Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

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They don’t hang about on the NHS. As soon as my neck was judged suitably stable, they started to hoist me into a wheelchair. There is a set regime to protect the skin on your backside from pressure sores. You start with half an hour a day in the chair, then an hour. You build up. You carefully toughen your epidermis to its new weight-bearing role in life. Overnight, your buttocks have become the soles of your feet. When you accustom the skin to that fact, you’ve reached the magic goal in spinal rehab of ‘up as able’. You’re then allowed to sit in your chair all day. This process takes weeks.

Getting up was a ritual like preparing a medieval knight for battle, a fairly accurate reflection of the pace of life with a spinal injury – achingly slow, with progress measured on a scale too tiny for the able-bodied to contemplate. Understand the mammoth effort, you able-bodied, and you will never again take for granted the fast, fluid ability to sit up in bed, swing your legs over the side, and stand up. First, the nurses have to dress you. It feels like they are stuffing a giant sausage. No underwear, just the baggiest T-shirt and joggers you possess. I had asked the boys to bring me in one of my 10k 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. Mistaken identity. As reality bit, I felt embarrassed and threw it away.