from ‘The Hollow Men’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 (Faber and Faber). Copyright © T. S. Eliot.

Excerpt from ‘An Epilogue’ reprinted with the permission of The Society of Authors as the Representatives of the Estate of John Masefield.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008291464

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008291402

Version: 2020-02-28

Dedication

To Dave and Doug and all the people forced to live in the parallel world – I didn’t realise you were there until I joined you.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Andrew Marr

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE: Farewell Happy Fields

CHAPTER TWO: Put Your Finger in the Crow’s Nest

CHAPTER THREE: Swallow Diving from the Seventh Floor

CHAPTER FOUR: The Angels of Mons

CHAPTER FIVE: Pollyanna Syndrome

CHAPTER SIX: This Way Madness Lies

CHAPTER SEVEN: Aunt Averil and the Hidden Army

CHAPTER EIGHT: Home

CHAPTER NINE: A Lost Body

CHAPTER TEN: Just Like a Woman

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Of String Girths and Running Martingales

CHAPTER TWELVE: When Melly Met Nelly

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: In Bed with a Walrus

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Am I Human or am I Dancer?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Pocketful of Diamonds

Epilogue

Specialist Spinal Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword by Andrew Marr

If a book makes you cry, properly cry, and if it makes you laugh, repeatedly, both quietly and loudly, then it’s safe to say this is probably a good book. This is probably a good book. Melanie Reid is already a star writer for anyone who regularly reads The Times. The horse-riding accident which rendered her tetraplegic gave her a ferociously hard, painful and difficult journey; and also, a seemingly inexhaustible subject for brutally self-revealing and often very funny columns. Mel, as her friends call her, is not an excessively inhibited person. She has a big laugh, and a generous, clear-sighted gaze. Here, in book form, you get the full story of her almost mundane accident and its awful consequences. It’s her story, of course, with her special particularities – her beautiful remote Scottish house, love of horses, gruffly charismatic husband, and so forth.

But it’s also a story for all of us, because we are all vulnerable. Life is incorrigibly random. Broken necks await us on school runs, uneven garden steps, family skiing holidays and at the shallow end of swimming pools; just as major strokes can happen, bizarrely enough, on rowing machines, at the basins in the hairdressing salons, or at either end of an international air flight. You never know. But, as Melanie puts it, our experiences of life are divided into an upper world of unconsciously elegant health and strength, of striding and stretching and elegant gestures we are barely aware of; and the lower, underworld, of the disabled, struggling to dress, and move, to eat and defecate. Anyone of us can be in the upper world, and then suddenly come on a completely ordinary sunny morning, tipped without a moment to complain or protest, into the underworld.

I am not as seriously disabled as Mel, but I have partial paralysis of my left leg, arm and hand and have had to go through, in a minor way, some of the tribulations that she has faced. Her description of the move from the warm cocoon of intensive care into the tougher rehabilitation wards of hospital, a place where the gym, bathroom, functional electrical stimulation and playdough all have a special meaning, returned me immediately to the wards in which I recovered from my stroke almost six years ago. She writes brilliantly about the characters of the different forms of nursing and medical staff, and the way black humour and grim solidarity knits together recovering patients still bemused about what has happened to their lives. (Though when this happens in Glasgow rather than London, the quality of humour is much, much higher.)

For tetraplegics, the road must be particularly rough. The rule she says is adapt or die: ‘A rehab ward in a spinal unit is like an under-strength factory floor: too few staff battling to a relentless timetable of feeding, medicating, washing, toileting, dressing and hoisting dozens of helpless carcasses into wheelchairs to get them to the gym.’ And then, if you’re doing well, come other multiple terrors and challenges of returning home and rebuilding life. Melanie Reid writes sensibly and well about thoughts of suicide, about depression, about the frustration of media-hyped ‘medical breakthroughs’ that never quite translate into helping you yourself; and unsparingly about the daily frustrations and humiliations of disabled life. For what it’s worth, I too have found myself screaming with rage from time to time having dropped yet another utensil on the kitchen floor.

So in that sense, these are really ‘Notes from the Underground’; and why would you want to read that? The answer is not only that you might find yourself in just the same place, but that Melanie is such a good guide in how to survive it. She knows that although the subject of disability might seem depressing and offputting, the courage it requires is exciting and inspiring. What she has gone through requires no less physical courage and determination than being imprisoned in a wartime prison camp – a parallel that hovers at times through the writing, but is no hyperbole. She rightly quotes the great English vicar-philosopher Sydney Smith on the importance of taking a short view of life: ‘Are you happy now?’ She understands the absolute importance of shunning the lethal beckoning poison-fairy of self-pity. As she says: ‘you learn, very slowly, to rediscover joy’.

On that journey, here, you’ll find some of the funniest and darkest comic scenes you have ever read, from a surreal encounter between the author in her wheelchair and a group of special needs adults, all of them on days out at a bowling alley, while they work out who is lowest on the pecking order. And then there is the scene in the hairdresser’s with the colostomy bag … But I will leave you to discover that for yourself. For what I think has saved Mel, apart from the love of strong people around her, is that she is such a natural and gifted writer. Early on she says, while still in the entrails of intensive care, ‘My sanity was … to make sense of it to myself … it was good copy.’ And so it bloody well was. The real reason we read is to get an injection of empathy; to help ourselves break out of the shell of our own experiences, and enter other human lives, so that we can understand this business of being alive just a little bit better. To do that we need really good writers on really big subjects. No, this is not probably a good book. It really is one, and reading it will change you.

Prologue

It was a cold, blustery Sunday in late March, ordinary in the way days always are before extraordinary things happen. We had slept late and it was mid-afternoon before we headed to the nearby village for provisions. By then, the sky looked unkind. As we reached the point where our farm track joins the public road, we glimpsed a tall man in hiking gear, carrying a large pack, striding purposefully away from civilisation towards the forests and hills. There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on, that made me notice him. He had a pleasant face but he looked – what? Anxious? Embarrassed? In a hurry?

‘Bit late in the day to be going that way,’ I remarked to Dave. Or maybe I just thought it. I can’t remember now.

Dropping down into the village, we passed a neighbour out inspecting his hedgerow. A non-gardener, wearing smart trousers and a ski anorak, poking suspiciously at the unforthcoming soil. We slowed to say hallo, holding the car on the brake, not committed enough to put the engine in neutral.

‘Just spoke to some crazy foreigner,’ he said. ‘Lost his way off the West Highland Way. I told him, I said, you’re miles off, and he wanted to know what he should do, but I just told him, you’ll need to head back the way you’ve come. Some people, eh?’

I waited in the car while Dave was in the shop. Rain started to blur the windscreen and I felt troubled. For the record, I’m no Mother Teresa. I don’t make a habit of picking up lame ducks and I’m ever so slightly impatient with those who do. But there’s something about travellers stranded on roadsides by breakdowns, or people who look lost, or in distress, that always makes me falter. Some primitive instinct, which I rarely act upon, makes me want to stop and offer help. Usually I dither, fail to act in case I look stupid, drive by and then regret it: the infinite frozen impulse, the wasted generosity, of the shy. The almost-nearly good Samaritan. Which, if you ask me, is more irritating than someone who lacks the impulse in the first place.

Being truly honest, I was still haunted by an incident from decades ago, when I was inside a tube station in London’s West End, rushing for the last train after a show. There was a young man slumped against the wall at the bottom on the stairs, causing people to crush and crowd in their haste to get past. He had a bloodied stump, one leg freshly amputated at the knee, and he looked utterly desperate. He held a piece of cardboard which said: ‘Please help me get back to Scotland’. And as I slowed, appalled, wanting to help, my companions grabbed me by the arms and hustled me onto a train. ‘C’mon! We haven’t time.’ And for thirty years I’ve regretted not stopping to help that boy, often wondering what his story was. Did he ever get home?

This time, though, was different. I knew that road back over the hills was long and exposed and I felt emboldened.

When Dave got back in the car, I said: ‘I think we should go and offer that guy a lift.’

‘What guy?’

‘The walker. The crazy foreigner.’

‘You are kidding.’ He turned to look at me as if I had sprouted two heads.

‘Why?’ He wanted to sit by the fire and read the Sunday papers.

‘Because it will be pitch-dark long before he gets back to where he started, let alone where he was supposed to be going. It’s pouring now and he’s ten miles off course in the middle of nowhere.’

‘He could be anyone. He could be some Eastern European axe-murderer.’

‘Imagine if it was you, or us.’

So we ignored our turning for home and carried on the hill road. We caught up with him toiling into the dusk, a dark figure on a lonely ribbon of tarmac, just before he began the ascent to the moor. He didn’t look like an axe-murderer.

We picked him up at the bottom of the hill on the Moor Road.

‘Would you like a lift?’ we said. ‘We heard you were lost.’ Speaking slowly and clearly so he could understand.

He smiled and put his sodden pack in the boot and climbed into the back seat, dripping. He seemed profoundly grateful and he expressed it in English. Excellent English, in fact. Our crazy foreigner was a Canadian university philosophy lecturer, a handsome, intelligent man in his thirties with a gentle manner. He’d flown over to attend a conference at Aberdeen University on, and I think I remember this rightly, Thomas Reid, a little-remembered Scottish moral philosopher of common sense during the Enlightenment. With the conference over, our academic had had a few days to play with before his flight home, and had a fancy to try the long-distance footpath that wends from Glasgow into the Highlands. After leaving his B&B in the morning, he’d missed a turning and had walked all day in the wrong direction. Looking back now, I suspect he was a dreamy, erudite man who just wanted to walk in the mountains, rather than a practical map reader.

By the time we got him back to the village where he’d slept, it was lashing rain and almost dark. He was a day out of sync with his accommodation. We insisted on taking him on, by road, to where he had booked a bed for the night. He protested mildly, not disguising his gratitude. When we stopped, at the car park by the shores of Loch Lomond, he got out, retrieved his pack from the boot, and returned to the driver’s window. He leant down to thank us. We knew we would never meet again.

‘You’re good people,’ he said warmly. ‘Good things will happen to you.’

Five days later I fell off my horse and broke my neck.

CHAPTER ONE

Farewell Happy Fields

Who rides the tiger cannot dismount.

CHINESE PROVERB

I was happy, I do remember that, although those were the days when I rarely stopped long enough to appreciate it. Isn’t it always the same old story – that hindsight is the teacher who always arrives too late and says I-told-you-so? We’re always blissfully ignorant and complacent leading up to life-changing events.

So, how to pin down those hateful seconds which I will gnaw regretfully over for the rest of my life? One moment I was cantering towards a small-to-medium-sized cross-country jump, relishing the unity with my own, my very own, lovely handsome chestnut Champion the Wonder Horse, high on the hill and the thrill and the freedom and the wind in my face.

I was hearing the little girl inside me crying out, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ – the next moment I was pinned to the ground with a broken neck and fractured lower back. I was conscious throughout; I knew it was catastrophic. I said, ‘Ow!’ to myself when my face slammed into the turf, and then I experienced a blinding red flash and felt my whole body suffuse with a most beautiful, intense feeling of warmth; my own internal nuclear explosion; my own terrible mushroom cloud. In those seconds I was already aware that my life as I knew it had ended. Everything had internalised. The only place where I could survive was in my head. The little girl was dead. Her dreams were atomised. Dust. You stupid, stupid idiot, I heard the voice inside my head. Damn, why did I let this happen to me?

High on the hill and the thrill.

Here are the bald facts. My horse refused a piddly jump, on a piddly little British Horse Society instruction day for piddly middle-aged wannabes playing with their piddly ponies. Harmless, happy people like me, playing at the bottom end of a thrilling, dangerous sport; pretending that I was thirty-two when I was fifty-two. I can still taste bitterness in my mouth, even as I write this, at the unfairness, the bad luck, the everyday, non-earth-shattering mundanity of the whole thing. I was a competent, experienced rider on a competent, steady horse, being coached by competent, qualified people. But horses are horses; they belong only to themselves. That day he didn’t want to do it. Jumping stickily. He refused one practice fence. Jumped it the second time. We were still warming up. I doubly committed to go over another jump – ‘Kick on, throw your heart over’ as the old manuals taught – but he didn’t. At the take-off stride, he ducked out sharply, I carried on going. And with impeccable hubris, my pride made me try to stay on by gripping his neck, which was the worst possible thing I could have done. It meant my arms were not in front of me when I hit the ground, so I did a fairly steep, slow-motion head plant. My body and long, long legs pivoted over my neck. ‘It just looked like an ordinary fall,’ said a friend nearby, shrugging helplessly at the memory. A millimetre or two difference, I would have been fine.

How to pin down the moment when your body deserts you? When you are forcibly divorced from yourself? Wedged face-down, I can taste dry, gritty, late winter Perthshire soil, and I realise I can’t move anything but my right arm and my shoulders. My elbows flip-flop a little, like a seal. I reach down and touch my leg – the hand feels the leg, feels the texture of the riding breeches; the leg doesn’t feel the hand. Doesn’t feel it at all. I can’t quite believe it, but I know what has happened. It really has happened – the thing I’ve always tried to put to the back of my head. The thing I sometimes dwelt upon, ever since I read about how the Hollywood actor Christopher Reeve, a tall, well-built man, had toppled over his horse’s ears at a small jump and become paralysed from the neck down.

I manage to lift my shoulders a fraction, and turn my head. My left hand is lying out there, sprawled where I can see it. It responds a bit when I try to clench my fingers. This reassures me, oddly, and I put my face back down in the soil so I can think a bit. In a perfectly cold, logical part of my brain I’m utterly furious with myself. Arrogant enough to think it would never happen to me. But it has.

They have gathered round me by now, my friends, training-day organisers, the instructor. I can’t feel my legs, I tell them, please phone for an ambulance. The two nice elderly men from the St John Ambulance, first-aiders in attendance at the course, have arrived. I can hear the anxiety in their voices, their fractured breathing. They put an oxygen mask on me. ‘Lie still,’ everyone is saying bossily to me, like they’re rehearsing a training drill. ‘I am,’ I say grumpily. Then they start nagging me again: ‘Keep talking. Don’t fall asleep.’ But I am growing weary and want to close my eyes. ‘Please phone my husband. His number’s on my mobile, in the pick-up,’ I tell Helene, one of the organisers. Someone comes back. Says: ‘There’s an ambulance coming from Perth.’ I nestle wearily into the soil. I’m struggling to think straight, but I know I have to try and stay in control. ‘Phone for a helicopter too,’ I say. Strangely unembarrassed. I hear them, voices off, urgent, ordering a helicopter, giving directions. On stage meanwhile, my monologue is internal.

