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I'm not sure how appropriate it is to post this here, since it's a story about getting very lucky and not ending up in a wheelchair, but it might be of interest because of the immense stupidity of an ambulance crew who seemed very keen on me ending up in one! Either way I hope it's of interest.
I was very nearly 22 and had recently been accepted to join the RAF, with grandiose dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. Partway through Initial Officer Training (IOT), you start to be allowed to go home and do things on weekends. I'd been living in Lincolnshire for four months, I hadn't seen my family or friends in weeks and my head was full of training and running around the countryside and military law and all the things I now know don't actually have much to do with the day to day of being in the RAF, but which they make you do anyway. On the evening I got back to where my parents live in Essex, I was at the home of a schoolfriend of mine who works for P&O as a first officer on container ships. We were comparing notes and chatting, the TV was on, I was enjoying relaxing, and we ordered a pizza.
Now, I should point out that this person's flat was (and still is) a complete sty, with stuff all over the floor. Coming back from getting the pizza (having run up stairs to her third floor flat) I tripped on something. Still don't know what. My head ended up in the corner, the pizza ended up underneath me, and as my head hit the wall there was a crunch in what felt like the bottom of my skull, but was actually my neck, like a horror movie effect - exactly as if someone had snapped a stick of celery, a real cliche breaking-bone sound.
I immediately knew exactly what had happened and exactly what the implications were. I remember testing and thinking: I can breathe, I can scrunch my toes up in my shoes, I've got away with it so far. What I now need is to get treatment for this without it all going wrong. What I didn't know then was that the vast majority of SCI happens after the fact, when people are being loaded onto stretchers. I was utterly terrified at the possibilities of what might happen next. I had no idea that it really is possible to sweat with fear, but it is.
So, I'm laying there screaming at my friend Sarah not to touch me, to call an ambulance, trying to shout at her and breathe without moving a muscle, with the burning hot oil from the pizza gradually soaking through my clothes and scalding my sensitive girly chestological area. When the ambulance crew arrived, after several thousand years, I screamed at them not to touch me either, especially after I told them I had no pain other than an ominous bruisy sort of ache in the back of my neck and they started pulling me about. Eventually they rolled me incredibly roughly onto a back board to which I spent the next 48 hours permanently strapped, because I wouldn't let anyone touch me.
Long story short I got away with severely breaking C3. I have no detectable injury to the spinal cord. Everyone here knows what sort of disability that could have caused. I'm very, very, hugely lucky, and I'm constantly preoccupied with what might have happened. As it was I spent the best part of a year as a partial invalid, first from being imprisoned in various metalwork screwed into my head, and then in recovering from that (halos hurt).
My principal goal at this point was being fit to return to training. I had already passed a class 1 aeromedical exam which qualified me to be a pilot, but I would of course have to pass a stringent reexamination after an injury like that. I've always been active, love swimming and running, and almost exactly a year after I crunched my neck, I got word that I was considered fit to carry on. I didn't get to graduate with the rest of the people I knew at Cranwell, but I did on the following year's course. The RAF were absolutely spectacular and held everything together fantastically well - they really look after you. Even though I was a cadet at the time it happened, I got a lot of the advantages that a full officer would have.
I spent the next very wonderful few years getting paid to train and fly around in a variety of aeroplanes and am now a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF on the Tornado GR.4.
Hokey as it sounds, I try to remember every day how lucky I am.
-Katie
Edited by katief, 30 July 2009 - 01:57 PM.
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just kidding... 
(maybe not all of us, but you can just disregard small % of those) 
Fly on Katie, great story of survival, thank you for sharing...
