Don’t waste energy moaning . . . you only have one life — cherish it!
She was in the prime of life at 52 when a riding accident changed her life for ever. In an inspirational memoir, Melanie Reid shares her story — and the hard truths she has learned
JOURNALIST and mother Melanie Reid lived life at 100 miles an hour — until 2010, when a horse-riding accident paralysed her from the chest down. She spent almost a year in hospital before returning to the remote cottage in Scotland she shared with second husband Dave, 73, and her son Dougie. In her new inspirational yet often darkly funny memoir, Melanie, now 61, tells her incredible story of tenacity and survival . . .
IKNeW it was catastrophic. I said, ‘Ow!’ to myself when my face slammed into the turf, and then I experienced a blinding red flash and felt my whole body suffuse with a most beautiful, intense feeling of warmth; my own internal nuclear explosion; my own terrible mushroom cloud.
In those seconds I was already aware that my life, as I knew it, had ended.
Here are the bald facts. My horse had refused a piddly jump, on a piddly little British Horse Society instruction day for piddly middle-aged wannabes. Harmless, happy people like me, playing at the bot-tom end of a thrilling, dangerous sport; pretending that I was 32 when I was 52.
That day my steady, handsome chestnut horse didn’t want to do it. At the take- off stride, he ducked out sharply. I carried on going.
My pride made me try to stay on by gripping his neck, which was the worst possible thing I could have done. It meant my arms were not in front of me when I hit the ground, so I did a fairly steep, slow-motion head plant. My body and long, long legs pivoted over my neck. A millimetre or two difference, I would have been fine.
Wedged face-down, I could taste dry, gritty, late-winter Perthshire soil, and I realised I couldn’t move anything but my right arm and shoulders.
I reached down and touched my leg — the hand feels the leg, feels the texture of the riding breeches; the leg doesn’t feel the hand. Doesn’t feel it at all.
Then, still face- down, I heard the helicopter, felt the shock waves of noise, an implacable clatter descending.
The crew turned me, releasing me from the earth, slowly, carefully — I don’t know how many of them, I couldn’t feel their hands — onto a spinal board.
I could only look straight up, a small dinner plate of vision. My friend Katie was bending over me, telling me I was going in a Sea King helicopter to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow.
Things got a bit blurry after we got to hospital. Time and cognitive slippage as shock and morphine kicked in.
At some point my poor husband Dave appeared at my bedside, his handsome, ever- optimistic face crushed with shock. I dared not even think about my son Dougie, at university, just emerging from his teenage years, or of my sorry future.
‘Horses, eh?’ said the orthopaedic surgeon. ‘ Used to keep them myself. Dangerous things.’
He seemed almost cheerful, as if I was more satisfying than a road accident. He told me I had fractured my spine and, worse, broken my neck, compressing the spinal cord on one side and stretching it on the other.
What I didn’t know was that Dave had already been taken aside and gently told to prepare for me being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
In the very early days after my accident, in the loneliness of a night-time ward, I found myself contemplating my situation with sudden forensic coolness. I put away the inner child and appraised as an adult. Yes, it appeared that things were bad, very bad. So bad that I couldn’t cope. I was para-lysed. It was unbearable.
Then, out of nowhere, came the epiphany. With the utmost clarity, I realised that actually, things could be worse.
What mattered most of all? Not me. Us. Them. My DIY family, Dave and Dougie, created by me from two marriages and held together by love and determination.
Our happy, often dysfunctional little unit, our laughter, our independent hobbies, our loving madness, our group hugs, when we shouted and pogoed to the words of the Sister Sledge song We Are Family — three different surnames under one roof. My two adored ones.
I convinced myself that if I could take back control and start doing things for myself, then all would return to nor-mal. I thought my hands would work if I really asked them to, of course they would! So I asked the nurse to leave that day’s pile of greetings cards on my bedclothes, rather than set them aside for Dave. I tried to pick up the top card and watched with bewilderment as my fingers refused to grip. The cards slid slowly off my chest onto the floor and I watched them go, passive and helpless. My right wrist still had some-thing going for it. There was still strength there. Dougie went shop-ping and found me a travel cup with the handle open at the bot-tom. I could wedge my palm under the handle and lift a mug of that precious weak, tepid, milky NHS tea high enough to drink through a straw — my first inde-pendent action as a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. On the spinal injury sever-ity scale, mine counted as ‘ complete’. Completely buggered: no power or sensation below the injury to the spine. They didn’t tell me that. Not then. As soon as my neck was judged suitably stable, they started to hoist me into a wheelchair. Get-ting up was a ritual, like preparing a medieval knight for battle. First, the nurses have to dress you. It feels like they are stuffing a giant sausage. No under-wear, just the baggiest T-shirt and joggers you possess. I had asked the boys to bring me in one of my 10km race T-shirts and the nurses cut the neck to widen it.
It was a symbol of who I really was and my statement of intent — a sporty person who shouldn’t be here. As reality bit, I felt embar-rassed and threw it away.