The brain was still functioning. I held lucid conversations with the paramedics from Perth, who had arrived and were preparing a neck brace. Then, still face down, I heard the helicopter, felt the shock waves of noise, an implacable clatter descending above us. At the time, I convinced myself there were two; could have sworn I heard someone say: ‘Here’s another helicopter.’ What a bloody waste, I remember thinking grumpily. Which was one way of expressing the whole catastrophe, although I didn’t see the irony until later. Later the Royal Navy air-sea rescue pilot who picked me up told me I was wrong; there was only one chopper. But that’s the tragi-comic essence of disaster: the everyday runs head-on into the bewildering.

They turned me, releasing me from the earth, slowly, carefully – I don’t know how many of them, I couldn’t feel their hands – onto a spinal board. I remember my vision spinning, the sky suddenly unbearably bright, but my head and neck were trussed with pads, so I could only look straight up, a small dinner plate of vision. My friend Katie was bending over me, telling me that I was going in a Sea King to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, where the main emergency specialities were. ‘Check out the winchman, he’s really dishy,’ she told me. ‘I’m coming with you.’ She always could be inappropriate, but I think she was trying to buoy me up. Of all the emotions, the pressing one in my head was annoyance: one, for causing all this fuss, and two, for not being able to sit up and enjoy my trip in a helicopter. Perhaps shock was setting in.

The inside of the chopper was furiously dark, crowded, vibrating and noisy. I felt sick and claustrophobic, strapped down. Panic started to rise. He was indeed dishy, the winchman, in the rare moments he crossed my limited field of vision. He’d taken off his helmet. Mostly it was his voice I hung onto. I told him that I couldn’t breathe and he leant over me, speaking softly but urgently to me above the noise: ‘Yes you can. Keep breathing for me, girl. We’ll be there in six and a half minutes. Do it for me.’ Pure Mills & Boon. It felt profoundly intimate, romantic – but also heart-splintering, because in that same instant, deep down, I knew with absolute certainty that never again would a man lean over me wanting to make love to me. Those paralysed thighs would never part. A brief wave of insight and intense loss washed over me. I can be that precise: in a few seconds, in that maelstrom of noise, my sexual identity died. Lust is only one letter removed from lost.

The crew of the Sea King from HMS Gannet, based at Prestwick, treated me as an emergency, aware that with a high spinal injury I could easily lose the power to breathe. The pilot requested a direct route and air traffic control temporarily cleared our path of commercial aircraft so that the helicopter could fly straight to the hospital. In those days, before the Southern General was rebuilt into a high-rise city, the helicopter pad was on the ground, just next to A&E. I remember being transferred to a trolley, remember trying to be polite and thank the RAF crew as they wheeled me away. Already, by then, there was the sense of detachment. This is just too bad; it can’t be happening to me, and I felt weary.

Things got a bit blurry after that. Time and cognitive slippage. Apart from everything else, it’s very hard to discern what’s happening when all you can see is a very small patch of ceiling. There was a warm, pretty female doctor in A&E who bent down to my ear and told me: ‘You’re going into resus now – it’s going to be very noisy, lots happening, but don’t worry,’ and I clung to her words and her humanity. She had blue eyes and blonde curls. A feeling of almost unbearable loneliness was settling upon me with the knowledge that I was absolutely on my own in this. Only in my brain was there sanctuary.

Snippets only thereafter, those dreadful hours, as shock and morphine kicked in. I was struggling with the unfairness of it; I couldn’t believe what had actually happened. Good Friday, it was; how inappropriate was that; and I’d taken the day off work to take part in the cross-country instruction. At some point my poor husband appeared at my bedside, his handsome, ever-optimistic face crushed with shock. Already, I think, he knew more than I did. At one point I remember being slid into an MRI scanner, immobile, staring at the plastic tube wall just a couple of inches above my face. White noise, claustrophobia: the very stillness made my ears boil. I was utterly passive; all will was gone; I no longer had a body. Is this what it feels like, I thought, losing everything?

It was in the scanner, though, that I had an epiphany. So weird was this experience, so unimaginable was it, at the cutting edge of catastrophe, immured like a mummy in a high-tech tube, that I suddenly thought – I’ve got to tell people about this, I’ve got to write about it. It’s just so interesting. Who knew? On reflection, that point of deliberate detachment from myself was hugely important. It was self-preservation: a way of ensuring I kept control of my emotions. Steel shutters were clanging down in my head: I dared not even think about my son, just emerging from his teenage years, or of my sorry future. But I could safely bear witness and carry on writing in my head. A correspondent from a hidden war.

Another fragment of memory. A consultant came to talk to us. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, the director of the spinal unit. He placed one fist on top of the other, upwards, in a tower, like the playground game one-potato-two-potatoes, little fingers of one hand resting on the clenched thumb of the other. ‘Horses, eh?’ he said. ‘Used to keep them myself. Dangerous things.’ He seemed almost cheerful, as if I was more satisfying than a road accident. ‘You have fractured your spine at T12,’ he said, ‘but that’s not so important. You have broken your neck at C6; the two vertebrae have gone like this’ – he angled his fists, bending the tower in half, ‘and compressed the spinal cord on one side and stretched it on the other. That’s where the damage is.’

‘Is the cord severed?’ I asked.

No, he said. And that was all I wanted to know. If it wasn’t severed then there was hope.

What I didn’t know was that Dave had already been taken aside and gently told to prepare for me being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. He was to go home, this proud, tough, man’s man, and spend the next two nights howling in despair and grief. Who can comfort anyone after news like that? And how can I ever escape the guilt of loading so much pain on him and on Douglas, my son – the two people who love me most in all the world? Even now, that is a kernel of grief which nestles at the centre of my being. I did this to me. But I did it to them too.

While wider family life was in meltdown, the news rippling out, by contrast I was removed to a place of eerie, enforced calm. My first night of my new life was spent in the high dependency unit, doped to the eyeballs on opiates. ‘Serious but stable,’ said the bulletin released to my colleagues in the media. I would need a delicate operation to stabilise my neck, but my timing had been exquisitely inappropriate: just as I ploughed into the soil, Jesus was believed to be rising from the dead, everyone was on holiday, and no neurological spinal surgery would take place until Tuesday. In the meantime, with a spine unstable in two places, I must be kept totally immobile, nil by mouth, fighting nausea.

The unit was a calm, bewildering, slow-motion cocoon. The room seemed soft round the edges, orangey in colour. I lay and stared at the dinner-plate bit of ceiling available to me, listening to a deranged woman nearby, raving in broad, angry Glaswegian. All I could move were my eyeballs. Hours passed without sleep, while my brain churned with despair. I was dimly aware, though, of a kind presence forever at my shoulder, stopping me from being alone, murmuring kind words. Early in the morning, before I was transferred to the spinal unit, someone – I presumed the same nurse – spoke. ‘When you’re better, come back and see me. My name is Bridget,’ she said. The words strung themselves into a banner in my head, as fragile and as sturdy as Tibetan prayer flags. I grasped them as a lifeline. In the apricot dark, she had given me the gift of human company, connection, hope, a future. One day I would go back. It was the first positive thought I had had.

Years later, by sheer chance, I found Bridget. Who was in fact called Brenda, and it was her co-worker Kate who had sat at my shoulder all night. Morphine turns many nurses, in the perception of their patients, into the Angel of Mons, and many more, unfairly, into Nurse Ratched; but these women were special. What continues to astonish me is that they remembered me amongst the thousands of smashed-up bodies they see in a major trauma hospital.

‘You were a fairly unusual case for us,’ Kate told me. ‘You were covered in mud from your fall. But what I remember was the way you lay awake all night, just looking at the ceiling. I could see your mind turning over and over. And I remember desperately wishing I could do something to put it right, to turn back the clock for you …’ her voice trailed off ‘… but all I could do was sit beside you sponging your mouth. We washed the mud off you in the morning. And I’ve often thought about you since, wondered what happened to you.’

As I have wondered myself.

CHAPTER TWO

Put Your Finger in the Crow’s Nest

The Warden owns the shade.

LOUIS SACHAR, HOLES

An apricot-coloured world, shading to russet, was actually rather an intriguing place to inhabit. You don’t sleep, when you’re on morphine, you just travel to strange places behind your eyelids, restless journeys through an orange landscape, journeys which leave you exhausted and confused. At night, I frequently found myself at the bottom of a cave, looking up like a potholer at rock faces which were clad with thick, hand-knitted russet wool – chunky cable-stitch, knitted on a giant’s great big fat knitting needles, as if to give you hand-holds when you climbed, but I didn’t need them because I was on some kind of cherry-picker, floating effortlessly up, up, up, exploring the openings and ledges on the woolly surface. Close to, I leant in and examined the texture, the thick twists of cable stitch. Up, up, I go, high into the stifling dark of orange woolliness.

That was one of the nicer destinations to which morphine took me. Other times, when it was daylight, and I was gazing at the ceiling tiles in the ward, I saw crude graffiti had been scratched. Evil messages to me. I caught the words subliminally. Fuck off, it said. But when I trailed my eyes slowly back to look more closely, the words had disappeared. Sometimes the tiles lifted at the edges, and I saw eyes peering down at me – sometimes rats’ eyes, other times, illegal immigrants’. Somewhere, in some sane fragment of my brain, I was horrified – my illiberal subconscious was betraying me, my inner Daily Mail reader emerging. The other part of me was preoccupied with the need to tell the authorities. Surely they shouldn’t be there. Not living in the ceiling. I knew things were bad in the NHS but surely not that bad. I felt under threat. But before I could call out, express it, the morphine carried me away somewhere else, and I forgot.

For three days, over the Easter holiday weekend, I lay motionless in the high-dependency ward of the spinal unit, waiting for my surgery. They had me on a specialist spinal bed, which tilted from side to side, to relieve pressure on my skin, and I was allowed neither to eat nor drink. Every so often the nurses wet my lips with a sponge on a stick. I pleaded for water, but they could not give me any. I pleaded with them to turn my pillow, to relieve the pressure on my head, but they refused to do it as often as I would like, because the neck was unstable. It took three of them to do it – two keeping my head motionless. The other one flipping the pillow. For three days I was unaware of anything else from the real world. I don’t know if Dave was there; I drifted.

My only certainty was that the ward was a dangerous, volatile place and I was a silent witness, buffeted and bewildered by the drugs. My instinct was to hang onto consciousness and concentrate very hard on survival. My view, when I was with it enough to open my eyes, was still that bit of ceiling. Out of the dark, in the periphery of my vision, emerged a face. A tiny woman with short grey hair; a kindly, self-effacing sprite whose voice offered me a mooring. ‘I’m Christine. I’m your named nurse,’ she told me. ‘I’ll look after you now. Together, we’ll get you through this. Things are going to get better.’

The connection she made held me, steadied me, a rope to the shore. She told me she had been a spinal nurse for more than forty years; she spoke with confidence and calm optimism. When she was not there I drifted alone again, fearful. Over the time I spent in hospital, I was cared for by dozens of nurses who were, like all human beings, a mixture of sensitive and insensitive, flawed and uncannily dedicated. With all of them, I sought kindness and a connection; the essence, surely, of any benign human relationship. And with most I found it, with few it was lacking. There was no other nurse, though, who gave me utmost sanctuary in the way Christine did when I was most in need.

Days and nights merged and I was unaware.

I could not feel my body, but I sensed strongly that my legs were raised up in the air in front of me. Floating up high. Later I learnt this was a common phenomenon of a new spinal injury, because they weren’t; they were flat on the bed. The other pressing physical sensation was of a steel band tightening around my ribcage, like the hoop holding together a whisky barrel. I could feel nothing else in my torso but that band. Most peculiar. Later I discovered this was my diaphragm. Our bodies, brilliantly evolved to survive, breathe in two ways – via the intercostal muscles around the lungs, and by the action of the diaphragm. The connections for each emerge from the spinal cord at different levels, like a safety net, a fallback system: I had lost the first but retained the second. My injury had paralysed my chest muscles and I was breathing solely by the rise and fall of my diaphragm. Had the break happened a few millimetres higher, both would have been knocked out and I’d have needed a tracheotomy and a machine to breathe for me. But I didn’t know this. I knew very little. I had no skin sensation at all … could only feel my head and back of my neck on the pillow. Just to test I was alive, and to release some distress, I chewed angrily at my bottom lip, the only autonomous action left to me. Just then I vividly appreciated the attraction of self-harm. Soon I could taste blood, but felt absolutely no pain. Why wasn’t it hurting? Only much later did I realise that this was the effect of the morphine.

Because my neck was unstable, they needed to secure the vertebrae at the front with a small metal plate. Before the operation, there were chats, which I only very vaguely remember, with both the anaesthetist and the neurosurgeon. The operation was tricky because my neck had swollen so much that from the ears down my neck flared out towards my shoulders, like some monstrous steroid-happy body-builder. It looked so grotesque Dave did not allow Dougie to visit me for several days.

‘You made an international prop forward look swan-necked.’

So swollen was my throat that the act of intubating me for the anaesthetic was risky and the operation, to plate the front of my sixth cervical vertebrae, took several hours. Afterwards they were worried that my throat would close up with the additional trauma, so they kept me on a ventilator to breathe for me, a big fat air tube in through my mouth and down into my lungs, and I was even more sedated. I couldn’t speak. A drip fed my body with fluid; a catheter drained it out. Of all this I was oblivious. I also had a nasal-gastric tube up my nose and down my throat, through which they passed the ground-up drugs into my stomach. When I was with-it enough to cry, the tears ran into my ears and soaked the tape securing the feeding tube to my face. I could do nothing about this; it was the same exquisite misery as when you have a streaming cold but are unable to blow your nose. The only thing to do was try not to cry. Christine had told me things would get better and she never let me down – I just had to take shelter in my head and hang on.

