by Ed Jackson
‘Technically there would be nothing stopping you,’ Kim said, as she repositioned my leg.
‘I’ll roll down there and sign up today,’ I responded, as I held onto the parallel bars with both hands. ‘How long until you think I’ll be able to visit home for a weekend?’
‘It’s not up to me, but not long now. Maybe even next week if we can get the consultant to agree to it.’
Staring down at my legs, I willed them to do what I was asking of them. I was getting stronger, but the same issues were persisting. My left leg still had a lot of spasticity and there was no power in my ankle and very little in my hamstring or hip flexor. Either Lois or Kim had to lift my left leg for me to be able to take a step forwards and we hadn’t got any further than this in the past week. I was starting to get frustrated at my lack of progress.
‘Let’s try the high lunge again,’ Kim said, helping me change position.
Putting my left leg forwards, I held the position. Until a spasm hit.
My left leg wobbled and then crumpled beneath me. I could feel myself toppling to the side. Everything went into slow motion. With nothing to break my fall, I tried to grab for something to hold me upright, but my movements were too slow, my arms too weak. I felt my knee jar as I hit the floor.
Not again. Please, not again.
I lay on the floor for a moment as Kim checked me over and Lois held my hand. As I’d fallen, Kim had leapt to protect my neck and head. Another knock in the wrong place might have been catastrophic. Kim was asking the questions I was so used to now: ‘Can you feel this? Can you squeeze that?’ My knee felt sore, but I knew it could have been so much worse.
‘That was a close one,’ Kim said, once she was satisfied that I could be helped back into my wheelchair.
‘Bloody spasms,’ I responded, as I used my arms to lift my legs onto the wheelchair’s footplates.
The spasms could come at any time and rendered my leg useless. That was fine if I was in bed or sitting up in my wheelchair, but if I was standing, my leg could just give way beneath me. Even if I did manage to take a few steps by myself, I couldn’t risk walking outside of physio as a spasm could send me flying forwards at any time.
The next morning, I had to admit to myself that there was something seriously wrong with my knee. It was twice the size of my right one and was throbbing. After a very painful transfer to the toilet I knew that I would have to tell the ward doctor about it. During the night, I’d been hoping it was just a sprain that would heal up in a couple of days, but I knew now that it was much more serious than that.
As Lois went to find one of the ward doctors, I thought about my situation and what a delay to my recovery could do. The very thought of staying in this hospital for months on end made my heart sink. I wanted to be in my own space, able to work to my own schedule. What I wanted was to go home.
Lois interrupted my thoughts when she returned with the ward doctor, Anna. Every so often in life you meet someone who is bloody brilliant at their job. I’d been lucky enough to have met two of these already, Pete and Kim. Anna also had this special quality. Within a couple of hours of looking at my knee, she had spoken to the radiographers about it, organised an X-ray and persuaded the radiographers to consider an MRI scan if my knee didn’t improve.
Diligent doctors aside, I was still laid up in bed with strict instructions that I couldn’t do any physio or rehab for at least a week. My recovery had been put on hold.
Lying in bed that night, I began to fret about my situation. Always at the back of my mind was the worry that I was missing my window of recovery. A few weeks laid up might mean that I wouldn’t be able to walk by myself. A bad knock to my weaker knee might mean a wheelchair for life. The stakes were that high. I went through my routine of trying to calm myself by watching a film and posting about my day, but nothing was working. These thoughts and worries wouldn’t leave me. My breathing was getting quicker and shallower, my head was whirling. The stress I was feeling was beginning to ratchet upwards into panic. On and on it went.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to gain some perspective. I looked at myself only five days after the accident. I wanted to reach out to that Ed – to hear how he would be handling this …
‘I’ve had a really shit day,’ I told Ed then, as I thought of him in the hospital bed. ‘I think this is as far as our recovery will go.’
