Three days after my nineteenth birthday in 2013, my life was turned on its head and I experienced one of the worst days of my life. It’s something that I’m very open about when the subject is brought up, but people often don’t know how to ask me about it, and I have felt it’s too hard for people to hear, but I’m going to explain honestly and in detail because I never know where to begin.
At that time, I was in a new relationship, I had just started a new job that I was settling into and enjoying, and I had plans to complete qualifications through my new job to climb the ladder to get into a career that I was passionate about. I was seeing my friends a lot between my shift work, enjoying nights out at the weekend, and meeting lots of new people in my community carer job role, while facilitating and enabling vulnerable people to continue living in their own homes.
That day I had an evening shift with a new colleague that I hadn’t met before. She was newer to the company than me and unlike myself, who had a ‘round’ of clients that I saw daily for care on my own in the community, she had been placed on what we called the ‘doubles round’ that cared mainly for the individuals who needed two carers for each visit, to operate lifting hoists and for more personal care. I was overly confident in my more experienced role and decided to ask my colleague to drive as it was usual practice to car-share for the doubles round. I was aware that she hadn’t long passed her driving test just weeks before this shift that we shared, but I didn’t think much of it except she must have been quite excited to be on the road like I was when I first passed my driving test. The first thing I noticed when entering her car was the amount of rubbish that littered her dashboard and back seats. When I say rubbish, I literally mean just that – there were numerous food wrappers and cartons that had been discarded in the back, wellington boots, coats, even a shovel laid on the back seat as we were due to have snow and icy weather. The dashboard and door pockets were also housing lots of car parking receipts and I wondered how she could concentrate on driving when the car was so messy – but I’m a clean freak (or I was until I had a child who litters my car with breadsticks and raisins now!) and remembered that I only had a few hours to be in the car between clients.
Our first client was a very particular one, I had visited them before, and I knew they had their favourite carers, and my colleague was already one of them. Our first visit went smoothly, and I relaxed a bit, although as we left, I was desperate for the toilet, but our next client was one of my favourites on the round, and I knew they wouldn’t mind me using their toilet. Something that I was guilty of at that time, and it turned out that my colleague was also in the habit of too, was not always wearing my seatbelt between clients. I know! It makes me angry now at how naïve I was. Another filthy habit was lighting a cigarette to smoke between each client, some of which would only live five minutes apart, and there was no way I ‘needed’ one after only finishing one half an hour before, but it was a habit that formed and meant I was smoking upwards of twenty or more a day at that time. Both of those habits turn my stomach now, but at the time we were young, and we were in and out of our cars so often every day that wearing a seatbelt was sometimes more of a chore than it should have been when we were nipping between houses. However, I really felt the desire to wear my seat belt for that journey. It was only meant to be a five-minute drive, but my choice also triggered my colleague to do the same. We still lit our cancer sticks though, and we were on our way to our next client. It was around 5pm and it was a dark and almost freezing night outside in early January. We were forecast snow and it was a particularly bitter evening, but the roads had been gritted and there wasn’t any ice, and I didn’t consciously feel unsafe up to that point in the car journey.
As we made our way back through a particularly winding road, I felt that we were probably going a bit fast but didn’t feel that I should say anything – we were all always in a hurry because our timetable didn’t allow time for travelling between our clients. I knew each bend and curve in the road so I could see the journey in my mind to our next client and I knew it was only minutes away until we were out of the car (and I could go to the toilet which was one of my main concerns!).
