Why did I let this happen to me?

The Times columnist Melanie Reid broke her neck and back earlier this month. Here, from a hospital bed, she confronts her future . . .

by Melanie Reid

This is me. I’m dictating this because I lie imprisoned on a hospital bed. I’m here because, three weeks ago, I landed on my head and broke my neck. In the space of 15 minutes I have gone from someone whom I considered to be a fairly high-achieving mistress of her universe to what looks like a tetraplegic.

It happened as I was doing a course of cross-country jumps at the start of the season. I’ve been riding for 30 years and I have always done so on a safe horse. It was the fifth jump, he was jumping a little stickily and with the brilliance of hindsight, the uncatchable brilliance of hindsight, you think, maybe he wasn’t going so well. But experience has taught you to kick on. So we did and we went for this little jump. I had committed, I was riding hard for it — and he stopped sharply. I slid over his head quite slowly, and was face-planted in the Perthshire soil, some of which is still tying up my teeth three weeks later.

As I landed I felt the impact on my face and thought, OW! And then there was this blinding flash, this red light, and in a perfectly cold, conscious, logical part of my brain I knew my back was broken. When I couldn’t move my legs I wasn’t altogether surprised and I just lay there thinking: shit, why did I let this happen to me? Damn, why did I let this happen to me? Damn, life is going to change for ever.

I lay with my face in the soil. My friend, who is a vet, had jumped the fence first. I told her: “I can’t move my legs.” They phoned for an ambulance.

The St John Ambulance team were very good but I think they were horrified to realise the implications of what was going on. I could speak quite normally. I said: “Why don’t we phone for a helicopter?” I could move my shoulders and so I could flip-flop my elbows, but there was no power there and I thought, keep still. Here was me, a middle-aged woman, arrogant enough to think I could compete with riders 20 years younger than I am, telling myself, it’s not going to happen to me. But it has.

After 15 minutes, the helicopter landed. In fact two helicopters landed. The journalist in me smiled. I think the Sea King got there first and Katie, my friend the vet, said: “Ooh, the winchman’s really dishy”; and he said: “Does anyone want to come to Glasgow, with the casualty?” and she said: “Oh yes, I do.” And I thought, Katie, you should be taking your child and your pony home.

They put me on the stretcher and already, in a weird way, my life was shutting down. I was strapped on to bodyboards and put on the floor of this helicopter. I love helicopters. I’ve always loved helicopters and I couldn’t enjoy riding in it. I experienced a moment of utter frustration.

The winchman was indeed very dishy, and he took his helmet off, but I was having trouble breathing, and I think he was worried that, because it was obviously a neck break, I didn’t have the chest power to breathe. I said to him: “I can’t breathe,” and he said: “Yes you can, girl. You do this for me. We’re going to be there in six and a half minutes.” It was one of these hilarious Mills & Boon moments where you think, I’m yours, I’m just completely yours, and at the same time you’re thinking, no one will ever want me again.

Then it was into A&E, from there to high-dependency unit, to MRI scan. The doctors come and introduce themselves and they tell you that your spinal cord is fractured and is unstable and the column has been damaged — not severed, but damaged, stretched on one side and compressed on the other. It’s a C6 fracture, a classic neck break. There is a break further down the back — T9 — but it’s not so serious.

With an unstable fracture of the back, you become a slow-motion emergency. You have no control and it’s hard to come to terms with the loss of that, even now. Here in the national spinal unit for Scotland, at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, the care begins, and the pace of life changes down.

You go from running your own life, from being go-for-it, up-for-it, get-the-job-done, to being this person who is completely helpless. The change is extraordinary. Apart from the physical shock of a spinal injury, there is the emotional shock of coming to terms with the fact that you’ve lost control over everything ... everything — from your future employment to your bowels, even to your ability to call out for a nurse in the night.

Those of us who operate at full volume, full control, we make the decisions and we make them quickly, and suddenly we’re caught up in a world where there are no decisions to be made. We just have to lie and wait. Our futures have been taken out of our hands in a way we could never have dreamt of. And we know that coming to terms with that will be an extraordinary battle.

I was operated on by one of the top neurosurgeons, Jennifer Brown, and she pinned the bone.

The nights are the worst. On the third night, I lay through the long, dark reaches of the soul. You realise that maybe it’s not going to work out. The biggest battles are fought at night-time. Sleep is difficult, but if you do sleep there are these appalling morphine-induced dreams. Every time you close your eyes the tiles on the ceiling start to crawl with animals, demons and obscene things. And you float up there as if on some morphine cherry-picker and drift in a state through this world made of knitting, cable-stitch, plain and purl, with dark hollows. You can read obscene messages written on the tiles and when you look again, they’ve gone and when you look again, there’s a rat peering out.

Whoever did Trainspotting had had a lot of morphine at some point or other. I’ve stopped the morphine now, but the effects of it are still crawling in my system. I was on it for quite a few days. I had to be intubated for the operation and remained on a ventilator until I was strong enough to breathe on my own. I then caught pneumonia. I was told by my doctor: “There was a point at which we thought we might have lost you there.”

Most of the time, you don’t know how ill you are, because you seriously refuse to consider it. You don’t think logically. You are trying to be brave for your family when they come to visit you, to make them smile and go away happy and think, she’s bright tonight, when really you just want to say to them: “Stay with me tonight. Please don’t go.”

To sustain the illusion, the nurses lie to you. They have to lie to you. It’s the only way to keep you going. So I would say: “When will I come off the ventilator?” And they would say: “Oh, it’ll be Saturday.” Well, let me tell you, that week there were five Saturdays, three Sundays and two Fridays. Then they did finally take me off.

The other enormous thing is the claustrophobia. When you’re on a spinal board the vision is peripheral. You can only see a tiny view — a dinner-plate size above you. You can’t see clocks. You’re also lying very flat because you’re in a neck brace, and when you do move you get motion-sick, so I was permanently nauseous, bringing up food. Food? I haven’t had proper food for three weeks. I was fed intravenously through a stomach tube. Tea? What’s a cup of tea? They give you drugs for nausea and you bring them up. Everything is a fight to keep you alive and to get your body through the shock.

Every night you lie and you look at your body and you try and recognise it. I don’t know if my legs are going to come back. You look at them and it’s the weirdest sensation, because you’re looking at the bit of your body that you can’t feel. It’s slightly fleecy and suedey and velvety and you can’t feel it. You can look at it and touch it, but you can’t feel it. All you can do is try to wiggle your toes — but the wiggle doesn’t happen, except that just very occasionally you think, maybe I did feel something there, and you’ve just got to keep hoping.

I have got fairly good use of my right arm and I’m right-handed. I’ve got mobility in my shoulder. My fingers are weak, but hopefully I’ll be able to build on that. If I’m extraordinarily lucky I might get some feeling back in my legs ... you hear wonderful stories. I just have to come to terms with the fact that I’m lucky to be here at all. And in my head I am fiercely alive.