‘So, we’re going to be stuck like this?’ he responded. ‘Just a bit of movement in the right arm … That’s not what I was expecting. I’d hoped we’d get back more …’
‘Oh, no, no,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to worry you like that. We’re much further ahead. I’m in a wheelchair. Set a blistering 45-second lap time round the gardens yesterday. I can stand by myself. But I’ve got stuck taking steps, I can’t do it. I can’t lift my foot by myself. And today I had a fall in physio and hurt my knee. It’s pretty bad, even bigger than after that dodgy scrum when we were—’
‘Wait! So, I’ll be able to stand again?’
‘Yes, but we might not be able to walk. There’s still a chance, but it feels like it’s slipping away …’
He sighed. ‘Do you not remember the promise we made in the first week in hospital?’
‘Yes …’
‘That night when we promised that we’d accept being in a wheelchair for the rest of our life, if we could just have the use of our arms and hands back. We’d be independent then, not a burden to Lois or Mum—’
‘Yes,’ I interjected, as he didn’t know the full situation, ‘but being in a wheelchair is still bloody hard: there are the kerbs; everything is designed so badly for wheelchair users; my arms are still so weak; and I’m constantly staring at everyone’s crotch …’
‘You expect sympathy from me? I’m just lying here. I’m basically a head on a pillow.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘No buts. It’s less than three months since the accident and you can stand. You’ve got further than we ever imagined you would. Yes, you’ve twisted your knee and you might be laid up for a bit, but that doesn’t mean our recovery is over. And even if it is, accept what you have now. It’s more than we thought we had the right to bargain for.’
‘I know,’ I said, suitably chastised. ‘I just miss home.’
‘Me too.’
I blinked my eyes open. Head on a pillow … Ed was right; I had come so far in only nine weeks. I opened up my phone and looked at all the videos that had been taken of me over the last couple of months. Quietly watching them, I was glad that I had gained some internal perspective. By looking back over my own progress, I was able to see how far I had come.
It was time to refocus on the small stuff and appreciate how lucky I was to be able to whinge about my walking technique at all.
Over the next few days, I went and picked Nas up in the mornings and took him to meet Rick in the gym. My knee throbbed, but I could still work on my upper body strength. Afterwards, we went back to my new ward and surveyed what food Mum had brought in for us. She still visited most days, and still brought half of the M&S food hall with her.
As I finished my mid-morning sandwich, I reached over and picked up a plastic fork that came with one of the salad bowls. Jamming it down the inside of my neck brace, I gave it a wiggle. The relief was instantaneous. My neck was so itchy from the summer heat that I would regularly be found with a pen or chopstick stuck down there.
Remembering to remove the plastic fork, I headed off to meet the wheelchair dealer for my late-morning appointment. The fact that this appointment had been organised for me was a sobering thought – I would obviously need to be in a wheelchair for a considerable amount of time. Fortunately, the Matt Hampson Foundation had offered to pay for one for me. I was very grateful to them as the alternatives were either borrowing a clunky NHS one or paying for my own and that could cost thousands of pounds.
I sat patiently as Noel took all my measurements and made a note of them.
‘So, have you had a chance to look
through the catalogue and make your pick?’ he asked, looking up from his notebook.
‘I’ve been doing some research and, well, the choices are endless … I know I want a lightweight, active one that I can transfer in and out of easily.’
‘Well, that narrows it down a bit,’ he said, pulling open a few pages of the catalogue.
There was also another part of me that I had to acknowledge. I was 28 years old and I wanted one that was a bit cool. I didn’t want to look like I was rolling around in my granddad chair back in Bath hospital. The wheelchair I had at the moment was gigantic and had the turning circle of the Titanic. I wanted to be nimble. It would also be nice to be mistaken for a participant in the Paralympics. Was that too much to ask?
Together we pored over the options, but I couldn’t seem to narrow it down. It seemed like such a monumental decision. What if I made the wrong one? In the end, I decided to hold off until I had a chance to message a few other people with spinal cord injuries who I’d met on Instagram to get their advice.