As we turned into an S-bend, we could see another car approaching far in the distance on the opposite bend and my colleague said “oops, I had better dim my lights, so I don’t blind them” and as she did, it all happened at once; as we approached the sharp corner, she was only holding the steering wheel loosely with a couple of fingers on her right hand as she was holding her cigarette with the other fingers, and her left hand had completely left the wheel to reach for the dipstick to dim her lights from full beam. She didn’t brake enough before the bend and didn’t have full control of the steering wheel around the corner, and although she tried to correct her mistake, it was too late. She lost control of the car and it mounted the grass verge which led to a very deep ditch on the other side. In a panic, she had her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, so we went hurtling into the ditch on the corner. If this same accident had have happened at any other corner or turn along that whole road, then it may not have ended as it eventually did. However, this corner happened to be where the entrance from the road into the fields that beautifully edged this dangerous road was situated, and the deep ditch was home to a brick culvert (a tunnel carrying a stream or open drain under a road) and the car collided head on with the brick wall.
I always assumed that the slow-motion scenes in movies of events like this were just for affect, but those last few seconds definitely slowed down in my head and that scene became what I my nightmares contained for months after the accident. The noise was so loud. The heavy metal car scraped along the plants in the ditch; the winter season had stripped the branches of their leaves so the bare branches and roots scraped my side of the car as our cigarettes flew through the air and some of the rubbish from the back seats flew around the car until we were brought to an abrupt stop as the bonnet and windscreen crumpled against the brick wall with an almighty noise, and time caught up with us again.
The car was in the ditch at an angle with the passenger side submerged into the icy ditch, and the driver’s side was barely visible above the wall. I had braced myself for the impact by pushing my feet into the footwell of the car and holding the seat either side of my legs with my hands. The impact threw us forward and that was the moment that I knew I had put my seatbelt on for a reason. It broke my sternum, four of my ribs, and bruised my lungs, but it absolutely saved my life. All I could see through the broken windscreen was a brick wall. The passenger airbag did not explode on my side, but luckily it did on the driver’s side, and it prevented any serious injuries to my colleague except a couple of bruised and broken ribs from the impact of the seatbelt.
I was numb from shock and unaware of any injuries to my body, let alone aware of how serious they were. My immediate thought in that moment was to call Rob (my boyfriend) and tell him what had happened. I left home that evening feeling slightly nervous that for the first time I would be the most experienced carer out of the duo for the shift and because I had never met my colleague before, but he reassured me, as he always does, and I told him I would be home by 7.30pm for dinner. While stuck in the car, I thought, “he’s going to put the oven on for me to do dinner when I get home, and I need to tell him that I’m not going to make it back”. That’s something that has never changed – always thinking of my next meal! The smell of the dirty ditch water, oil from the engine and the smell of the burning cigarettes that had landed on the dashboard in front of my face brought me back to reality and I dialled 999 instead. Someone immediately answered to ask me which emergency service I needed for my crisis and after being put through to the ambulance service instantaneously, I was asked by the lady on the other end of the phone what the emergency was and where I was. I didn’t know the name of the road; in fact, my phone was on emergency signal as it’s well known for being a dead patch for mobile phone signal so I couldn’t look up my location. I spent a lot of my time as a teenager in the local area with friends who lived nearby (mainly drinking and camping in the fields and hiding at the play park), so I knew where I was and could direct someone who knew the area, but to someone in a call centre far away from where I was, it was useless. That’s when I started to panic. Cars were driving past us as if we weren’t even there and I worried that if I couldn’t explain where we were, that no one would find us as we weren’t visible from the road. I started shouting and pleading, and the driver picked up on my distress and my worry that we wouldn’t be found, so she began fumbling with her seatbelt and trying to take it off to escape the vehicle. It was then that I looked down ready to try and exit the car too, and I realised exactly what had happened to me from the waist down. The front of the car and the dashboard had been pushed so far in that my legs from the knee down were hidden by the warped metal and plastic that used to be a foot well and dashboard. Even the radio and speakers had been dislodged from the front of the car and were not where I expected them to be. My passenger side door window had been smashed and I was holding my weight up on my left arm against the inside of the door as the car was at such an angle that I couldn’t sit back. If I had relaxed, I would have fallen through the passenger window into the ditch water that was already starting to flow into the car.