To enable me to communicate while on the ventilator, the nurses hung a laminated card with an alphabet by my right arm. After my fall, Pam, a dear friend of many years, rushed from France to support Dave. I have snatches of memory of them both at my bedside, with me conducting irritable, faltering mime conversations with them, spelling out the words by waving my right forefinger at the letters. My mind – I was convinced – was as clear as a bell; I became increasingly exasperated when they failed to keep up with my slow-motion spelling and grasp the words. They can’t be this stupid, I thought crossly. One day they arrived and said happy birthday – I remember feeling a genuine sense of shock and surprise. My birthday was 13 April, surely not yet. But I had lost control of time; I’d been on a ventilator for more than a week and the sound of its rhythm, sucking and sighing, the persistent beep-beep-debeepbeep behind my head, had become the vortex of my entire life. My real world was inside the apricot. I waited, while the scene changes came thick and fast and the only constant was the machine, sighing and pinging apologetically.

Some nights, my bed was in the corner of a room that was being used for a party. They’d opened an Indian restaurant on the ward. There were vast buffets of curry spread out, people came and went, laughing. My bed kept being moved. Every day I was in a different room and strived to orientate myself. One night I had a bird’s-eye view overlooking a city, which lay across the curve of a bay. In the dark the lights of the city were twinkling, reflecting across the water. Another night, workmen, wearing high-vis jackets, were digging up the floor around me. Then my bed split in two across the middle and I was sliding down into the gap, suspended over dark, deep water, and I kept crying out to the nurses to tell them I was going to drown, but they didn’t understand. One nurse was lying on the floor behind my bed snogging a workman. Another night, I was kidnapped – strangers used a fork-lift truck to take me, on my bed, out the back of the ward and stow me in a horsebox. They wanted me to go back to the cross-country course and testify that my accident was not their fault.

A family game from childhood haunted me, the rhyme shimmying around in my head. It had come from my mother, who played it in Northern Ireland in the 1920s on the way to picnics on the beach, sometimes Tyrella, sometimes Ballywalter. We played it too, obediently, on the back seat of the car. You crossed two fingers from one hand, opened a little, over the two fingers on the other hand, creating a neat, square, inviting hole in the middle. As you offered the gap to the person next to you, you chanted:

Put your finger in the crow’s nest

The crow’s not at home

He’s gone to Ballywalter to gather shelly stones …

And then, squeezing on the other person’s finger, you shouted:

He’s coming

He’s coming

He’s nipping!

He’s nipping!

And you squeezed and squeezed, and held them, trapped tight by the finger, until they squealed for mercy.

At one of the ward rounds, in a window of comparative sanity, I remember meeting my consultant for the first time. Mariel Purcell was young, a tall cool stylish Irishwoman, with long dark hair she wore loose. She wore sassy dresses and high heels. ‘We are keeping you on the ventilator,’ she told me. ‘You have a lung infection and we are giving you antibiotics.’ Later, when I was off the ventilator, she was more expansive. It was pneumonia. I was strangely thrilled, in the way you are when you’re a kid and you’re going to have something to boast about when you go back to school. It was like being eight again, falling off roller skates and cracking a bone in your wrist. But at that point I was just frustrated. I’m fine, I tried to tell her with my eyes. The purgatory of the ventilator jammed in my mouth was becoming unbearable. I wanted it taken out. I pleaded with the nurses on my alphabet card. W-H-E-N? T-O-D-A-Y? At the weekend, they said. Soon. They lied. Lied repeatedly and prodigiously. The weekend never came. Day followed day. I inhabited some lost bit of space, some cul-de-sac on the dark side, all alone, floating along in my own ghastly spaceship of tubes and sighs. Beep-beep-debeepbeep. Beep-beep-debeepbeep.

I remember when they took the ventilator out – there was an unpleasant rippling sensation as the corrugated ridges of the tube were withdrawn from my throat, I had a fleeting vision of those perforated blue drainage pipes, the kind you dig into the soil of your garden. Then it was over and I was drawing in my own air, could talk again. My jaw and my ears ached, despite the morphine, my tongue so dry and fat I was barely decipherable. I pleaded for a drink, but they refused: it was still too dangerous for me to try swallowing. At one point Christine moved across my line of vision, dragging a machine on wheels.

‘You don’t know this, but today is a very good day, a very significant day for you.’

I looked quizzical.

She smiled her shy smile. ‘I’m taking the ventilator away from your bed space. You’re making real progress.’

At some point during that time, on a morning ward round, the doctors clustered inside the curtains round my bed and asked to do an anal examination. What I didn’t know was that this was the test to see how paralysed I was. The spinal cord ends in the perineal area, your bottom, and if you have sensation in your anus, it indicates how badly injured your spine is.

I was rolled on my side and they stood behind me. Can you feel that? Can you clench your bottom? No, I said. Nothing. They were silent, grave. I decided, in my morphine haze, to be a good hostess and fill the silence to cover up any embarrassment. After all, my body was the party, wasn’t it? ‘That’s the nicest anal examination I’ve ever had,’ I said in a jolly more-tea-vicar sort of voice, trying to lighten the atmosphere, turning my head so I could grin at them. I didn’t understand why they didn’t smile back.

The severity of a spinal injury is measured on a scale developed by the American Spinal Injury Association – the ASIA impairment scale. If you are Asia A, you’re completely buggered, basically: you have no power or sensation preserved below the injury to your spine. You will not recover function. Asia B, you have sensory feeling below the injury but your muscles don’t work. Asia C, some muscles do work but they’re very weak. Asia Ds have muscles, at least half of which have reasonable strength and they can walk. And Asia Es, lucky creatures, are normal healthy people.

I was diagnosed Asia A. Completely buggered. They didn’t tell me that. Not then.

Only the ward was real. My other life had receded to some distant place. My sanity, my compensation, was to pretend I was indeed that war correspondent on the front line, compelled to start recording this crazy story, to make sense of it to myself. Besides, it was good copy. I was finding things quite fascinating, in a rather grotesque way. By writing, I figured, I could justify my absence to my bosses at my newspaper, The Times. It’s peculiar how much of a priority this felt at the time – a measure, I suppose, of my desperate determination to hold onto something familiar and re-establish some control. Work could save me, keep me viable. At the same time, it represented escape from emotional anguish. Very few things made chronological sense to me. Unbeknownst to me, Dave came every day. Other visitors were discouraged by the hospital and he was like a Rottweiler keeping people at bay. Later I heard some of the details of events outside: Dougie had been away on an Easter ski trip in the Alps and apparently it took him a couple of days to get home; his mates performed a heroic drama-filled dash to get him to Geneva. I honestly don’t remember the moment when I first saw him at my bedside; grief and morphine have kindly erased the memory of the encounter. I hope he has forgotten too: but even now, years later, I am unable to ask him, in case I reawaken the pain. In some dark corner, I have a terrible memory of trying to give him a thumbs-up gesture with my right hand as he left, and realising with shock that I couldn’t; my thumb wouldn’t move – simultaneously realising that he had perceived the same thing. At the time I was aware only of the unbearable hurt I had inflicted on my child … and him being extraordinarily brave and composed and trying to comfort me.

Dougie’s best friends from university, I much later discovered, came to stay at our home with him to comfort him during the first couple of weeks. I thought that was wonderful, that he had friends as fine as that. He was always more of a doer than a dreamer and I realised after my calamity that he was happiest when l asked him to do practical things; it was welcome distraction. When he knew I wanted to record what was happening to me, he brought in his Dictaphone. After he had gone I asked the nurses to place it beside me on the pillow and switch it on. I spent half an hour or so rambling gently about how I’d got here, trying to be professional, coherent. I had a job to do. A job to try and keep. I expressed anger at my own stupidity in falling off. Then I ran out of energy and the machine kept running, recording my breathing and the voices of the visitors in the bay opposite mine. Perhaps in my head that corner of the ward was still a curry shop at the time, or maybe by then I was at the stage of being convinced that a crowd of football casuals had got in and were trying to steal from my bedside cabinet. Shimmying between sanity and madness, I managed to summon the wit to ask a passing nurse to hit the off switch.

The next day Dougie took the Dictaphone and promised to email the recording to London.

They must have transcribed it and put something in the paper because at one point Su Pollard phoned the ward to talk to me, which was precisely the moment I knew my spaceship had landed on another planet. Su Pollard, for those under forty, is a wacky English character actress best known for a sitcom in the 1980s called Hi-de-Hi, which I had been aware of, as a young twenty-something, as a piece of cheesy middle-brow telly for my parents’ generation. A totem of its time, like Morecambe and Wise. Su is famous for eccentrically outsize glasses and a funny voice. Good-humoured Eighties kitsch. I had never met her in my life.

‘Call for you,’ said a nurse, holding the phone, eyebrows raised, a rather amused expression. ‘It’s Su Pollard.’

It must be a morphine moment. She would drift away in a minute.

‘THE Su Pollard?’ I said.

‘Sounds like her.’

‘But I don’t know her.’

‘It’s you she asked to speak to.’

Too random. Had to be opiates. The nurse held the phone to my ear and I had a short, apparently lucid conversation with someone who sounded exactly like the hapless holiday camp chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw whom I’d occasionally seen on TV thirty years ago.

Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)

‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.

‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.

‘I’m rooting for you.’

‘Thank you.’

I still don’t know if it really happened or not.

At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes and swaddling gowns to reach the bare skin of my hip. Exploring in the dark. The one-way sensation of touching my own warm skin, and feeling nothing back, is most peculiar, as if it is an alien I am attached to. My fingers are not giving me trustworthy signals, because their nerve connections are damaged too, and retreating further into shock. What’s so devastating is that the skin I touch feels fleecy, beautiful, devastating; all these things at the same time. Because it belongs to me but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s someone else’s; it’s like reaching down and touching your lover’s body in the night. How peculiar. Four-fifths of my body has divorced me, but it’s still attached to me. I’m two people – me and the rest of me. I am eerily still … but inside I’m screaming and waving. I’m helpless as a beetle on its back, except my legs don’t even wave to express it. My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. Where do I go from here, seeing I have already blurted out something about Switzerland and Dr Purcell didn’t respond?

The movie Trainspotting was really accurate, you know. The stuff about coming off morphine, when your body is a seething rats’ nest and nothing will calm it. Although I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, because I didn’t even know I had been on morphine. All I knew was that it felt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Even though my body was paralysed and insensate, I felt that it was jangling all over, itching, shivering – compelling me to cry out for relief, for death, for anything to make it stop. Inside my brain, restless leg syndrome multiplied a million times, ants crawled inside my skin, devouring me from within. One vivid day I became convinced my bedding was soaked. The mattress and bottom sheet were sloshing in icy water: I was certain I was freezing alive, shivering, nagging for more blankets.

‘I can’t give you any more blankets,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re not cold.’

‘Please, I’m freezing,’ I wheedled. ‘Please. Be kind.’

‘Kind?’ she said. ‘Heart like a swinging brick, me.’

She wasn’t joking. She was on duty one weekend morning when they were desperately short-staffed – they often were at weekends – and running very late, taking hours it seemed to me to attend to each of us high-dependency patients in turn, log-rolling us to wash us. The morphine withdrawal must have been at its peak, for I started crying out from the sensations in my head. Outwardly motionless on the bed, I was inwardly consumed by chemical distress and bewilderment. I could see them log-rolling someone else in the distance; although I must have been imagining it, because the curtains were always closed when they were washing someone. The room kept changing in shape. I shouted again but still no one came. Of all I had experienced after my accident, in its totality, that was my most desperate lonely moment, the point when I couldn’t go on. Like someone near death, my instinct was to shout for my mother. But she was dead, I knew that, so I shouted for my sister. She lived in France and I had not yet seen her, but I had regressed to childhood; my big sister would make it better. Lindsay would make them help me.

‘What d’you want?’

It was Swinging Brick and she was pissed off.

‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘Please …’

‘We’re busy with other patients. We’ll get to you when we can.’

I never cried out again.

Lots of other patients vocalised their distress; I listened jealously to them screaming and yelling, calling out repeatedly. I was too repressed, too polite. Posh girl in bedlam. It’s only funny now, much later. How I used to envy them their release, these unseen uninhibited souls who raged aloud, who set loose their pain upon the world at large. I wished I too could wail and curse. The way I’d been brought up, you suffered in silence, you were never rude, never made a fuss. There was one voice I often heard shouting at night – a young argumentative male who roared with anger and rage, despair coming from the deepest, darkest torture chamber. ‘Why?’ he used to shout. ‘Why can’t I fucking move? Just tell me why.’

I asked Christine about him.

She sighed. ‘Oh, that’s Snafu. He’s one of mine too.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘He’s finding it hard.’ She sounded sad. She didn’t say any more. I would find out later for myself.

In general the cursing was epic. Legendary. When West of Scotland working man meets catastrophe all he needs is a victim to let rip upon. The spinal unit had a resident psychologist, a gentle New Zealander, a bit of a waffler who must have helped some people lost in the shock of paralysis, but I found him irritating. Everything he said seemed anodyne. But then who wouldn’t seem ineffectual, with the unenviable job of counselling people in the rawest of grief? We existed in a world beyond platitudes, beyond consolation. On the ward, I still couldn’t raise my head to see anything but I lay and listened, as would a blind person, to the voices and the noises.

The darkest of five-star entertainment came one afternoon when the psychologist was sent to counsel an older man who was refusing to cooperate with the nurses. Grunt was a tiny Glaswegian hardman, paralysed from the neck down, who was taking his plight as a personal insult and was either beyond or incapable of reason. He launched a verbal assault upon the hapless Kiwi, a tsunami of violent Glasgow kisses which no curtains round a bed could confine. His tirade was loud, sustained, fluent, uninhibited and utterly priceless: the hairdryer treatment, poetry of the utterly profane, articulating all the pain and fury inside him. Grunt was no doubt a talented curser already, but neuroscience shows that swearing actually helps people biologically to relieve extreme distress, and he was going for it. The caress of the damned, it occurred to me.