It was Friday and a weekend of no physio or rehab lay in front of me. I decided to take some action. I wheeled around the corridors until I found the nice ward doctor, Anna, who I knew would be sympathetic to my request. I set out my case and she agreed that it was a good one. She would support the request to stay at my dad’s house for the weekend, but there were still a couple of things I would have to do. We divided them up between us and Anna set off to find the consultant to ask her to consider granting permission. I wheeled myself back to my ward, and Lois and I set off for my first ‘official’ trip into town and to show the nurses my car transfer. Dad and my stepmum, Sue, went to find the occupational therapist so they could arrange a time for her to visit their home.
Everyone had swung into action. It was going to be tight and we only had one afternoon to get everything done, but at least we were trying. I really needed this. I needed to go home.
My excitement bubbled as Dad unlocked the front door and pushed it open for me. He stood aside to let me be the first to enter.
‘In you go then, Ed. I’ve set up a bed in my study for you. I think there’s everything you’ll need in there.’
Wheeling myself though the wide door, I remembered how lucky I was that my dad and Sue had built their own home a couple of years ago and no longer lived in a house that was over two hundred years old. Like most modern buildings, the doors of their home were wide and all the floor joints were flush. Getting around in a wheelchair was a relative breeze in a home like this one.
Lois followed me inside and ushered me into the study.
All of them had done their best to make it as welcoming as possible. Dad’s study and a toilet were on the ground floor of the house. The kitchen, living room and all the bedrooms were on the floors above. Through the door of the study, I stared at the flight of stairs that led to the rest of the house.
‘We can hang out in the garden,’ Sue said. ‘Your dad will cook you whatever you want. And it’s warm enough to eat outside. If it gets chilly, we can all sit down here in the study. There’s enough room.’
‘It looks great,’ I said. ‘I really appreciate all the effort you’ve gone too.’
Five minutes later, I wheeled myself out of the study to investigate the bathroom situation. With my back to the others, I looked mournfully up at the stairs that led to every other room in the house. I felt a bit like my dog, Barry, when he was a puppy and I was trying to train him to sleep downstairs. That hadn’t lasted long; he’d soon found a way to get up them …
‘Daaad …’
‘Yes, Ed?’
‘If we could get me safely to the floor … I could then slowly bum shuffle up the stairs … If you and Lois could then lift my wheelchair up the stairs, I could stay up there for most of the weekend …’
Whilst my dad and Lois exchanged glances, I gave them my best, Barry-inspired puppy eyes.
‘You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you, Ed?’ Dad said, as he offered me his arm. ‘Lois, you take the other side.’
Fifteen minutes later, having used my arms to lift myself up each step, I had made it to the top. Looking around at the familiar sights of Dad and Sue’s house, the open-plan living room and kitchen, the bowls of flowers where Dad always placed them, I took in a deep breath and smiled.
It might not have been my house but, with Lois and my family there with me, it felt like home.
Chapter 11
Homeward Bound
‘You’ll be able to come back soon,’ Dad said, as I stared out of the car window while he drove me back to the hospital.
‘I know,’ I responded, trying to focus on his words, ‘but what I really want is to be discharged.’
With my first night away from hospital ticked off, I was now completely focused on being discharged. The average hospital stay for a patient with my injuries is four to six months, sometimes longer. I was aiming to be discharged in under three. I was incredibly lucky that Restart, the charity that supported rugby players, was still keen to pay for my physiotherapy. Having spoken to Pete and Kim, they had both agreed to work with me on a private basis and had capacity to see me several times a week. Ironically, I would actually have more access to rehab once I left hospital than I was currently having.
‘Sue and I have been talking about that,’ Dad responded. ‘You and Lois would be more than welcome to come and stay with us. The house in Cardiff isn’t very suitable for a wheelchair. Much better that you’re with us.’