My seat had twisted inside the car and just over my left shoulder was the shovel that was on the back seat at the beginning of our journey – the firemen later said that if I hadn’t had a head rest on my seat that the shovel would have caved my head in as the back of my seat had a gauge out of it. I knew that if the driver took her seatbelt off that she would fall straight on to me because there wasn’t anything else stopping her from falling. The freezing cold and vile smelling ditch water was slowly coming into the car through my broken window and warped door frame, and I worried that if she fell on to me that I would be pushed into the water, so I shouted at her to stop.
At that moment, our knight in shining armour (or rather, green medical uniform) arrived! On his way to another emergency call in a nearby village, an on-call doctor in a specialised medical car saw the smoke coming from the crash site and pulled over to help us. He stood on the road above the car and looked down through the driver’s side window – it was like a film where the hero goes in to save the damsels in distress. He opened the rear driver’s side door and reached in to tell me to hang up on the bewildered call handler who was still trying her hardest on the other end of the phone, as he would call the accident in with accuracy, rather than me saying we were somewhere that didn’t exist on a map. The driver immediately scrambled to get out of the car at the sight of someone in a medical uniform – just his presence made us fell hopeful. He pleaded with her to stop in case she had any unidentified injuries, but she was as desperate as me to escape this situation and she managed to climb out with his help. A passer-by had pulled over in her car to help, she was the kindest lady, and she kept the driver calm until an ambulance arrived for her. I’m sure there is more to this part of the story, but I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening outside of the vehicle and I know that there will of course be another account of the whole accident from the driver’s memory.
The doctor climbed into the back seat to talk to me, making remarks about the state of the contents of the car. By this point, the ring finger on my left hand was starting to hurt and my left shoulder and arm were burning from holding my weight up for what was probably five or ten. He assessed the situation at my feet and managed to extinguish the cigarettes that were still alight on the dashboard. The car was still smoking and the smell of oil and burning was getting stronger, but when he was satisfied that there was not a big risk of any fire or explosions caused from inside the car, he brought a medical bag into the car and began taking my temperature and my blood pressure and listing my obvious injuries over the phone to someone else at our local hospital. We managed to access my feet eventually and it turned out that the footwell had caved in and crushed both of my feet, but I managed to release my left foot from my shoe to wiggle my toes and bend my knee to satisfy him that it wasn’t too serious. My whole right foot was engulfed by metal and after three attempts at inserting a cannula into my right hand (the cold temperatures had made my veins disappear and hide), the doctor administered some anti-sickness to help with the side effects from the gas and air that I was furiously sucking on. I gave up with the Entonox after a while because it made me feel dizzy and sick, and didn’t really make the pain that was becoming more apparent all over my body subside at all.
After waiting patiently for news from the fire service about help with my escape, they informed us that all local services didn’t have the equipment needed to cut me out of the vehicle available, so we waited for 45 minutes for a truck to arrive from further afield. In the meantime, a couple of police cars had arrived to shut the road, and an ambulance was there for me but waited out of the way to make access for the when fire service arrived. At some point after this, the anonymous lady who had stopped for us was moved on to avoid any more danger to her on the scene of an accident, but her presence and her kindness has made me now unable to pass anyone else who has broken down or had an accident without stopping to see if they are okay. I had passed my handbag that contained my phone and the special jewellery that I had been given as gifts for my birthday three days before to this anonymous lady, and I trusted her with the only familiar and comforting items that I had with me once the doctor had removed them from me. It’s a funny feeling being eternally grateful for complete strangers, but she helped me more than she probably realises that night and she is always part of this story when I tell it.
We eventually attempted to free my right foot as the pain was increasing, my body temperature was dropping, and the initial shock was starting to wear off, so I was beginning to panic. I could budge my right foot slightly, but my shoe was completely stuck within the wreckage, so the doctor managed to cut away enough material for my foot to become free with his scissors. That was the point that the blinding pain really kicked in, my crushed and dislocated bones where no longer being held in place by my shoe or the car, and my foot and ankle looked like something you would see on a cartoon – floppy, huge and almost visibly throbbing and growing.