‘Fuck off. Who the fuck are you? Jesus fucking Christ what’s it to you? What the fuck do you fucking want? Yer fucking useless waste of space, yer fucking stupid idiotic cunt, nah, nah, get out of my fucking face yer fat cunt and leave me alone.’

‘Now I git it why you’re upsit,’ said the Kiwi, his voice high and mild.

‘Upset, you useless piece of shit? I’ll give yer fucking cunting upset, you bastard.’

‘B-b-but it would hilp to talk, chick out some thoughts, it’s nicissary for you to ixpress yoursilf …’

‘If I could fucking move I’d fucking express maself, I’d wring yer fuckin neck. Just get to fuck … right?’

‘Yis, Grunt … I understand.’

‘Away back to Australia yer stupid speccy bastard, yer useless cunt. Someone should have drowned ye at birth.’

And so it continued. Lying on my back, silently chortling, I was joined by one of the nurses, who dashed in behind my half-pulled curtain, stuffing her apron in her mouth to silence the giggles. We shared a wonderful private, silent moment of hilarity. It was the first time I had laughed since the accident.

Perhaps it was the third week in high dependency when I became aware lots of things were starting to happen. I’d regained the breathing; now it was basic stuff like drinking normally. Previously, much as I had pleaded, the specialist designated two-woman swallowing team, who came round and judged these things, had deemed me unfit to do so. They were the Fat Controllers of the gullet: at one point, they tested me with a sip of tea from a straw while they stood and watched, unsmiling, pens poised over clipboards. They seemed spectacularly humourless, these specialist teams. I sucked with a degree of arrogance. Of course I was fine! But much as I craved it, drinking was weirdly difficult. I found myself spluttering, coughing, and they shook their heads and took the tea away.

After that, I stopped pushing against the system. A few days later, they granted permission. A kindly staff nurse, to whom I had confided my fantasy about a latte, went and bought me one from the café. But what I had yearned for tasted acrid, strong, too hot. I turned instead, gratefully, to sucking weak, tepid, milky NHS tea – baby tea, they called it – through a straw, as she held the cup. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t hold a cup by myself, but then I had not even started to address the size of physical loss which I faced. Denial piled up on itself; like bricks in a wall. I had nowhere near yet exhausted what Brian Keenan called the strategies of denial, convincing myself that if I could just take back control and start doing things for myself, then all would return to normal. I thought my hands would work if I really asked them to – of course they would! – so I asked the nurse to leave that day’s pile of greetings cards upon my bedclothes in front of me, rather than set them aside for Dave. Anyone can open an envelope! Surely! I tried to pick up the top card and watched with bewilderment as my fingers refused to grip. I didn’t even get to the stage of finding out they couldn’t rip paper. Then the cards slid slowly off my chest onto the floor and I watched them go, passive and helpless. So much for Get Well Soon.

My right wrist, though, had something still going for it. There was still strength there. The hand therapist Leslie had come to see me and, upon her instructions, Dougie went shopping and found me a travel cup with the handle open at the bottom. I could wedge my palm under the handle and lift a mug of that precious baby tea high enough up to drink through a straw – my first independent action. Likewise, when the Gullet Controllers had carried out Protocol Two Testing, Permission to Take Solids, I was given yoghurts and found I was just about able, by myself, to dig in a spoon and then transfer it to my mouth. The feeding tube, a ghastly uncomfortable thing that had been strapped to my cheek and down my throat for weeks, was withdrawn – a peculiar sensation as the nurses reeled the long, thin pipe out of my stomach via my nostrils, as if hauling in the garden hose. At the time I took little notice of such progression, unimpressed, impatient merely that I was so feeble at simple tasks. As I mocked and fretted, denial built. Only later, wiser and humbler, did I come to understand the extraordinary significance of this hand–mouth coordination, and how lucky I was: so many people with broken necks, several of them in the unit with me, could not do this basic task and were doomed to total dependency in order to survive. Others needed months of hand therapy, and specially adapted implements, to be able to drink by themselves or reach their mouths with food.

Time to sit up a little, another milestone. I was fitted with a white collar, like a Star Wars Storm Trooper, so that my neck was supported when my bedhead was raised a few degrees for the first time. This meant my first view of the new world. It also meant I saw my legs for the first time. Not good. Nothing – nothing at all – can prepare you for the appearance of those paralysed limbs, sprawled where you do not feel them to be on the bed, lifeless and somehow deeply misshapen. Someone else’s legs, not yours. I felt physically sick. They looked like the Guy Fawkeses we made as children for bonfire night, newspaper stuffed into an old pair of tights, puffy and lumpy in the wrong places, knees and ankles askew like scarecrows. These weren’t my legs at all; they were horrific, alien objects.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you face sudden, extreme disability as an adult: a sense of disconnect, of disbelief, which I can best describe as a compound fracture of the soul. Losing the use of one’s legs is profound, an event so fundamentally wrong that it catapults you through a door which no one else who has full function can possibly enter, into a place which often is the loneliest place in the world. Humans were not meant not to be able to walk; we are hard-wired to move, and at the deepest level we understand that in movement lies our ability to survive, to feed, to keep warm, to seek shelter, to procreate, to interact. Mobility is caveman stuff – we are programmed to understand, somewhere in our ancient genes, that those who cannot keep up are left behind to the wolves. When wild animals and primitive people fall ill, or fail with age, or grow lame, they drop back from the herd. It is natural. Those who cannot walk are left behind; they become isolated; their weakness overtakes them; they stop, lie down and die. Elephants do it; sheep do it; Native American people did it. By allowing the healthy to move on, unburdened, nature ensures the survival of nature. Walking therefore has a grip over our imagination, which helps to explains healthy people’s subconscious prejudice against wheelchairs, manifest in their impatience and irritation and sometimes open hostility. Civilisation in certain instances can desert us in a flash, because deep down it’s about life or death. Walk and win. Go off your feet and you’re history.

Long legs were good for skiing. In the Alps in the yuppie 1980s.

Now I’m sure everyone, should they ever be forced to part with them, would be partial to their own legs, but I’d always been particularly attached to mine and my initial feeling was absolute bewilderment. They weren’t slim or beautiful, my legs, but they were so unusually long they defined who I was: a thirty-six-inch inside measurement, longer than most men’s, making me over six feet tall without shoes on. I liked that. They gave me scope, shaped my identity: in their time they had pogoed to punk bands, skied down black runs, ran half marathons, walked up mountains and done crazy charity endurance stunts. This is humblebragging, isn’t it? I’m boasting, pathetically, about something I don’t possess any more. But it is the only way I can plot the scale of my loss. My legs were my closest allies, my ever-ready Amazonian accomplices, enabling me always to skip away from bores and bossiness and bureaucracy. Catch me if you can. All of which made my present situation even more difficult; the sense of bereavement even more profound. Without my legs, I was baffled. What now? I’m sure every sporty person, every individualist and risk-taker who has ever damaged their spine, feels the same. How did we bridge the imagination gap between what was, and what is? Who was this godforsaken new person who could not move? I did not know them. Nor did I know what they might become. Nor, quite frankly, did I have any intentions of finding out. I was going to get better.

Paralysis. The Venerable Bede prescribed a cure. ‘Scarify the neck after the setting of the sun and silently pour the blood into running water. After that, spit three times, then say: “Have thou this unheal and depart with it.”’

Paralysis. According to Wikipedia, defined by the loss of voluntary movement or motor function. A late Old English word, via Latin from Greek paralusis, from paraluesthai ‘be disabled at the side’, from para ‘beside’ + luein ‘loosen’. A term used figuratively from 1813.

Paralysis. According to the Egyptian physician Imhotep, 3,000 to 2,500 years BC: ‘If thou examinest a man having a dislocation in a vertebra of his neck, shouldst thou find him unconscious of his two arms and his two legs on account of it (and) urine drips from his member without his knowing it, his flesh has received wind, his two eyes are bloodshot … he has an emissio seminis which befalls his phallus, thou shouldst say concerning him, “an ailment not to be cured”.’ Give or take the phallus, old Imhotep was spot on.

Paralysis: all in all, a complete bastard of a word.

The human skeleton is designed to protect your core nervous system at all costs: the vertebrae link like chain-armour around it, grow bony spikes on the outside to foil intruders. The spinal cord is the wiring from central command and control; it is the engine of your free will; the power and pleasure of your flesh. When the spinal cord is damaged, it is indeed like a nuclear attack, the ultimate hit. Your body does everything it can in defence: it shuts down, retreats into itself, sends fluid to the site of the injury. Every resource available goes to the core and the extremities get forgotten about. The surface of your hands and feet become thickened and leathery with excess skin. Your heart rate slows, you start to retain litres of water and swell all over. The body remains in a state of suspended animation for four to six weeks, during which time accurate diagnosis of the extent of your injury can be impossible. Some weeks after my accident a deep ridge started to emerge from the cuticles at the bottom of my fingernails and slowly grew its way up: a tremor in my body’s rock stratum; a record of the geological seismic shock within me.

They don’t hang about on the NHS. As soon as my neck was judged suitably stable, they started to hoist me into a wheelchair. There is a set regime to protect the skin on your backside from pressure sores. You start with half an hour a day in the chair, then an hour. You build up. You carefully toughen your epidermis to its new weight-bearing role in life. Overnight, your buttocks have become the soles of your feet. When you accustom the skin to that fact, you’ve reached the magic goal in spinal rehab of ‘up as able’. You’re then allowed to sit in your chair all day. This process takes weeks.

Getting up was a ritual like preparing a medieval knight for battle, a fairly accurate reflection of the pace of life with a spinal injury – achingly slow, with progress measured on a scale too tiny for the able-bodied to contemplate. Understand the mammoth effort, you able-bodied, and you will never again take for granted the fast, fluid ability to sit up in bed, swing your legs over the side, and stand up. First, the nurses have to dress you. It feels like they are stuffing a giant sausage. No underwear, just the baggiest T-shirt and joggers you possess. I had asked the boys to bring me in one of my 10k race T-shirts and the nurses cut the neck to widen it. It was a symbol of who I really was and my statement of intent – a sporty person who shouldn’t be here. Mistaken identity. As reality bit, I felt embarrassed and threw it away.

Then they put on my high, choking collar and they rolled me on the bed into a hard white plastic shell, a back brace, to protect my lower-down fracture, until, trussed, I resembled a Storm Trooper even more closely. Why was I so miscast? Didn’t they realise I was actually, in my past life, a female Jedi warrior? The brace on the collar extended down my sternum; the body brace came up to meet it. Thrust up into the gap between, elevated like some spoof medieval embonpoint, came my breasts. They sprouted, insensate, near my chin.

‘Jesus, your tits look amazing,’ said a male colleague who came to visit me a couple of weeks later, ‘like they’re peeking over the garden fence.’ Never was there a less sensual image.

Only then, fully armoured, was it time to be hoisted into a chair. Lack of balance and orientation from weeks spent lying flat, plus the low blood pressure endemic to my injury, made this an ordeal. Seasick and head swimming, headsick and seaswimming, I was rolled to get the hoist cradle under me, and then lifted up to dangle for all the world like a dead cow in an abattoir; whereupon they lowered me into a wheelchair, rocking me forward and back until my weight was centralised. The whole process was exhausting, lengthy and discombobulating. That first time, I cried out in fear – I had a terrifying sensation that my head was loose and was going to fall off backwards, so the physiotherapists fashioned a temporary cardboard extension to the chair back to comfort me. They told me my neck was completely stable and things would get easier but I was not convinced. Inside, I screamed at the indignity and the horror of it: outwardly, I put on a grim smile and told myself sternly that this was progress. This was how to get better. First goal, get used to the chair. Then begin the recovery.

Once in the chair, I could resume some adult responsibility. My immediate boss at The Times, Magnus Linklater, had been one of the very few allowed in to visit soon after the accident. He had told me not to worry, and kissed me on the forehead. The kiss struck me as terribly kind but rather worrying. Was I really so ill? It was evident to all but me. Then Anne Spackman, the comment editor, who told me she had wept as she transcribed that initial tape recording, flew up from London. I showed her how, now I was up, I could use a laptop with one finger. I couldn’t grasp why everyone seemed so surprised about my determination to try and get working again. Anne was followed by the editor of The Times at the time, James Harding. The nurses arranged for me to meet him in the conference room. Hazily fearful, I think I expressed my insecurities about the future. He could not have been more supportive. Could I continue to write, I asked hesitantly. The professional editor in me, despite the madness of the morphine, smelt a source of good copy. Of course I could, he said. In fact, he wanted a weekly column about my recovery, to be published in the Saturday magazine. My heart, I remember, leapt.

‘The only thing is, we don’t know what to call it.’

‘Oh, I’ve already thought about that. What about “Spinal Column”?’

Did he know, this most human, warm, sophisticated man, that he was handing me a precious lifeline? Not just in terms of my family’s future, but of my psychological survival. Here was a chance for me to create my own biographical narrative, to write towards some kind of redemption.

Labouring under many illusions, and feeling quite breezy – I do think the opiates were largely to blame at that stage – I then tackled my first session in the gym, which swiftly brought home the brutal realities of my situation. The cruel parallels of two worlds were beginning to impact on me, old and new crushing me between them: the gyms as I had been familiar with them, Lycra-ed temples of beautiful fit bodies in motion; and gyms, paralysis-style, where broken, frozen people were propped upright, in various stages of disorientation and bewilderment. Plus, there were unseen horrors to discover. I was about to have a crash course in the reality of paralysed bowels. As two physiotherapists used a hoist to lift me from wheelchair to specialist rehabilitation plinth, gravity struck. My bowels suddenly and involuntarily emptied. The only way I knew was by the sound and then the nostril-fluttering smell, which trapped me in a ghastly freeze of humiliation. What was the famous Nike gym slogan? Just do it? Well I just did. ‘Uh-oh,’ said the physiotherapist at the wrong end.

Too upset even to cry, I could only stammer my apologies, but they were totally nonplussed, matter-of-fact. Don’t worry, they said. Part of the job. Happens all the time. For me it seemed catastrophic. My first morning in the gym, when I had planned to hit the machines, develop sizeable shoulders and start my legs moving again, all within the space of an hour, and there I was being lowered, stinking, onto pads on the wheelchair, hurried back to the ward, laboriously hoisted again onto a bed of pads and rolled and cleaned like a baby. I was getting an inkling of what exactly paralysis entailed.