I couldn’t help but reflect on how I had changed. In my 40s, I had fallen in love with exercise and before my accident I had been in the best shape of my life, trimmed down to size 12 jeans — a statement which now rings with futile vanity, a pathetic boast.
I genuinely could not find any beauty in my body in my wheel-chair, only loss.
When I made an effort with mas-cara and a pretty scarf, friends would say gamely: ‘You look lovely today,’ because they were kind and wanted to encourage me to feel good. ‘You’re still you inside.’
But they knew and I knew and they knew I knew. When I looked, I saw a shipwreck. A wheelchair first, and then that strange, still person in it, her dowager’s hump growing, her middle settling.
That wasn’t me. But it was. Physical pride. Femininity. I had to let them go, fluttering from the
window, letting the past fall away. Gone was sensuality and sexual movement. Never mind spontaneity. When your limbs do not work and you cannot feel, you can hardly make lunch, let alone love.
Sometimes, after my accident, Dave admitted he would see a couple walking in the street together, hand in hand, laughing, bumping shoulders like mates, and would feel a terrible pang.
I felt furiously envious of women who looked stunning in clothes, whose bodies still signalled attraction. Who still had everything I had lost.
I tried to resist the inevitable lure of the miserabilist high ground of disability: the sour voice that said my incurable suffering trumps your trivial pursuit of a designer label. You want Gucci? Me? I just want to walk.
Sitting in my chair one day, six or seven weeks after my accident, I convinced myself that my left thigh had twitched sideways on command. I stared at it, willing it to move inwards towards the other knee. I was sure there was a flicker. Well, maybe.
I told Susan, my physiotherapist, and she gave me an ‘ Oh, yeah, who are you kidding?’ look, because part of her job was to stop people like me destroying ourselves with false expectations. ‘Show me,’ she said. I tried. two grown women bent over, gazing intently at a set of knees. ‘See! It flickered.’
She put my feet up on the bench, took off my trainers and liberated my toes from the dreaded elastic stockings.
‘try and move your toes.’ And as I watched, willing them to move, the middle and fourth toe went up and down. Susan looked intrigued; my brain was boiling with joy, excitement, amazement.
I began to wonder if my diagnosis had been so accurate after all. I redoubled my efforts at the gym; after hours and hours of graft I learned how to transfer — that is, move myself from wheelchair into bed and back out again without a hoist. For a tetraplegic, this is epic, a passport to a kind of independence.
But for everyone with a spinal injury, there was an elephant in the room.
It was that looming, enormous question — will I ever walk again? — which haunted you in every quiet moment of your day, and at night was answered by your subconscious, when in your dreams you sprang to your feet and danced around. As the weeks turned into months, my focus on rehabilitation became more and more intense as I was re- diagnosed from a ‘complete’ injury to an ‘incomplete’ one. In other words, there was some scope for recovery.
My legs, after months of grinding exercise and electrical stimulation to encourage the regrowth of neural connections, had become strong enough to bear my weight.
In the hydrotherapy pool I had managed to stand, propped between the side of the pool and a physio. And then, supported by the water, I had swung my legs forward in a few consecutive steps. It was walking, Jim, but not as you’d know it.
Welcome to my new world, the eternal torture of possibility.
I left hospital a week before the first anniversary of my accident, and returned home to our long, higgledy-piggledy old cottage which had been comprehensively ramped and now resembled a skateboard track.
As time passed, and my body settled down, it did continue to improve in numerous tiny, slowmotion ways — a process that goes on to this day.
A former patient told me not to say: ‘I will always be disabled,’ but state instead: ‘I will always be recovering from my injury.’ I can now walk with a frame, placing my feet deliberately without wearing ankle splints. With slowly increasing stamina, I could stagger up to 100m.
then I realised I had recovered some sensation under the skin; and next, after seven years or so, I noted the return of some form of long-distance skin sensation. It’s what a healthy person might feel, perhaps, if someone was stroking them through two or three thick duvets.
Approaching a decade post-accident, this is where I am. I am still doubly incontinent, the motor functions controlling my main muscle groups are effectively dead and my life is still that of a paralysed person, spent in a wheelchair.
hope has never left me, but it now co- exists with acceptance. Life may be smaller, but life is still immeasurably good. All you have to do is stop and look, but so few of us do.
One autumn, I witnessed an extraordinary 20 minutes of frenzy and clamour when a flock of redwings descended on the rowan tree at the front door, heavy with red autumn berries, and stripped it like locusts.
In my old life, I realised, I would have jumped out of my car and I might have noticed, in passing, that the tree was suddenly denuded. Now I was catching the secret dramas. these were close to privileges of a kind I could never have imagined.
In this way, you learn, very slowly, to rediscover joy.
So please, pause and appreciate exactly what you have.
Don’t get angry about discarded socks, wet towels dumped on the floor or traffic jams; don’t waste time and energy moaning about your job, your relationship, the weather or your unfulfilled aspirations.
We only have one life and, take it from me, we should never waste it. cherish the people you love, change your job, tilt up your face and kiss the rain, follow your dreams. Because you can.