The second biggest relief of the day (after seeing our doctor appear), came over me when I saw the bright lights of the fire service appear and immediately angle flood lights over the whole scene to begin work to get me out. Because my chest and neck were in significant pain, they had to treat me as if I had injuries to my neck and spine so they couldn’t just hoy me out of the driver’s door like I’d asked them to (several times). The bright lights illuminated the smoking bonnet and showed exactly how far down into the ditch that we were. The firemen talked to me through the driver’s side window and one man climbed into the back to be with me, to tell me what they were going to do. He threw out some of the rubbish – and held up the spade to show me what had almost decapitated me – and told me that I was about to be covered in layers of bubble wrap to protect me from any splinters made by removing the roof. This all became real and scary, and I started shaking. We were in an area without streetlights so the only light until this point had been from the doctor’s torch. Thanks to the new illumination from the fire engine, I saw the blood around me that had come from my own body, although I wasn’t sure where it had come from. As the seriousness kicked in, I quietly asked the doctor if I was going to die as he began to leave me in the car under the bubble wrap blankets. The doctor was amazing and told me to remember somewhere that I liked to go with Rob and his dog Buster, who we had spoken about in my previous moments of panic, and with his help, as the firemen began cutting the roof away from the car to expose me and the wreckage underneath, I imagined walking Buster with Rob at our special place by the beach. They don’t use electrical equipment in these situations when water and people are nearby, so they used handheld clamping and cutting devices, and they talked me through the whole thing as they went along. The two paramedics from the ambulance told me to sit back and relax, “you’re now sitting in a convertible car with the roof down and surrounded by hunky firemen in uniform, enjoy the ride!”. Without me realising, the amazing firemen has somehow replaced the back on my seat with a spinal board and eventually, with a lot of bodies clambering around me, they slowly and carefully laid me flat and pulled me through the boot of the car and lifted me up on to the road above. I was free. I was bloody freezing. And I still desperately needed a wee!
The specialist doctor and the ambulance crew immediately cut my clothes open, leaving me in my bra and knickers laying in the road to quickly assess the rest of my body before covering me up in blankets. The paramedics said, “and now you’re nearly naked surrounded by men in uniform – what a lucky lady!”. I replied something about them not being so lucky to have me in my underwear because I suddenly remembered what underwear I was wearing – my most ‘comfortable’ bra (a misshapen push-up bra that had been washed probably too many times and wasn’t the pristine black and white number it once had been) with black and purple Batman knickers that my Mum had given me for Christmas. I was on the upper end of my comfortable weight after recently having my first Christmas and birthday celebrated with Rob with ALL the food and drink, and I was humiliated laying there with a crowd of absolute strangers (mainly men) looking down on me. I could not have thanked them (and apologised to them) any more times if I tried.
Once inside of the ambulance, my legs were both examined, and unfortunately a pulse wasn’t easily found in my right foot, so they placed my legs into inflatable boots to protect them and I was strapped to the spinal board with a neck brace and lots more blankets. For anyone who hasn’t had a neck brace on before – you’re extremely lucky! They are purposely made too small so that you can’t move at all but that makes them excruciatingly painful, and it feels like it’s cutting into your neck and head. I was in agony everywhere, but the neck brace was either that painful that my brain couldn’t concentrate on anything else, or it was actually making me delirious from cutting the blood supply to my head! The amazing paramedics were so funny. I would recognise the man who stayed in the back with me even now, ten years later, and I would love to thank him and the doctor who stayed with me in the car for saving me physically and mentally in my scariest ever moments. The paramedics joked as they strapped me up that my legs were so hairy that they were like Velcro and that is a phrase that I’ve used for my spikey leg hair ever since! I think I was slightly away with the fairies from the drugs they had started giving me because I found them hilarious. In the back of the ambulance, while we were on our way to hospital, the paramedic (I wish I knew his name!) offered to make calls from my mobile phone to people who could meet us at the hospital as my phone and belongings had been taken from me and no one else in the world knew that I was living this nightmare. I asked him to call Rob first and the paramedic started the conversation by saying “don’t call me babe, it’s not Amy on the phone so keep your dirty comments to yourself to save us both the embarrassment!” He explained briefly what had happened, and Rob apparently didn’t actually sound that concerned and it was only when the paramedic told him to get his arse to the hospital that he realised he should get in the car. Rob says that as he was playing a game on his computer at the time, and because the paramedic was making jokes, he thought I had just hurt my foot and it wasn’t a big deal – if Rob was any more laid back, he’d be horizontal! The next phone call to my dad wasn’t as calm, and his initial emotion was anger that someone was driving like an idiot with me in the car (I think he thought it was my new boyfriend driving as Rob likes his cars and had a nippy little skoda at the time that he loved), but the paramedic calmed him down and put him on loud speak so that he could hear I was okay, and he was waiting at the hospital with Rob when we arrived.