Over the next few days, I had a few more brief sessions in the gym when, thank God, my bowels did not betray me. The gym offered a welcome distraction from reflection. It wasn’t wise to sit and dwell on your plight. ‘Gym,’ one cynical spinal consultant once muttered, ‘is really only there to take people’s mind off things.’ You hid your despair as much as you could, if only because too many tears invoked a dreaded visit from the Kiwi psychologist, whose amiable ‘Have you got time for a chit?’ confirmed to you that matters really were wrist-slittingly terminal.

The gym in fact, became all-consuming. I got my first taste of what it would take to strengthen my arms and shoulders and returned to the ward furious at my own weaknesses. Where was bloody superwoman now? Ten minutes on the handcycle – where my hands were bandaged to a set of handles rotating at shoulder height – left me puffing as I would once have done running on a treadmill. Another big test was to propel myself for the first time in a chair. It sounds so easy but it was such a ridiculously difficult, slow-motion challenge, even just twenty yards down the hospital corridor, that when I made it back to the ward I was totally drained. My right hand, because my wrist was strong, was good at pushing but the left, a bunch of stone bananas, couldn’t grip the chair’s push rims and the imbalance made me zigzag across the lino. To compensate, I turned my left hand and elbow outwards from the shoulder, like an injured bird, and propelled with the edge of my palm and wrist. There was some residual power. Life, it occurred to me, in an image which would be repeated, honed to perfection over the next decade, was beginning to feel exactly like one of those sadistic TV game shows made famous by Clive James in the 1980s. It was the genre of humiliation as entertainment, which began on Japanese TV and in Britain evolved into I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. And that was exactly what it felt like for me, that world of crazed, pointless challenges tantalisingly just beyond the contestants’ grasp, the stream of filth and cockroaches cascading over their heads. And the celebs had it easy: they went home after a month.

With the ability to push a few yards came a tiny amount of autonomy and I started to explore the corridors around the high-dependency unit, like a toddler exploring her home. I would reach a big window, or a glass door, and peer out at the sky and a bit of treetop behind the roof. Sometimes I overreached myself and had to sit for five minutes, resting, at the corner until I was strong enough to turn. Five minutes … the most inconsequential flick of time in a spinal rehabilitation ward, where snails moved faster, their goals better defined. David Allan, the director of the spinal unit, the man who had clenched his fists in A&E for us to demonstrate what happened to my neck, had already warned me my rehab could take over a year. When he had said it I was aghast; now, reluctantly, I was beginning the process of understanding.

The awakening consciousness, the struggle to regain some form of control over my life, was encapsulated by my tragi-comic battle over my hair. When you break your neck, you are condemned to have the back of your head set on a pillow for, well, much of the rest of your life, and in the shorter term to wear collars for several months. My thick, wavy hair was problematic. Too short to be tied on the top of my head in a pineapple – the only place where it would be out of the way – but long enough to snag and mat like the fur of an abandoned dog. And it hurt. Being unable to raise my head was ordeal enough; having the elastic straps from oxygen masks to tug my scalp, tubes to stick in the hair, tears to dry in it and a collar to catch it made my daily existence more miserable. The back of my head became a hot, itchy torture and just as I had earlier obsessed about drinking a coffee, so I now fantasised about having my hair shaved like a GI. Cut it off, I commanded the most friendly nurses. They laughed at me. I blustered that I would do it myself, but of course in reality I wasn’t able to raise my head unaided, let alone lift my arms behind my head, or wield scissors. I ordered Dave to send for two of my most resourceful friends. I demanded my human right to have my hair cut.

But my husband, less impulsive than me, was concerned it would be against hospital rules or might injure my neck. He refused. I tried again with the nurses, they asked the ward sister, but she too had a touch of the Fat Controller about her, and forbade it – some specious excuse … health and safety, infection control, possibility I might sue them – and I lay and seethed with impotent fury as my Rastafarian mat hummed behind me on the pillow. I remember eyeing the sister balefully as she stood at the nurses’ station. Bloody jobsworth, hidebound by rules. Totally exasperated at my lack of control over something so trivial, I resorted to asking my consultant on the ward round. Dr Purcell raised a cool eyebrow and agreed a family member could cut it. So it was that my sister Lindsay, over from France and armed with a pair of blunt disposable NHS scissors, gave me the best cut of my life – hacked short and choppy up the back of my head. She insisted on leaving the length on top. The result was Simon Le Bon circa 1983 but I felt so free and cool and happy I couldn’t have cared less. My appearance, I had at least twigged, wasn’t going to matter that much for a while, if ever again. I had bigger priorities ahead.

Around then the doctors finally took me off tramadol and I experienced my first proper sleep, morphine-free. I remember waking with a sense of profound joy, awash with the novelty of feeling deeply rested. Unbelievably restored, at peace. All traces of the orange cable-stitch wool had gone away and the sunlight was streaming through the thin patterned curtains around my bed, a pattern of blue oblongs and squares which I had, it seemed, been studying and reinterpreting for years. For the first time the material looked fresh, normal – just cloth – not an omen, or pictures, or a metaphor, or a maze.

It was time to move into the unknown.

CHAPTER THREE

Swallow Diving from the Seventh Floor

What hath night to do with sleep?

John Milton, Paradise Lost

The rehab ward was no place for sissies. I learnt that in the middle of my first night, woken from sleep as if for a hostile interrogation. Two nursing assistants arrived in my bedspace with a flourish, switching on the full-strength fluorescent examination light overhead, pulling the curtains noisily shut behind them, stripping back my blankets. It was somewhere in the small hours; there were other patients asleep a few feet away in the same room.

‘What’s happening?’

No reply. They were talking, but not to me.

I was bewildered, dazzled, disorientated. They were putting their hands under me, moving me across the bed. Maybe this was another fantasy kidnap.

‘Please, what’s happening?’

One of them broke off from their conversation.

‘You need turned.’

He reeked of cannabis. Dougie always said I had a nose like a bloodhound but this guy was in a different league. You could almost taste it. Together they worked like a Formula One pitstop team: rolled me onto my other hip, wedged a pillow behind my back to keep me there, placed another pillow under my top knee, and switched my overnight urine drainage stand, attached to my catheter, to the opposite side of the bed. It was done in seconds, a slick, well-practised manoeuvre. Wham bam, wheelnuts tight, off you go, Sebastian Vettel, back out of the pit lane.

‘OK,’ Doobie said. It wasn’t a question. They switched off the blinding light, pulled back the curtains, and moved to the next bed. Click, swoosh, gone. Not remotely cruel, but not remotely kind either. Disengaged, impersonal. I wasn’t a person; I was a task, one of dozens of four-hourly turns they had to perform through the night. It was an attitude I was to become deeply accustomed, and eventually immune to. But right at that moment, I had never felt more alone, more insulted by the stench of cannabis, or more acutely aware of what a sheltered, precious, middle-class prat I was to feel so offended. Later, when I got to know Doobie better, I became quite fond of him. But not his smell.

Way back in the beginning, hospital was a sanctuary. Like driftwood washed to the top of the beach by a high tide, salt-bleached, splintered by the storms, you just rest awhile, nestling in the sand. Something terrible has befallen you, but if you lie very, very still, you will be safe. Nothing is asked of you. Hands which you cannot feel will gently position you; quiet voices address you. In intensive-care and high-dependency wards, they turn you frequently in the night to protect your skin from pressure sores, but they do it discreetly and by torchlight in order not to wake you. When you cease to be acutely ill, and move away from those remarkable acute areas where the staff ratio is generous and the NHS functions at its very best, things change. The nurses in high-dependency tried to warn me about the difference in ethos awaiting me. ‘It’s different next door,’ they said. Next door was the adjoining corridor, the forty-bed spinal rehabilitation ward, where, having had your spine stabilised, you would be schooled to cope with your condition. Weeks later, Euphorbia, one of the senior rehab nurses, proudly shared with me the standard joke about the transition.

‘Like going from the Ritz to a Travelodge,’ she said. And laughed. Took me a while to find it funny, but I did eventually.

The ward seemed more Guantanamo than Travelodge, though, that first night after the interruption, as I lay with a thumping heart and retinas imprinted with the white-hot square of the ceiling light. It struck me, as I struggled to take in the rules and understand the rhythm of the ward, that this was what being dumped at boarding school must have felt like to a sheltered child. A doctrine of tough love with the love taken out. Newly paralysed, I was exquisitely powerless to do anything but watch and listen. Once again, I garrisoned myself deeper and deeper in that only safe place, my head. Once again, it came down to survival.

And boy, imprisoned, motionless, I really did feel my spaceship had landed me on yet another alien planet. I had to learn fast. There was something almost Darwinian about it. Sink or swim. Adapt or die. A rehab ward in a spinal unit is like an under-strength factory floor: too few staff battling to a relentless timetable of feeding, medicating, washing, toileting, dressing and hoisting dozens of helpless carcasses into wheelchairs to get them to the gym. I guess it’s a bit like a geriatric ward only there’s more shit and less dementia, and I’m not sure, from a nurses’ point of view, if that’s a wholly desirable payoff. The operation was geared to through-put. The aim was to get us wrecks into the best possible state of semi-independence as quickly as possible, aware and able to self-manage, so we could be returned to our homes. It was noisy, smelly, shitty, relentless hard work for the nursing staff and a slow, tormented awakening to reality for the carcasses, many of whom lacked even the motor function to press their call buzzer for attention. But it was functional. Something had to be done with us.

Things, I swiftly discovered, wound themselves up from 6 a.m. onward, in preparation for the 7 a.m. handover, when the nurses’ twelve-and a half-hour-night shift switched with the twelve-and-a-half-hour day shift. There is a grim unforgiving routine when you have paralysed bladder and bowels. Conveyor-belt stuff. The nurses detached our overnight urine drainage bags, great wobbling two-litre plastic bags of yellow fluid collected from indwelling catheters, and emptied them down the loo. Before handover, in the dawn light, they would leave us our little morning package of delight, anal suppositories wrapped up in an incontinence pad, on the ends of our beds. ‘Are your supps in?’ echoed the cry.

Paraplegics, whose arms and hands were not paralysed, were taught to reach behind their backs to their bottom and shove their own up. Tetraplegics like me, who could neither hold nor reach, had to wait to have the nurse do it. A few minutes after insertion, as the suppositories began to do their work, our semi-naked bodies, big, small, and everything in between, were hoisted onto commode-style shower chairs and wheeled into the bathroom one after another, to be poised over the loo until our bowels delivered. There was a critical time balance as to how long you waited. Left in bed too long, you would poo on the sheets or, worse, in the hoist; or perhaps even dump upon the floor through the hole in the shower chair seat en route to the bathroom. Too short a time, and you would sit for what seemed like hours over the loo, waiting for the splash that told you something had happened. It was the only way to tell. You had no feeling.

Eventually, a staff nurse would come and use a gloved finger to check that your bowels were empty; and then you would be showered. Often your bowels didn’t oblige and after half an hour or so, with you cold and acutely miserable on the hard plastic split seat of a shower chair, a staff nurse would come and put their fingers up your anus, stimulating the rectum until it released. Some nurses were better at it than others. They were the ones you loved because they were fast, efficient and gave you confidence that you would last the day without an accident. The ever-cheery Rosebud, one of my favourites, used to waggle her index finger and joke that she should have it insured as one of the best in the business. Without the willingness of spinal nurses to put their hands up dozens of backsides a day, closing their noses to the smell of faeces, the paralysed would die. It’s as simple as that. Perhaps it’s no surprise that death rates for spinal injuries improved after the invention of the disposable latex glove in the 1960s.

They gave as good as they got, those fast-talking, insouciant Glasgow girls. Lupin, her uniform straining over her fabulous bust, had spent the morning crouching on the floors of bathrooms, beside arse after arse, evacuating poo. Later she sounded off to some of us, the patients she trusted, about being criticised by one of the consultants.

‘He’s like complaining it was too smelly when he was doing the ward round.’

She threw her hands out, paused for effect.

‘I’m like, “No shit Sherlock!”’

‘Did you really say that?’

‘You kidding?’

For us, new trainees in the hard school of double incontinence, this was the start of an entirely different way of life. We laughed about our plight when things went particularly wrong, forged together by the dark humour, the dry-as-dust jokes, the human condition stripped to its most primitive. It was, I guess, like a PoW camp. With it went an undercurrent of real camaraderie, a shared acknowledgement of our common misery. Up and dressed one mid-afternoon, a dozen or so of us were parked in our wheelchairs in a polite semicircle, staring at the wall onto which was projected the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation. And one of our number, a distinguished man who had boarded a plane at Heathrow but when it landed was unable to stand up because he had suffered a spinal stroke, leant over from his wheelchair towards mine and muttered:

‘Did you ever imagine a situation where you would sit gazing intently at the words “Bowel Management”?’

Indeed, there were far too many things beyond the power of imagination and they were pressing in on us. We got detailed tutorials. We were as mordant as we could be, for without a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, how else could we cope with bleak forty-five-minute lectures about suppositories, peristalsis and sphincters; or indeed, in subsequent sessions, about pressure sores, catheterisation techniques and the risks of a deadly condition called autonomic dysreflexia? We were awake yet trapped in an undergraduate’s anxiety nightmare, where you dream you’ve committed to study entirely the wrong course. There had been some terrible mistake. You wanted to do English Literature; you were stuck in theoretical astrophysics. And in this university there was no dropping out, no transferring. To this day, I have lodged in my memory one particular giant image of a bedsore on a buttock which was displayed on the wall for us during those afternoon education sessions.

‘This sore is the size of a plate,’ warned the nurse in charge.

‘It had to be packed every day and the person had to spend two years in bed before they were able to sit up in a chair again. It is what can happen if you do not check your skin and take efforts to relieve pressure points.’

I looked at plates differently after that.

