4 days ago
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
Kitchen fall brought me back down to earth as I deal with broken ribs
My paralysed leg slipped, and I landed full force on my side, smashing into a table before bouncing to the floor and hitting my head.
I knew instantly something was wrong. I couldn't move.
However, I could reach my phone, so I managed to message for help.
I lay there for 20 minutes on the floor until a friend with a spare key arrived. Then the ambulance came.
And just like that, I was back in hospital. CT scans, IV lines, heart monitors, painkillers. One minute I was planning a road trip; the next I was flat on a trolley in the resus department, blinking at the ceiling lights I've seen too many times before.
The diagnosis: two broken ribs. My first. And of course, they're on my paralysed side, where everything is more complicated.
When the doctors said it would take eight weeks to heal, I could barely process it. Eight weeks is an age in this body. In this life.
Falls are something I live with daily. They're an ever-present risk. Every step, every uneven pavement, every slippery floor there's a split-second possibility that my world could turn again.
At the spinal cord hospital, the wards were full of people whose lives had changed because of a fall. We don't talk about it much, but it's one of the most common reasons people with injuries like mine are caused.
What makes this harder is that it happened so fast. One second I was moving through my day, groggy from jet lag, sure, but functioning.
The next, I was in survival mode. It's not just the fall that hurts. It's the trauma it triggers.
The ambulance lights. The questions. The scans. The smell of hospital soap. The sound of the machines. It all takes me straight back to the worst days, to the mistake that caused my spinal cord injury in the first place. An injury I still believe 100 per cent should never have happened.
And so, I find myself back in limbo. I should be in Edinburgh. I was looking forward to taking part in The Capital Conversation, sitting on stage alongside Rhona and Archie.
Instead, I was patched in via Zoom from my sofa, propped up by cushions and codeine. I'm proud of the Edinburgh University team who made that happen, they didn't need to, but they did. That small kindness meant a lot, I also wanted to support Archie.
I should be visiting friends across Scotland. Playing golf. Breathing in the cool Highland air. But instead, I'm in my flat in London, bruised and broken (again), looking out the window and trying to come to terms with another detour I didn't choose. This is one of the hardest parts of living with a spinal cord injury. Not just the physical limits, but the unpredictability.
The fact that everything can change in a blink. You plan a week. A conversation. A game. A trip. And then suddenly, it's a hospital corridor and someone asking if you know what day it is.
I've had a few messages from friends who've broken ribs before, all of them say it's brutal.
No comfortable position. No quick fixes. No shortcuts. Just time, and patience, and learning to breathe through the pain.
Another bump in the road, then. Another test. Another chance to practise resilience whether I feel ready or not. I'm tired of the tests. But I haven't given up. I can't. Because somewhere beyond the frustration, there's still a belief in the life I'm trying to rebuild.
This fall has grounded me, literally and metaphorically. But I'll get up again, like I always do. Slowly, carefully, stubbornly. Not because I'm brave or special or built differently. Just because I have to. And because I've learned that even when you can't move forward in the way you hoped, you can still find a way to move in thought, in connection, in spirit.
Even when your body breaks again, you can still show up with those core values that guide you everyday.
As I laid in hospital opposite a 93-year-old lady who had also fallen I kept thinking maybe this was a sign to slow down, I had moved into human doing rather than human being recently and felt a wave of frustration come over me as I thought this should not have happened.
So, as the weekend comes I will try to be kind to myself around the fall and reframe this as a point of rest and recovery from my recent travels.
