WHY I BEGGED DOCS TO

After he was blown up by the Taliban, ex-Royal Marine ANDY GRANT made an extraordinary decision

AS MY eyes blinked slowly open I became aware I was on a hospital ward with machines beeping softly all around me and the whiff of burning toast mingling with the smell of disinfectant. My whole body hummed with pain and my right leg felt like a ton weight. As I looked down I could see a grille of interlocking metal circles, enveloping it from the knee to the ankle.

I knew immediately that my real-life nightmare was just about to begin.

I was just 20 when I woke up in that hospital bed in February 2009. I’d been lying in an induced coma for 10 days. I was a Royal Marine Commando, part of the elite fighting force, and now here I was, coming to my senses in Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital being spoon-fed cereal by my dad.

I’d been in Afghanistan and during a routine foot patrol in Helmand Province my mate Iain Syme and I had jumped over an irrigation ditch where the Taliban had laid down a tripwire for us. There had been two loud bangs, the sound of screaming and then pulverising pain. I knew within seconds that an improvised explosive device had blown me backwards through the air and that my body was trembling due to its force.

As I lay dying in the mud under a pitch black sky my fellow Marines fumbled around me in the darkness, trying to save my life. I’d sustained 27 different injuries including a broken sternum and a broken leg.

There was nerve damage to both my hands and feet and I had deep, gaping wounds in both of my cheeks.

Within days of waking up a doctor told me that during surgery they had been forced to remove my testicles and I would no longer be able to have children. The cage fixed to my right leg, they explained, was an Ilizarov frame and it would give me the chance to regrow the 6cm of bone which had been shattered during the blast.

Each day for the next 14 months I turned screws attached to the cage and let science work its magic. Thanks to the painstaking work of the staff at Headley Court, the Armed Forces Rehabilitation Centre in Surrey, and the love and care of my family, eventually I was able to walk again.

I could hobble to the shops and when I walked the terraced streets towards Anfield to cheer on Liverpool I looked as comfortable as the next fan. But I endured days when I was bedridden with pain and fatigue. The nerve damage in my foot meant I would never be able to run again.

At Headley Court I had mates from the military who had lost legs and arms and yet, thanks to the sophisticated prosthetic limbs they had been fitted with, they could run like the wind.

That’s what I wanted to do more than anything in the world.

I wanted to kick a football in the park and race around a track like I was a young Marine again.

After a couple of months of shuffling about, afraid of the next flight of stairs, I knew that I FIGHTER: Andy with labrador Oppo, running at the Invictus Games, and with daughter Alba wan I to und aliv

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