Most definitely beyond imagination were the backstories of my fellow patients: the extraordinary mixture of bizarre and mundane which had brought us together. We were a community bound by the common possession of crushed or severed spinal cords, but the disparate tales of how it came to happen were far, far stranger than fiction. Any woman who has given birth in an NHS hospital will know what it’s like to share a ward with the fantastic, comic mix of rough and ready, posh and precious, and every kind of female in between, whose only common bond is the ability to have a baby. Well, breaking your back is like that but magnified a millionfold. If you tried, you could not have made us up. Academics, labourers, wasters, tradesmen, accountants, failed suicides, business managers, teenagers, drunks, cyclists, stuntmen, farmers, speedway riders, criminals, jockeys, teachers, police officers, motorbikers, dog-walkers, golfers, drug addicts, teachers, pensioners and more congregate in spinal units. We were young, old, decrepit, well-groomed, inarticulate, intellectual, deranged, gay, straight and transgender, condemned to our wheelchairs by road accidents, falls from bikes or horses or walls or beds or cliffs or balconies, stumbles off kerbs, trips over slippers or coffee table or dog leads or manhole covers, crashes on the piste, dives into swimming pools, rugby tackles, violent assaults, attempted murder, war, vascular incidents or complications from tumour operations. Several were victims of slipping on ice. Men outnumbered women by almost ten to one. Every one of us had our own bitter misinterpretation of risk to reflect on. What we had in common is that life, quite simply, chose to leap out and attack us. As one nurse put it: ‘When I first came to work here I was terrified of the chance of spinal injury happening. Then I saw that it can happen to anyone, in any circumstance. It is completely random so I stopped worrying.’

This did not stop us, as individuals, in private moments, being haunted by our ‘what ifs’. What if I’d left the bike at home. Or pulled up the horse. Or not got in the car. But such thoughts were entirely pointless, jousting with the random essence of existence. Meantime, I decided, even if I couldn’t move, there was at least some fleeting entertainment to be had watching and listening to my fellow travellers. It was, I supposed, like being on a cruise ship.

The rehab ward was subdivided into rooms of four or six beds. One of these, opposite the nurses’ station, was a dedicated respiratory section for those poor sods who were on tracheotomies in order to breathe. They remained strangers to most of us, as they never rose from bed to wheelchair, and were too sick and dependent to reach the gym. People with such high-level neck injuries stayed as long as it took to stabilise them and arrange the massive twenty-four/seven care packages they would need at home. Then they were taken away at quiet times: still, distant figures upon stretchers beset by tubes and ventilators.

I remember catching a glimpse through the internal ward glass of one occupant: a morbidly obese man, not old by any means, who lay like a mountain upon what seemed an impossibly small bed, the tubes through the front of his throat, his face turned impassively towards the outside window. He did not live long enough to go home: one morning the staff came and drew all the internal curtains in the wards, shut the doors and hushed our buzzers, because his body was being removed and we were not to see. His accident had probably been caused by a fall – the most common cause of calamity. But oh what variety was contained within that tiny little word ‘fall’: it included everything from failed suicide to a trip over the coffee table in the living room after, or even before, a glass of wine, or sometimes six. All of human life was there in the lurid, eye-popping diversity of falling. There was Del, a part-time brickie and a full-time wild man, who had swallow-dived from the seventh floor on holiday in the Costas, convinced by drugs and alcohol he could fly. Despite his injuries, I think he still thought he could. He also thought he was irresistible to women and was famous for making lecherous comments to staff and female patients. Some weeks later, when I was upright in the gym on a static wooden standing frame, braced upright between foam knee braces and leather straps behind my bottom, I became aware of Del in his wheelchair at my right hip, leering.

‘You look OK standing up. For an old bird,’ he said. ‘I’d have a bit of that.’

‘In your dreams,’ I said as haughtily as I could, trying not to laugh at the pitch-black irony of a pick-up line from one deranged tetraplegic to another marginally less deranged; indeed, at the very suggestion either of us had sexual currency of any kind. How to plumb the depths of bitter-sweet. Later I rationalised that as offers went, given my condition, it was probably the best I was ever going to get.

He cackled and rolled off to pester someone else. I felt as if I had joined some hilariously macabre list of Dickensian characters. Tenement had done much the same thing as Del but on a lesser scale, a chronic alcoholic who had lost his house keys and fallen while trying to climb in the window to his third-floor flat. If his life had been chaotic beforehand, it was hopeless now. His hands jangled like a medieval palsy sufferer’s, and it was nothing to do with his broken spine. The stuff his girlfriend smuggled in for him could only assist. Despite encouragement he never showed up for gym sessions; he preferred to go outside and join the smokers, the small band of paralysed who huddled their chairs near the entrance to the spinal unit. Out there too was Steroid, a scaffolder who told the doctors he had tripped but confided to us in hand therapy, where he was learning to feed himself, that he’d run into a wall in a drug-induced rage and broken his own neck.

‘At least I think I did,’ he said. ‘I was aff ma fucking heid at the time.’

Right outside the front door, just through the underpass, lay the streets of Govan, an inner-city Glasgow ward which persistently featured in all the indices of deprived Britain. Like urban foxes scavenging, the occasional local street dweller or small-scale drug dealer smelt out the needy patients and would drift by in the evenings, offering an anaesthetic of fags, booze, dope, pills, harder stuff. Here was an eager market; and usually with cash stowed in their zips and pockets. But nothing is successfully furtive when you cannot use your hands and slow-motion drug-dealing with cripples in the dusk was worthy of the blackest of comedy scripts. The dealers – though the name makes them sound more glamorous than they were – would hand over their booty and watch as the paraplegics, whose hands worked, fumbled in the pockets of the joggers of the tetraplegics, whose hands didn’t, to get their money out for them. That was the unwritten code with a knackered spine: anyone who had a less severe injury and could do something, helped out anyone who couldn’t. If your hands didn’t work, you found a mate whose hands did, and you locked your wheelchairs together in a macabre mating while they reached over and retrieved what you needed. For the scavengers it was a rare encounter with people far lower down the pecking order than they had ever met before.

Although the authorities alerted the police regularly to drive away the dealers, these transactions were fairly unstoppable. Anyone caught using or in possession of drugs inside the unit was expelled, and some were when I was there; but who was to ban patients from smoking outside the hospital doors? Morally, these were the entitlements of the damned. Down among any dead men – the traitor before the firing squad, the poor sod in the trenches with his torso blown away, the young paraplegic whose penis would never feel again – a cigarette was an emblem of compassion. Who would ever deny the needy whatever tiny pleasure was possible? Certainly not the occupational therapists, who would on the quiet craft ingenious devices to allow tetraplegics to continue to smoke – hand straps to let them grip fag packets, a length of wire with a loop on the end to hold the cigarette, so they could reach it to their mouths. There were no pious bleats about being forbidden to facilitate patients’ smoking, just discreet pragmatism and an absence of judgementalism. The bosses looked the other way. I loved that, even if it was just one more measure of how great a catastrophe had befallen us.

In my ward there were six beds and slowly I began to find out about the people around me. Next to me was Karen, who was the same age as me. She was a fall statistic. An innocuous tumble in her house had mysteriously paralysed her: only when she was X-rayed did she find out that she had undiagnosed arthritic deterioration in her neck which, in a stroke of appalling bad luck, had pierced her spinal column. Her injury was at a roughly similar level to mine, but I was the luckier: she had less movement in her arms than me and her fingers were permanently bent shut. If she envied me, it never showed. She never knew, either, how much I envied her calmness and realism: while I was gung-ho to fight my way back to total fitness through blood, sweat and tears, her ambitions were simply to be able to hold a mug, feed herself, and apply make-up. Guess who was the wiser?

With us in the room were two teenagers, one who had dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool on holiday, the other who had her back broken in a car accident. For months, lying listening to those kids learning their new realities, hearing them sobbing behind the thin curtains, or being taught how to catheterise themselves, or sitting their national school exams with an overwhelmed-looking adjudicator, was a profound lesson in how fortunate I was to have lived a lot of life before this happened. Later I shared a room with another little girl, and felt silent anger flare when Snapdragon, a senior nurse, insisted that her teddy bear was an infection control risk. Normally the bear would have had to go but, announced Snapdragon, glowing with the warmth of her own magnanimity, she’d make an exception as long he was kept wrapped up in a sealed plastic bag. Teddy sat there on the bedside cabinet, asphyxiated, head forced sideways, nose crushed against the plastic, pleading black button eyes, until the child went home.

In the far corner of the room was a mysterious patient who never got up: she was ensconced in a vast, high, warm sand bed, the size of a car, which shifted and vibrated constantly to heal long-term pressure sores. The bed, with its noise and warmth, had a strong presence of its own. Its occupant, an older woman, did not interact with us. Apparently her spinal injury was not new, but she had been unable to look after her skin for some years, and had developed a sore so bad she had been brought back in. Plates. The warnings resonated.

As a rule, the higher the neck injury, the more one’s hands were impacted. So every morning at 11 a.m., after our previous joyous two hours on shower chairs, us high spinal cord injury patients – the young, the old, the sporty; you might call us an elite of misfortune – congregated in the manner of elderly tortoises around the hand therapy table in our wheelchairs. Most of us wore the same severely restrictive collars, making us even more tortoise-like, so we greeted each other without full eye contact, nodding and squinting at midair, and then taking our places, waiting for our pots of hand putty to arrive. It resembled an early learning centre, but we were far more placid than toddlers. Left in peace long enough we would start to snooze, our heads drooping onto our collars.

The Miami J spinal collar, a thing of claustrophobic torture, smelling of sour milk, and worn every minute of the day for three months. That’s not me modelling it, that’s one of my mates from the spinal unit. Looking only a little bit porny.

There was Karen, wry and cheerful as ever, learning to hold her mascara brush. And Nevis, a high-flyer businessman who’d broken his neck ski-mountaineering, a silent man with the most harrowing thousand-yard stare I witnessed on anyone in the unit. Hand therapy was a misnomer for him: his hands were lifeless. Instead his arms were put in slings suspended on metal stands, the kind used to hang saline drips from, and he was trying to move his shoulders enough to be able to make them swing. If he could get enough motion, his insensate fists would brush hard enough across the pages of a magazine to turn them. The Professor was an elderly scientist who had been pulled over by his dog while out walking and broken his neck; he told whimsical, erudite stories and charmed everyone.

We had some laughs, most in very bad taste. Joker was a serial offender with velvet brown eyes and winsome long eyelashes who had broken his neck falling through a roof. He was one of the brightest people in the unit, subversive in a way that challenged common perspectives. He just didn’t care about anything or anyone. He said he quite liked having a broken neck because it meant that he got looked after.

‘I’ve been in Y— [a young offender’s institution] thirty-seven times,’ he announced one day, sitting opposite me and flapping his elbows for balance as he reached up to try to rearrange an abacus.

‘Ooo,’ I said. ‘What for?’ My tongue was sticking out with concentration. I was doing my best to play Chinese chequers with rubber bands around the wooden pegs for grip.

He looked pityingly at me, across our different worlds.

‘Stealing cars.’

I found him fascinating. He told me the best makes to steal and how easy it was. He said it had been fun for a while but then it got boring and he didn’t like being on the streets, so he would steal a car deliberately to get caught, knowing it meant a warm bed and hot food. I always feared he would take his own life when he left the unit, but in fact, with proper care in place for him and a new sense of being valued, he forged a career online.

Joker had about a year’s seniority on Kindle, another of my contemporaries, a brilliant schoolboy whose parents’ car had skidded on black ice. Kindle did his Highers, the Scottish equivalent of A levels, in the unit and went on to Oxbridge. He carried a tablet in his sweatshirt, and read compulsively, even on the standing frames. Both young men broke my heart: just boys at the start of their adult lives, making the best of the cards they had been dealt, from different ends of the pack.

And so we gathered every weekday morning round the white melamine tables, and while those with no movement in their hands were put into arm slings, those of us with semi-viable hands had to start on our own personal lumps of hard, blue putty. This was our warm-up kit – we must mould and squeeze and grip and shape the putty, flatten and separate it into tiny balls and roll it into long sausages, all the while strengthening and suppling our hands. Cars droned past on the arterial city road outside, and the wider world was turning, but in our bewildering new pre-school this was the only task which must concern us. Here I was, I reflected, former mistress of my universe, member of the chattering classes, mover, shaker and regularly responsible for editing a national newspaper, here I was struggling to cope with playdough. It required astounding effort. At the end of the exercise you returned the putty to a big round ball, which you pressed into the table with the heel of your hand. Then you sat and panted for five minutes, wiped out by the effort required.

My hands were more damaged than I liked to admit. Both were very numb. The left, in the beginning, badly swollen, flopped heavy and useless on the end of my wrist. I clocked myself in the face with it several times. My right, although fairly normal-looking, with a relative range of movement, had almost no power at all. My grip was gone. But the hand therapists, positive, cheery people, kept at us. The nicest times were when they took our hands and smoothed and massaged them within their own, so warm and active and normal. Leslie the senior therapist would take my hands, grotesquely white and crusty with dead skin, and soak them in a basin of warm water for ten minutes, and then scour off vast amounts of lizard-like scales with a coarse NHS towel. The result was extraordinary – the palms and the fingers felt liberated and free to move again. Then there were more tasks to fulfil: Connect4 to complete, tiny plastic cones to be lifted onto other cones; hoops to be taken off one peg and placed upon another. One fiendish challenge was a tall wooden stick, a tree with pegs instead of branches, upon which we were to hook discs with corresponding peg-sized holes – the sort of thing a bright three-year-old would manage in seconds. Actually, a two-year-old. First we had to reach up and hang the pegs on the top branches. Then, try and lift them off. Trying to balance my torso, extend my arms above my shoulders and grip, simultaneously, took me to my physical limits. If I managed, I was left exhausted but ridiculously pleased with myself. I saw the same sense of elation on the faces of my fellow patients. This was like climbing Everest for us.

My frequent challenge was a game for children aged five plus using a pair of tweezers to lift tiny coloured balls of plastic, 1970s love beads, and place them on equally tiny pegs. With enough concentration, to my amazement, the thumb and middle finger of my right found the infinitesimal amount of squeeze needed to do this. I even managed a few with my left hand as well. I glowed with the achievement.

