6 - Physiotherapists? Affectionately known as Physio-terrorists!

"The team at this particular hospital were great."

The team at this particular hospital were great. It was their job, as I was bed-ridden, to begin to move my right leg and my right arm with some kind of motion so that my tendons did not shorten and cause me further difficulties. Not having moved from being in an induced coma for a more than normal period combined with my body's overall swelling reaction to the impact trauma, I can honestly say that every movement at this stage was painful.

Taking you back to the preceeding moments before impact, the head on collision that was coming at me was the result of a driver not paying attention to the road whilst suspected of engaging on his mobile phone. As neither vehicle, mine nor the larger heavier van that was careering toward me on my side of the road, were speeding however, the combined impact of our two vehicles totalled a collision speed of at least 100mph.

Try to picture the impending emotions that would wash over you in the moments before the split second that takes you and your car headlong into a wall at 100mph, the rapidly approaching object filling your windscreen faster than a bolt of lightning streaking across the grey sky. I can visualise those safety tests on TV from the 1980s; a slow motion film of a limp crash test dummy in a car, hitting a solid wall and its limbs flailing about as the camera captures all the glass shattering, body lurching, metal crunching action that developed in the field of view. Little did I know when I saw those as a child, so many years ago, that I would unwittingly go through something so near fatally similar at the behest of a senseless, wreckless driver.

".. hitting every surface amid a shower of sharp diamond shards.."

As a consequence of that severe, motion stopping moment when my limbs were like that yellow and black striped doll hitting every surface amid a shower of sharp diamond shards of windscreen shrapnel, my body slowly protected itself by inflating subdermally. This had taken weeks to reduce to a point that I could begin movement at my joints.

The phrase that springs to mind, and is very pertinent, is, "Use it or lose it". How very true that phrase is. Owing to my inactivity during immediate recovery from the 16 operations across a month, my muscles were consumed by my own body and my tendons had shortened in all areas; my legs, my arms and even my fingers and wrists! The physios were there though; slowly, daily, religiously moving the limbs they could, a painful inch at a time.

The physios that really took me to the next level, however, were the ones I met in the next ward move when I was de-camped from the Liver Unit, to the Civilian Trauma Ward in the main hospital. These were the trauma specialists and gave me my first taste of a normal situation in so many months of physical stasis.