My Dad and Rob’s faces were what made me cry for the first time since the accident happened. Seeing two of the most important people to me looking so concerned set me off. Apparently, I looked like a massive baked potato because my face was all squashed from the neck brace and I was covered in tin foil to warm me up!
Once into the resuscitation ward, I could only look up at the white ceiling tiles when a doctor put his head over mine and explained that it was about to get very busy and I was going to be asked a lot of questions. It was exactly how I had seen emergencies on the TV, and I was surrounded by so many medical professionals who proceeded to check every inch of my body with their eyes, hands, and scans and my tolerance of the pain was extremely low as I yelled and screamed when they prodded the parts of me that were bruised and broken. While I was laying alone in one of the scan rooms, I asked the sonographer if I had broken both of my feet because I just knew the pain in both of my limbs was not normal. They confirmed my suspicions and told me I had also broken my sternum, but a doctor would write a report and proceed from there.
When I returned to the resus unit, my left foot was completely ignored when they listed my injuries, and no one would believe me that I had broken that foot too as they were so concerned with how badly my right foot and ankle was broken. From head to toe, I had a fractured sternum (breastbone), four fractured ribs, bruised lungs, a fractured left ring finger on the first knuckle, two fractured metatarsals on my left foot, complete dislocation of the right ankle joint with associated fractures of the ankle joint and the neck of the right talus, and the sub-talas bone had broken off completely. There was no blood supply to my right foot, and I could see my Dad and Rob’s dad looking at the scan results with a doctor through a gap in my curtain and their faces told me that things weren’t good. Over the course of the evening, my best friend, Rob’s parents, two of Rob’s best friends and one of my colleagues all joined Rob and my Dad to check in on me at the hospital– I didn’t have my phone so none of those people came because I asked them to! They all turned up to support me and eventually it became too much and some of them started leaving to wait for news at home.
I STILL hadn’t been for a wee by this time either and I knew we were in risky territory if I didn’t go soon. They offered to fit me with a catheter but that really scared me, so I asked for a bed pan. I was in so much pain and I still had a neck brace on so I couldn’t sit up and I wasn’t able to lift my back enough to slide the bed pan underneath myself. So, my best friend asked for plenty of the absorbent pads that you get in hospital and we piled as many as could underneath me so I could use them like a nappy – a good idea in theory but my bladder was the fullest that it’s possible ever been and the tsunami that left me as I relieved myself was too much for the pads and my wee went everywhere! My friend started flinging warm, wet pads into the bin while we just kept saying “oh no!” and laughing to stop ourselves crying!
The doctors sedated me with ketamine, so I was awake but unaware of the pain that I was experiencing, and they reset my ankle to try and align the bones enough to allow the blood to circulate again. I’m grateful that I don’t remember that, and I ‘came round’ to the whole cubicle covered in plaster where they had manhandled me and placed my leg into plaster to send me for another scan to check they had been successful in saving my bones from starting to die. I was then admitted to a ward so I could wait for surgery the next day. I kept asking when I would be allowed to go home, as if they would just give me a cast on the sore bits and send me on my way like the way it had happened many times before during my childhood – I’m so accident prone and was in A&E numerous times with different injures from a young age. My parents were bored of waiting in the emergency room for another one of my injuries by the time I left school!