My distorted hands in leather pushing gloves. This is after the swelling went down. My fingers soon froze in this shape.

Frequently we had FES – functional electrical stimulation. Electrodes on our wrists, wired to a battery unit, sent pulses which made our fingers lift and straighten. And strengthen. The electric pulses replicated the nerves which had been destroyed. The effects were remarkable. Leslie fantasised about putting newly spinally injured people in all-over FES suits, to kick-start everything. She focused heavily on making my left wrist flex upwards. This, I was to learn, was critical to my future.

Oxbow the ecologist had been cycling to work when his front wheel hit a pothole and he broke his neck. He could hardly move anything; his elbows were supported in slings in hand therapy so that he could try and regain a scintilla of shoulder action and be able to work the joystick of a power wheelchair. Barnaby was an older man, a former ship’s officer, desperate only to learn to feed himself so he didn’t impose on his elderly wife. He had fallen at home. He would sit, his forearms in yet another kind of sling, waving with a spoon at a bowlful of apple segments. Occasionally he hooked one and got it as far as his mouth, and his face cracked open with satisfaction as he munched.

Stoical the businessman, who had slipped on ice crossing a supermarket car park and suffered cervical damage, had, like all of us, numb fingers. But his numbness was combined with painful hypersensitivity in his fingertips. Every single session he sat, like a man on a lifelong mission, methodically scouring away at them with gentle sandpaper, desensitising them. I envied him his calm.

Priceless was an older, educated woman, a tourist, who had fallen and damaged her neck after drinking a glass or three of wine. She could still walk and her injuries, compared to the rest of us, were about as bad as a summer cold, but she was oblivious to this. Her lack of self-awareness, common tact even, was breathtaking. Viewed through her eyes, her plight was monstrous – her holiday had been ruined and her elegant handwriting was affected. She demanded the hand therapists help her restore it; she complained loudly about the nurses on the ward who refused to help her wash and dress, the state of the food, and the fact she was in pain. She was one of the very few patients who didn’t either touch or amuse me; it took me several years to understand the truth that she embodied. Everyone’s handicap is relative. We are all entitled to our own perspective on how badly we are injured. What seemed trivial to some was life-changing to others, and vice versa. The ownership of that grief belonged entirely to her; that was her right. Its impact upon her was not for others to judge. At the time, though, I just wanted to tell her to open her eyes and look around at the rest of us. And if I’m honest, I still experience a similar stir of exasperation when I am corralled by some old dear who wants to tell me how bad her sciatica is. I have learnt to smile and nod, detach myself from judgement.

After a couple of weeks, the intensive hand therapy began to reap rewards. My left hand became less stone-like, and the thumb and fingers were starting to wiggle. The wrist grew strong enough to prevent it flopping. My right hand was definitely more powerful and I could grasp an old-fashioned phone receiver, something I couldn’t have done a fortnight ago. Dave and I managed our first telephone conversation, home to hospital, which made both our hearts sing. Eventually, in hand therapy, I even managed to open an envelope, a major victory. To do this, I had learnt how to use my teeth, my invaluable third hand from now.

Afternoon gym was also becoming less unfamiliar. I was starting to recognise faces and understand the rhythm of therapy. The gym was two large spaces linked by a glass divide, and equipped with about ten pale blue physiotherapy plinths, which raised and lowered electronically. To a layman’s eyes, the landscape was hard to interpret, more like a medieval torture chamber than anything. There were standing frames and tilt tables beribboned with heavy-duty Velcro straps to bring paralysed people upright, jutting pulleys for carrying arm and leg slings, hooks hanging from mesh cages suspended over more plinths, two sets of parallel bars, a conveyor-belted machine with robot legs and a harness suspended over it, and various arm and chest weight machines. Plus, splendidly, like a piece of modern art, half a car – a Fiat cut off in front of the windscreen, which was attached nose-in to the glass partition. That was for the future, for those of us who were able. We could learn to transfer into driver or passenger seats, practising for a life outside.

Everywhere I looked, I saw devices I could not understand but was desperate to try. My desire to get better was atavistic.

Resting on one of the plinths while my physiotherapist attended to another of her patients, I could observe fellow inhabitants who were learning to mobilise their bodies and cope with their new lives. I felt all of eleven years old, wide-eyed, evaluating my new classmates at the big school. Who would be a kindred spirit? Who would have a sense of humour? Swiftly you learnt who to seek out, who to avoid. Fetlock had also fallen off a horse; she’d had a close escape, was walking wounded and would be going home soon, but she wanted to tell me, in great detail, in the way only horsey people do, about every wisp of hay and variation of snaffle bit she had ever seen. I shrank inside myself when she walked – walked, damn her – over to me, and I could not escape, because I was not in my chair.

‘So what horses have you got? I’ve got three – my old mare and my young one – it was my young one that dumped me – and then there’s my pal Sheena’s pony, I have him too, but he pulls like mad and he’s a bugger to catch and keeps ripping his rugs and I have to soak his hay. Do you keep yours at livery?’

Like I’m going to keep any horse, ever again? Please go away, Fetlock. I don’t wish to be cruel, but don’t you realise that my dream has ended, that you’re shooting holes in my soul?

I smiled up at her, and made some anodyne reply. On a cruise ship, be tolerant. Keep your own counsel.

Wee Jimmy had been shot in the spine, for all sorts of alleged reasons. You never asked too many questions. Some said it was revenge for a murder by his uncle Tam-the-Hatchet. In that sense the unit was akin to a church, a place of sanctuary where you accepted people for their needs rather than their deeds. Jimmy was gangly, mild-mannered and wary. He had the air of someone faintly bewildered as to why the staff were being so nice to him and he tried hard in rehab. He gave everyone on the ward a slice of his birthday cake and when he left hospital he made the front page of the tabloid press. As well as their victims, every now and again you got criminals in the unit with broken spines. Big Willie, one of the physiotherapists, a benign sixteen-stone barn door of ex-rugby player, remarked that over the years he’d had several as patients but only realised it when he read about the court cases in the paper afterwards. One man was later convicted of organising a murder.

‘Honestly, you couldn’t have met a nicer guy,’ said Willie, shaking his head.

Mostly we were innocent, life’s fallen jesters. Cycling and sports injuries were common. Cog was a mountain biker from down south who’d gone over the handlebars on a boys’ biking weekend in Scotland. He was semi-dazed and nauseated by tramadol. I remembered its ghastly nausea-inducing and head-fugging qualities. Taking tramadol, you were in the world but not of it. Pretty soon Cog transferred back down south, still looking grey and confused.

Tourette was a middle-aged man who had had a stroke that damaged his speech, long before a car accident broke his back: he was in a wheelchair and came to the gym but could only shout ‘Fuck Off!’ or ‘Pish!’ Again, his ability to swear endured, although his brain had closed down more sophisticated speech circuitry. Tourette looked like Waldorf from the Muppets, his mouth set in a determined upside-down U. Despite appearances, he was very cheerful and seemed to enjoy amusing the rest of us by cursing inappropriately. Spatula, the chef who’d broken his back in a drug-addled suicide attempt off a cliff, befriended him, and the two of them sat outside and smoked, mostly in silence but for the cursing. Spatula could stand, and mobilise a little, and could have improved, but he stopped coming to the gym and the rules were strict. If you didn’t buy into rehab, you had to leave.

And then there was Grit, a former soldier, five-foot-two tall and as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg. I loved Grit. He possessed very little in the world but an outsize sense of decency; his flat in a Glasgow high-rise had been broken into and when he challenged the suspected culprits, they stabbed him. One knife wound pierced his spinal column and he was paralysed down one side. Grit had been treated with little sympathy by the police and had languished without expert care in another city hospital – just one more knife victim with the wrong post code – until a doctor had recognised the seriousness of his injury and got him transferred across the city to spinal. He couldn’t believe how well he was treated in this unit by comparison.

‘Night and fucking day, Mel,’ he told me. ‘They’re just fucking angels here, the nurses. The doctors listen to you. They just didn’t care in the last place. Not fucking interested.’

Grit and I were mates from the days of high dependency when we’d had beds in facing bays; I told him he’d be walking soon and so he was, within a month, so he took to calling me Crystal Balls. He had a lot of mates, hardmen like himself, who crowded round his bedside and told him how his football team was doing and discussed the people who’d stabbed him. They knew fine who’d done it.

‘Fucking terrible, sure it is. You should see what the dirty wee bastards are getting away with now.’

‘We’ll fucking get them for you, Grit, we will.’

Sometimes the crescendo of cursing got so bad that my husband, a man not unknown to swear himself, would turn his head and lift an eyebrow. Grit would clock it, and his natural courtesy would kick in.

‘Listen Dave, big Mel, ah’m sorry, ah cannae stop fucking swearing. Lads, tone it down. Stop fucking swearing so much. Youse are upsetting people.’

Weeks later, in the gym, when Grit was getting around, first on crutches, then a stick, he busied himself bringing cups of water from the cooler to those of us stuck on machines. One day I was strapped upright, my head at least twelve feet in the air, on a tilting table with a mechanism which moved your feet backwards and forwards – towering like some ghastly human sacrifice over everyone else in the gym. Grit, who couldn’t reach high enough to put the plastic cup of water in my hand, put down his stick and starting climbing up the frame to give me the water. Only one side of his body worked, and he was utterly precarious, but he made it up and down safely and glowed with paternalistic pride as he watched me.

‘Fucking brill, big Mel. Youse are doing great, Crystal Balls.’ In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king.

There were Buddhists, and poets from the Scottish islands, there were heroes and villains. There were several patients with old injuries, returned for treatment, whose voices we only really heard if the drugs trolley was a few minutes late, which it often was, and they would ring their buzzers crying for their methadone. Had their injuries made them opiate addicts? You could not ask, and no one would ever tell. Nor would judgement ever be passed. We mostly lived out our private lives in public, but we gathered into ourselves what scraps of dignity remained behind those grotty thin curtains, and kept some secrets. There was a policeman who had had his back broken by a getaway car; he often rehabbed on the plinth next to a stone-mason whose bungee jump had gone wrong and whose mum kept complaining about the quality of the food. Mrs Bennet, a school dinner lady, didn’t come to the gym often – hurt in a fall, she seemed to accept her fate with remarkable good grace, though I suspect it was partly to do with the amount of tramadol she took. She was not at all unkind, but very lazy, and liked to know everyone’s business. Had there been a God, she would have had several unmarried daughters, and an acerbic husband. And who could forget Passion, the Brazilian stallion, whose spinal operation had not been successful? He fretted very publicly about whether he would still be able to have sex and boasted that his body would be perfect again soon. Very swiftly he earned a reputation for commandeering the communal bathroom when his wife came to visit, presumably so he could check out whether things were really as bad as he feared. He was ignorant, and sexist, and thought nothing of making insulting remarks to female patients, me included, but I watched him on the parallel bars one day, straining to make his steps fluid, trying to convince himself he was winning, the beads of sweat glistening on his upper lip, and felt sorry for him. We were all in our own ways trying to kid ourselves.

So I began my rehabilitation, trying to ride that ghastly non-compliant new horse which was my body; a terrible physical challenge that bucked and threw me contemptuously, time and time and time again. They had given me a wheelchair with the brand name Quickie and in it I learnt a new definition of slowness. My nails grew faster than my progress down the corridor. Somehow I had to learn to exist again; my arms had to learn to support and move me; my hands, the fingers now tightening, clawing into stumps like decrepit Trafalgar Square pigeons, had to learn how to hold a kettle or a toothbrush and bear the pain of the push rims of the wheels on my palms. I was given thick leather mitts, which fastened with Velcro and were specially designed for easy use by tetraplegics, to protect the skin (see photo here). One day, trying to come back from the gym along the carpeted stretch of corridor – installed, sadistically but sensibly, to prepare us for real life – my arms gave up and the pile of the carpet steered me into the wall. I sat quietly weeping in frustration until a nurse took pity on me and pushed me off the carpet.

In the gym my routine was simple: arm exercises first – twenty minutes on the handbike, then biceps curls and triceps lifts on the weights machines. Then, hoisted onto the specialist plinths, I began the process of coping with the appendage formerly known as my body. Propped in a seated position, my feet on the floor, foam wedges behind me to catch me if I went backwards, I started to learn how to balance sitting upright. How peculiar it felt. Because I could not feel my backside in contact with the plinth; I had the sensation I was a head and shoulders poised on wobbly air. I swayed like a blancmange, only staying upright because I could grip the edge of the plinth with my crocked fingers and lean back on my arms.

Next, from the same seated position, as my left wrist strengthened and began to hurt less, I was told to place my hands beside me on the firm surface and try and lift myself. Impossible. But critical to the future. When your body is paralysed and you try to lift your own body weight solely with your unaccustomed arms, you cannot believe how hard it is. The movement starts in your brain with a huge heave and ends, if you’re lucky, in a flicker you barely perceive. The physios put a bench in front of my knees so that if I toppled forward, I would not go onto the floor. And there I sat, for perhaps forty minutes at a time, hands aching on the blue plastic, wobbling, tilting forward a little, bracing through my shoulders and arms, trying to heave. Did anything happen that time? I could only tell by peering down, trying to imagine a sensation of lightening. It was exhausting. And I couldn’t kid myself that I saw anything.

The gym had a radio, with notoriously bad reception, tuned by whichever member of staff got to it first in the morning. If Big Willie switched it on, we had Radio 2, because he was addicted to trivia and knew the answers on Pop Master. Margaret, the lovable, warm-hearted physio assistant, upon whose shoulder I often wept, preferred Smooth. And Susan, my own physio, a feisty rock-chick with a tongue stud and attitude, the woman who became the focus of my world, always went for Rock Radio. Somehow, as the weeks stretched onwards into summer, and the hours spent in the gym fused into one another, the only tune I can remember, throbbing fuzzily, flatly, over and over and over again, was ‘Heartbeat’ by Enrique Iglesias and Nicole Scherzinger. The more tinny and unmoving, the better, as far as I was concerned. Only in the gym could I bear music, where there was company and distraction. On my own radio, in the intimate surroundings of my own bed with an earpiece in, I never tuned to music stations. Only talk could I cope with. Current affairs. Hanging onto the familiar voices of the Radio 4 Today presenters, friends from my lost past, discussing current affairs that used to matter. When I was surprised by snatches of music or songs, especially those that meant something to me, the violence of my grief was overwhelming. Music released emotion. In order to stay strong, I had to shut it out.