I took a moment to think about it; it made complete sense. Their house could have been designed for a wheelchair user with its wide hallways and flush flooring. Even better, it had its own gym as Sue was a personal trainer. I would be able to work on my rehab eight hours a day if I wanted to.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I responded, a plan already beginning to form. ‘I’ll have to ask Lois but I’m sure she’ll agree. This could be perfect.’
Something else was also becoming a possibility: I might actually be able to make it to New York to see Fleetwood Mac in six weeks’ time. I was still in a wheelchair with a catheter, but that didn’t prevent me from flying if the consultant would agree to it. What better way to persuade her to grant permission than showing I was able to function outside of hospital for a month? Now all I had to do was actually get myself discharged. I’d ticked off everything on the list and was just waiting for my catheter to be removed.
A few days later, the swelling on my knee had gone down so I was able to go back to physio with Kim. Whilst I’d been away, she had arranged for me to have a fitting for a FES contraption that would help lift my left foot. With the wires in the correct place on my left leg, the FES would monitor my movements through a pressure sensor under my heel. When it was time for my left leg to lift up it would send a pulse of electricity through my leg, causing the muscles to contract and my foot to raise. This meant that Lois was now out of a job as my Chief Foot Raiser. I didn’t think she minded too much as she was busy preparing for her well-deserved netball trip to New Zealand.
As Kim strapped the FES to my leg, I held onto the parallel bars for support.
‘There we go,’ she said, while straightening. ‘You’re all set. Want to give it a test run?’
I gave her a grin in response.
One hand on each side of the bars, I stepped forwards with my right leg. There was a second’s pause and then my left foot also lifted fractionally off the ground, just enough for me to move my leg forwards. The timing of the electrical currents wasn’t perfect and didn’t raise my foot very far, so my step was out of time and my gait wasn’t very smooth. It didn’t matter. Right foot first and then my slightly lagging left foot following – I was walking!
That Sunday, Lois and I had decided to visit a pub together for a late lunch. It was one of those pubs with rolling lawns out the back that are designed to make you want to stay for fifteen minutes longer, take in the view, and chat about anything and everything.
‘It’s getting harder to go back, isn�
�t it?’ Lois said.
I had been nursing the last of my pint for twenty minutes, not wanting the afternoon to end.
‘Is it that obvious?’ I asked, lifting the glass to my mouth.
She smiled at me. ‘Only to someone who knows that it doesn’t take you an hour and a half to drink a pint.’
‘One more for the road?’ I asked, waggling my glass at her.
‘Two whole pints on a Sunday?’ she said smiling. ‘They’ll have you done for drink driving your wheelchair.’
I raised my eyebrows at her in protest but she was already standing up to go to the bar.
An hour later than we had expected, we reluctantly agreed to head back to the car park. Rather than having to take my wheelchair through the busy pub, Lois wheeled me around to the side of the garden as we chatted about when the doctors would finally remove my catheter. The lawn’s incline was getting steeper and Lois stopped for a moment to eye it up.
‘Perhaps we should go back,’ Lois said, as she looked around her and smiled at the group of men sitting the other side of a large oak tree.
I assessed the situation. We were halfway up a hillock, more of a mound really, but for a wheelchair user even the smallest gradient change on an uneven surface was something to think about. The world is designed for people who walk rather than roll. In the old days, Lois and I wouldn’t have even commented on this, let alone stopped and stared at it. I’d thought that stairs would be my only trouble in a wheelchair, but I was wrong. When we visited the town centre I would have to wheel down a pavement, completely in the wrong direction so I could find a dropped kerb, as I lacked the upper body strength to ‘hop’ my wheelchair up a kerb. Often there wasn’t a dropped kerb on the other side of the road, so I’d have to wheel along the edge, cars veering out of my way, until I found another dropped kerb and could join the safety of the pavement again. Then I’d wheel back down the pavement to the point that I wanted to arrive at. It was a faffy, zigzag way of getting around and it was very annoying.