6 hours ago
1
Birthdays are always a big deal in my family – we love any excuse to spend time together. My dad’s 60th, in May last year, was a particularly special one, as we had family travelling from Germany to Eastbourne, in East Sussex, to celebrate.
I spent the first part of the morning with my sisters at my mum’s nearby. She has a birthday in the same week, so we were celebrating hers first. Around midday, we decided to go to my dad’s house, a few minutes’ drive away.
Two years earlier, at 22, I had got my motorbike licence after spending most of my teens wanting to learn. My dad is a big fan of motorbikes – that’s what inspired me – but my mum was always concerned.
That day, I decided to drive my motorbike to my dad’s house. I know his road like the back of my hand – I grew up on it.
Recalling what happened next is hard. My life changed in a millisecond. As I drove down my dad’s road, just seconds away from his house, a pigeon suddenly flew into my open helmet. I only know this from CCTV footage captured by a neighbour’s door cam. Within a fraction of a second, I’d turned my head, flustered by the bird, and veered straight into a parked Volvo. I started doing cartwheels in the air, smacking my head on the ground when I landed and skidded down the road into a kerb.
My mum and two sisters arrived a couple of minutes after, to find bike parts scattered along the road and me lying motionless. My younger sister was screaming and crying, and sprinted to get my dad. Luckily, a lot of my family have medical training: my dad is a trauma and army doctor, my older sister is a hospital doctor and my mum a GP.
Dad told me that my pupils were dilated, and I was blue, unresponsive and bleeding out from internal and external injuries. He said that my face was so smashed up, you could fit an entire finger in the wounds. He almost refuses to talk about it now.
An ambulance arrived within minutes. The paramedics refused to remove my helmet, for fear of exacerbating a spinal injury, but my dad shouted that he’d rather me be in a wheelchair than dead, and removed it anyway.
When I woke up in Brighton hospital one week later, my entire memory of the accident was gone, as were any recollections of my life a month before that day. I was told I had been in an accident, and was terrified and confused when the doctors listed my injuries. My skull was smashed, I had two bleeds on my brain, I had lost three litres of blood, my pelvis had shattered, my back was fractured in six places. I had a broken shoulder, four broken ribs, a broken finger, broken knee, internal bleeding and my bladder had been filled with blood.
I watched the CCTV footage repeatedly, and looked through scans and photos from surgeries to try to piece together what happened, but it didn’t feel real. I needed three surgeries alone just to fix my pelvis. I’d already had an eye operation, which I don’t remember.
I was in hospital for another month, but still had to spend three months off my feet. I couldn’t even go to the toilet by myself and needed constant care. It was devastating to see how sad my family was. My dad still refuses to watch the footage, and my mum and sister said they would sit in my room and cry about how scared they were that I wouldn’t make it.
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Doctors called me a medical miracle after my six-month recovery, but I still have pelvic, facial nerve and brain damage. Though I was nervous about it, I now regularly get back on my motorbike. It needed a lot of adjustments – my legs are different lengths now due to my pelvis break. I don’t drive on the road any more, but I continue doing what I love by using motorbike tracks. And I look at pigeons a bit differently now. In a way they remind me that I’m lucky to be alive.
The biggest lesson I have learned from this is that protective gear is really important. My helmet cost more than £1,000, and if it hadn’t been such good quality, I wouldn’t be alive. One thing is for certain – I now value birthdays and time spent with my family more than ever.
As told to Elizabeth McCafferty
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