But this was different, and I spent a week in hospital and had an operation to put my right foot and ankle back together with five screws – known as open reduction and internal fixation. Understandably, the urgency to save my right foot from amputation took precedence over anything else and I waited patiently for my other injuries to be addressed during my recovery. There isn’t anything that can be done for broken ribs, so I was told to move my upper body as much as possible and take deep breaths every hour as my lungs had taken a beating too.
However, when the physiotherapist came to visit me the day after my surgery and gave me crutches to begin weight bearing on my left leg, I refused to stand because of the pain in my left foot. I knew it was broken and I accepted that I may not have been a serious injury compared to what else was going on in my body, but it was too painful to stand on and I refused their help. The next day they came back, and that time I got annoyed that no one was listening to me. I shouted and cried and demanded to be seen by my consultant who later re-scanned my left leg and agreed that I had two fractures to my left foot. What I hadn’t factored into my pleas for help was that broken bones usually go in plaster, and after they agreed that I didn’t need further surgery, they put my left leg in a plaster cast to match my right leg and I was absolutely devastated.
Once home, I was in a wheelchair for ten weeks solidly, and it took around six months for me to be able to ditch the wheelchair for more time time than I used it. SO MUCH has happened in the years after my accident medically, I’ve undergone numerous surgeries and procedures – even nine years after my initial accident, I attended hospital for another procedure to help me manage the chronic pain that I have been left with. Chronic pain deserves its own blog post, so I won’t go into it here but its’ a big part of my life now. Nor will I go into particular details about the very personal attacks from solicitors, and the relentless onslaught from private investigators that I experienced for several years following the accident while an insurance claim took place, but the severity of what I experienced made it almost impossible for me to recover mentally from the trauma that I experienced until very recently – and I’m still working on it now!
I changed as a person on the night of that accident and I will never be the same again. I tried desperately over the years to claw back the carefree and confident person that I was, and I mourned for the person and the life that was taken from me at that time. I went clubbing in my wheelchair and on crutches and many years later I was even going out with ankle guards and air-boots on to protect my delicate leg and ankle because I was so desperate to join my friends and feel normal again. I would swap my usual painkillers for alcohol on those nights and wake up as a sweating, shaking mess in the morning from a mixture of a hangover and medication withdrawal.
I was diagnosed with PTSD by a counsellor after the accident and although I have been impacted by this event, it has eventually (and very slowly) made me a stronger person. I am proud that I have survived the physical and mental aftermath, even when I thought I wouldn’t, and it has made me so incredibly grateful for health and happiness for me and my family. Thanks to this experience, and other events that have happened in my life, I am a much more empathetic person, and I try to make jokes of it now so that I don’t dwell too much on what I lost. We refer to my ‘bad’ ankle as my ‘cankle’ because places that bones and the Achilles tendon should protrude like a normal foot is now covered by permanent swelling and bruising and some of the bones don’t exist anymore as they were put together differently after being crushed. I have permanent muscle wastage in my right calf, and we refer to this as my ‘turkey leg’. I can’t walk in shoes without using special orthotic insoles and the insoles only comfortably fit in flexible sports trainers so I’m very limited on footwear – I’ve lost count of the times I have had breakdowns in shoe shops while trying to fit my insoles into footwear that I am desperate to wear. But I’m extremely grateful to have my foot still and as it’s still a possibility that I may one day still have to lose it, I’m going to make the absolute best of what I’ve been given and make memories with my friends and family to continue my ongoing recovery.
The NHS is under constant pressure and scrutiny but I have probably used up my allocated quota of care from them and they have continued to provide the best care for me and I’ll be eternally grateful for every member of the NHS team that have cared for me every time!