About six weeks after my accident, the staff took us out of the unit in a minibus to the local shopping mall to play ten-pin bowling. It was my first time out in the world in a wheelchair and I found it brutal – physically alarming (would my head stay on going round corners?) and emotionally souring. Glowering from the minibus windows at the drivers zooming past in their busy, able-bodied lives, I cursed the bad luck that had put me here, in crippledom, in what felt like the Sunshine Variety bus, rather than where they were.

At the giant shopping complex, I struggled with everything – the fresh air, the searing daylight, the tiny gradient up to the entrance, the sight of people, people, people, effortlessly doing all the things I used to do, getting out of cars, rushing into shops, window shopping. The sense of dislocation and loss was profound and I felt so small that I wished I could disappear, swallowed up in my own tears of self-pity. Weeping defiantly, I inched my way along the fronts of shops full of clothes designed to look good when you’re standing up, cursing them as well. As I was by far the weakest wheelchair pusher there – and it’s a tough school, spinal physio; you have to push yourself – I was trailing a long way behind the others by the time I got to the bowling alley at the end of the mall. Black humour is possibly the very last lifebuoy left in the sea at times like that; it certainly came to my rescue that afternoon.

The spinal outing had coincided with that of a group of special needs adults, who were clustered around the arcade games at the entrance to the bowling alley. Severe Down’s syndrome, people with growth deficit, damaged bodies and all degrees of learning difficulty, enthralled by the flashing lights and the buttons to press. Then they saw me coming. I guess I was some sight: a kind of Ninja Turtle moving very, very slowly on wheels, encased in black and white plastic from chin to groin, flailing elbows, funny gloves, red eyes, a yellow bag of urine and its valve trailing mysteriously from under my trouser leg. They all turned, entranced by the vision. At the entrance, just where the arcade machines were, the shiny floor of the mall turned to carpet and upon it I stuck, becalmed, and my legs went into spasm.

Oooooh, said the army of little people, and they forsook the flashing lights and motorbike simulators to gather around me. They inspected me at close range with grave, uninhibited curiosity, fascinated by the alien on wheels flailing weakly in front of them. I smiled and nodded at them, foolishly trying to protect my dignity. They didn’t care. They weren’t being judgemental. I realised that they had instinctively identified someone who was as low down the pecking order as they were. I was one of them, but I looked a bit funnier. I might even be lower down the order than them. Indeed, most of these solemn-faced souls were taller than me, and much more mobile. I felt as if I had been cast in one of Alan Bleasdale’s black comedy dramas. They were still staring, gently but persistently, when a nurse came to my rescue and pushed me onto the carpet towards the bowling alley, and balls I could neither lift nor bowl.

During those early days in rehabilitation, I got to put a face to Snafu, whose angry, distressed voice had echoed round my nights in the high dependency ward. Everyone adored Snafu – male and female patients, nurses, physiotherapists, his mum, his sisters, his Army mates, his five thousand ex-girlfriends: he was a tough, outrageous, larger-than-life character, as wild as a semi-domesticated polecat, as sharp as any stand-up comedian, as mature as he was vulnerable. Then nineteen, he had been shot in Helmand, Afghanistan, when a sniper’s bullet sneaked into the sleeve hole of his body armour, hit his shoulder blade and ricocheted through his spine at the top of his chest. He reckoned the Afghan was a rubbish shot.

‘If he was any good I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?’

As he lay on the ground, fully conscious, he remembers bantering with his fellow soldiers. He thought he was dying, but decided he might as well go with a smile on his face. His mates told him what soldiers always tell their dying comrades – that he’d be all right; that he’d be in the pub in no time. He was helicoptered to Camp Bastion, thence to Birmingham, and soon to the spinal injuries unit in Glasgow, to be nearer his family. The six-foot-four, fifteen-stone soldier morphed into a skinny, laconic, blue-eyed tetraplegic playboy, soon well enough to dance around the gym on the back wheels of his wheelchair like a trick cyclist, chatting up all the girls, amusing everyone with his antics. Either that, or he indulged in a soldier’s favourite game of mooching, fag in hand, at the door, trading profane insults with anyone brave enough to take him on.

During the Pope’s visit to Glasgow in 2010, Snafu appeared at one end of the ward, as if in a vision, a mitre fashioned from a pillowcase stuffed with cardboard upon his head, his body draped in a white blanket, a giant crucifix round his neck. He carried an aluminium brush handle as a staff and glided regally up the ward in his chair handing out fragments of sliced white bread to the occupant of every bed. In Glasgow, a city riven by religious divide, the comedy was especially edgy, of course, because he was a Protestant; a Rangers football team supporter.

‘Bless you my child,’ he said at every bedside.

And to the women and the female nurses, his eyes dancing sardonically: ‘Kiss my ring.’

Several years have passed, but I can still remember the sustained gale of laughter following him up the corridor that day. People laughed and then kept on laughing and then laughed some more. You simply don’t hear that in hospital. He provoked a similar outbreak of mirth in the gym when, bored and restless as he often was, he wheeled around asking all the women present how much they would charge to lap-dance for him.

The physios gathered their professional dignity and tried not to join in.

‘Get lost, Snafu.’

‘Go away! Aren’t you supposed to be on the triceps press?’

He was utterly persistent. ‘No, you have to tell me. How much?’

Eventually, casting their eyes around to make sure no NHS suits with clipboards were lurking, the physios played his game.

‘Four million,’ said one.

‘At least. Because my career would be finished if I was found out.’

‘Six million.’

‘I wouldn’t do it.’ A humourless junior physiotherapist on rotation in spinal.

His eyes lighted wickedly on me, purple-faced, toppled helplessly over my own knees. ‘Hey Mel, what would you charge?’

I was flattered to be asked. He tolerated me, just about, as a mate, although his banter was brutal – I was as old as his granny, plus he’d decided I was officer class. I’d been a horse rider, after all, and he’d found out my house had an orchard – so in the gym he loudly dubbed me a caviar-eating snob. In private, when he found me in tears, he was kindness itself. He was a year younger than my own son.

‘Half a million,’ I said. ‘Because my freak value doesn’t outweigh the fact I’m too old.’

‘Nah,’ he agreed.

Snafu got particularly bored at weekends, when there was no gym. One Sunday evening, the place packed with visitors, his terrible screams echoed down the ward: ‘Aaaaargh!! Nurse!!!! Come quick!!!! I can’t feel my legs!!!’ For amusement, he regularly soaked the auxiliaries when they helped him shower, or when the fire alarm went off, as it did often, he sped up the ward screaming, ‘Fire! Everyone out! This one’s for real.’ It was Snafu who yelled triumphantly across the gym, ‘Susaaaaan! Ah’ve pished masel’!’ when his catheter tube became disconnected from his leg bag; who invented wheelbarrow races for the paralysed; who decided to practise commando crawl across the gym, dragging his legs behind him, and of course wriggled straight out of his tracksuit bottoms, exposing himself to the world, and leaving the physiotherapists initially too helpless with laughter to cover him up; and it was Snafu who, despite his impaired hands, beat everyone in the target-shooting competition one Wednesday afternoon, part of our weekly games session. As a flourish, to demonstrate he was in the company of amateurs, he also shot the clock on the gym wall: the holes remain in the glass to this day. He had wanted to be a soldier since he was four and before he was paralysed he’d been in line for specialist sniper training and promotion. A man-child: incorrigible, charismatic, vulgar, cynical, careless, self-destructive, heroic, vulnerable, shrewd. Of all the people I encountered in the tiny, little-understood world of spinal injury, he was the one that made me the most sad.

Approaching bedtime on the rehab ward was the worst. The conveyor-belt sequence kicked in again, in reverse, and we sat by our beds, queueing for the team of two nurses to come and hoist us out of our chairs onto the sheets and attach our overnight urine bags. Then we waited for the final drugs trolley. Long-term incarceration in hospital teaches you tolerance, patience and the knowledge that we are all very, very human. Even now, years later, when I close my eyes I can hear the banter of Rosebud in the distance and the squeak and rattle of the night-time trolley she is pushing. And around me I can sense some of my fellow patients starting to flutter and jangle. Respectable middle-aged women, with husbands and flowerbeds and Vauxhall Astras, but now hungry for whatever opiate or benzodiazepine they needed to soothe the mental anguish of their state, their personal paradise lost. They hungered, bodies paralysed but writhing inside for medication, just as mine had writhed in the high-dependency ward. When was the trolley coming? One woman would press her buzzer anxiously and then others would follow. The drone of multiple alarms would sound down the long ward.

‘What kept you?’ Mrs Bennett would cry.

Rosebud, ever insouciant, was having none of it.

‘What do you think this is? BUPA?’ she cried. ‘I tell you, you’re lucky it isn’t. I’ve worked in private hospitals and they bill you for every single pill you take. Even a paracetamol. Youse are lucky youse are here and not there.’

Apart from when the staff came to turn us onto the other hip on a four-hourly rota, we were then undisturbed until the morning. That was the theory. Nights change when you are in hospital. In fact, as I was to learn, nights change forever when you are paralysed. Any joy went. Your favourite sleeping positions ceased to exist, partly because you could not feel them and partly because you could not achieve them on your own. You adopted the protocol position you were put into – on one hip or the other, pillow wedged into your back, another under the upper knee, more pillows stuffed into the bottom of the bed blocking your feet from going into a flexor spasm downwards. Thus comfort was outsourced: someone else arranged your limbs and your torso in a way which was safe for your skin and for your tubes to survive unblocked. Your frozen hands were put into customised splints, the fingers strapped flat against the formed plastic so they could not contract, and all autonomy was removed. You could no longer scratch your nose, let alone pick it. The private geometry of your night, your ability to cuddle into shapes practised from childhood, was gone for ever: a very personal autonomy to lose. Meanwhile, the hour hands stuck, as if glued, to the face of the clock – T.S. Eliot’s ‘Only through time time is conquered.’ Peace was as lost as paradise. The nurses’ station on night shift was notoriously noisy; there were a handful of the staff who seemed unable, or disinclined, to lower their voices as they sat chatting. When buzzers rang, they would push back their chairs, the metal legs screeching on the floor. Weirdly, my paralysed bladder used to spasm at that noise: a peculiar sensation – somewhere deep inside an insensate body, in a dormant vital organ which contained a foreign body, a catheter, there was a horrid jump of indignation at the discordant pitch. Imagine. I could hear with my bladder! Was it transmitted via my ears, down some remaining nerve pathways, or was it a vibration in the air that affected my bladder alone, its catheter acting as a misplaced aerial?

In between interruptions, we learnt to endure the passive tyranny of those long hours, where no limbs stirred, no sheets rustled. These were not normal wards. You have no idea how eerily morgue-like paralysed patients are in bed when they cannot move. Nurses are notoriously superstitious; there are rich stories of ghostly scares on night-time wards with darkened corridors. Delphinium, one of the regular night shift, told me of the fright she had when a patient, paralysed from the neck down and normally as still as a corpse, sat bolt upright as she passed, the result of a sudden, unexpected spasm. Muscle spasms could happen, but rarely as extreme as that.

‘I was like, waaaaaaah. Nearly crapped myself,’ she said. ‘He didn’t even wake up.’

Night time. Even if our bodies were by necessity quiet, our minds were their own torture chambers, forever churning the random nature of the accidents, the screaming bad luck which had damned us to stillness. Why us? Why me? And often, if we did dream, our dreams tormented us by putting us back on our feet again. Dreams so vivid that when we woke, it was especially desolate to rediscover reality. One night I dreamt that Vitamin D tablets were a miracle cure for spinal injury, and because I already took them as supplements I was able to walk again. There I was up on my feet, walking unsteadily round the ward helping my fellow patients reach things from their bedside tables, and waiting for the doctors to arrive so I could tell them the good news. I woke up, convinced it wasn’t a dream, fighting a sickening lurch of hope and then disappointment before cold logic kicked in. I remember one night I even said to myself in my subconscious, now don’t be fooled, this is a dream, you can’t really walk again, and then I dreamt that to test it, I had woken up, and it was true – I could actually walk again. Double-dip dreaming. A plot within a plot. But of course everything remained within the parameters of the dream. Waking that morning for real was particularly cruel.

Always in the night there were the needy patients, the ones who became queasy or overcome with pain, or indeed were just desperate for human contact to break their desolation. We had call buzzers on wires; paraplegics had theirs on the bedside table, because they could reach. Tetraplegics with some arm function had them draped across their bedclothes, as in my case. Those who could move only their heads and shoulders had them by their cheek, so they could turn their head and press them. I hated using mine, but many people didn’t have the same hang-up. There were also the confused souls who couldn’t locate their buzzers, and they would just cry out, ‘Nurse … nurse …’ Of course the nurses couldn’t hear, but the rest of us in the room would be woken, and someone in a nearby bed would press their buzzer instead.

Doobie had a habit of rushing in, crying theatrically: ‘Who’s buzzing NOW?’ and striding crossly towards the patient with the flashing call button above their beds.

‘It’s Elsie,’ the buzzer-ringer would stammer, defensively. ‘She can’t press her buzzer.’

And we lay awake and listened to poor wee Elsie being administered to, because we had no choice. One night, when I was on a further course of antibiotics for a lung infection, I woke with an overwhelming need to vomit. I pressed my buzzer and heard for the first time the distinctive slap, slap of a footfall I would come to dread.

‘What is it?’ she said. Not kindly.

‘I’m sorry but I feel really sick,’ I gasped. I was panicking inside. This had never happened before. I didn’t even know if I could be sick.

She said nothing, but turned on her heel and disappeared. Soon she returned with a papier-mâché NHS sick bowl, the grey bowler hat of despair. Her body language was contemptuous. She thrust, almost threw, it at me, and walked away, leaving me to be sick alone. She didn’t say a word.

It was my first introduction to Nettles.

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