Well, if you’re reading this, clearly you’re slightly interested in my story so thank you. This post will cover what put me where I am, the injuries I’ve had, and the start of my road to recovery. It’s a bumpy road, and has a huge toll price, but I’m making my way along it.

Right. This story starts on the 29th of July, 2019. At approximately quarter to four I think, I was riding my motorbike home from an assessment with the coastguard. It was rather important; I had been in the role just shy of a year, and so needed to pass this assessment in order to be classed as a full coastguard rescue officer (CRO). I don’t actually remember doing the assessment, but apparently I did well and fortunately passed. Anyway, I was on my way home, and was going up a hill. As I was on a small 125cc motorcycle, I was going rather slow. I came towards the top, and as I was looking at the road ( and knew the road well) I decided to hug the inside of the lane, where there was a wall, in order to avoid going over a large manhole cover. I came around the corner, but had no view through it. As I leveled out, I looked down to check my speed, changed gear, then looked up.

Shit.

In what I estimate now to be less than half a second, I hit the back end of a flat bed truck, which was stopped in the road waiting to turn right. Luckily my trusty little bike was carrying me at around 20mph; any faster and I doubt I’d be here to write this. The front end of the bike hit, which took a lot of the impact, and then the back end bucked up, and I took the rest of the impact.

And that is it. From there, I remember very little, other than hallucinating in ITU (which I will get into later) and the waking up from my coma. Even though I cant remember it, that split second changed my life.

But yeah. I hit the truck, hard. I’ve still not managed to piece the story of what happened next together perfectly in my head, but here’s a rough outline. There are many elements of luck in my story, and they all start here.

Lucky element one is that travelling behind me in her car was an ex critical care nurse, who immediately attended to me. Element two is that a fire engine, crewed by some truly incredible people, was travelling towards me and was able to be flagged down, and therefore attend to me in what I understand to be less than two minutes. Lucky element three is that the NHS and Great North Air Ambulance exist, and were able to keep me in enough of a good shape to get to hospital. Precisely who did what is a mystery to me, but it doesn’t matter at this point; everyone there played a huge role in keeping me alive, and to that I really don’t know what to say. I am yet to meet these absolute heroes, but I will. When I do, I’ll tell you the story.