Over the past year, Pier has been missing much-loved and respected Account Director, Caroline Tilley. Last month we were absolutely thrilled to welcome her back. Here she shares her story about what has happened over the past 12 months.
When something catastrophic is about to happen – 99% of the time you’re blissfully unaware. So, when I waved goodbye to my Pier colleagues at our summer soiree one sunny Wednesday in August 2024, I had no idea I wouldn’t be seeing them again any time soon. That Saturday, August 17, I fell during a horse riding lesson, landing in a broken heap and unable to move.
Did I know then how much trouble I was in? I certainly feared I couldn’t be fixed. My back was screaming in uncontrollable agony and I couldn’t ignore the horror that parts of my body were suddenly ignoring me. I would lie there for more than an hour until two extraordinary men from the air ambulance were called and took control. My clothes were cut off and I was examined before being transferred to a back board. Even with a good amount of morphine rattling around inside of me by now, it was excruciating.
I was blue lighted to Addenbrookes in Cambridge, the trauma centre for the East of England, where they discovered I had spectacularly broken my back, blowing my L1 vertebrae. The next morning, I went for urgent surgery and woke up with eight screws and two rods fixating my spine. I would spend the next week in a high dependency unit with wires and needles in every limb being log rolled every two hours and unable to move by myself.
What the surgeons couldn’t fix, however, was my spinal cord. Shards of bone had lodged in it from the fracture. While the bone was removed, there is no fix for a spinal cord injury. And mine was badly damaged. On day three, when an amazing spinal nurse called Aimee held my hand and told me I’d never regain full mobility, I was transported back to the arena floor. In my heart I had already known. I still cried. I insisted my dead feet, which I couldn’t feel or move, be covered at all times.
However, when the doctors and nurses said I wouldn’t be home for six months I was having none of it. I had two young children and a husband to get back to and a fabulous job waiting for me. I was going home. When, six weeks later, I was transferred to my third hospital – the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville – I grudgingly accepted I wouldn’t be back before Christmas.
It feels odd to say that at some point during my stay at Stoke I felt as though I had come home. I had a packed schedule of physio as I fought to regain atrophied muscles and spent hours being zapped by a machine to stimulate new nerve growth. Unable to see my family, I spent the weekends in Horatio’s Garden where you could go for a piece of cake with your friends in the unit, all of whom were also learning how to cope with this new life. On New Year’s Eve I was given the best present ever when my physio Bina handed me a pair of crutches and took me for a (doddering) spin round the gym. It turns out you don’t need your feet to walk. Although splints, sticks and pig-headed determination help.
Don’t get me wrong – there were still dark moments. When the doctors discovered at Stoke I had also broken my neck at C2 (wonderfully known as a hangman’s fracture) and shoved me in a neck brace, which I was to wear even sleeping and showering, it was bad enough. But when it refused to heal and I was told I had to have another surgery, I thought my luck had run out. I wrote letters to my two children to open on their 18th birthdays, not knowing what the hell to write to my four-year-old who had just started school. Turns out I was just being melodramatic and another screw later I was back on track.
However, the doctors were wrong about one thing. I wasn’t in hospital for six months. It was six and a half. I went home in March able to look after myself and focused on spending time with my family. I started back at work in September on a phased return, so happy to see all my amazing colleagues and fantastic clients again, if a year later than expected.
Where does that leave me today? My feet still don’t like listening to a word I say, and I have no feeling in either them or a lot of my legs – something my children love to test by tickling me repeatedly. My walking is slowly improving with help but I will always need a wheelchair. I have also lost control of my bowel and bladder, something which is not talked about nearly enough yet affects most spinal cord injury survivors. But it is not just me who has been living this. My boys had to make do without a mum for 202 days without really understanding why. My husband was suddenly a lone parent (and doing an amazing job). Spinal cord injury disrupts lives until you accept yours is not ruined, simply different to how it used to be. A year on, we are all living a new life but a happy one. And that is down to the hundreds of NHS staff and friends whose support got us here.
It was my physio Bina who gave me the best advice – not to compare myself to who I was previously, that person is simply gone. Instead, I look back to that person lying on the arena floor utterly alone and fearing the world had ended and I give her a pat on the back. In the end, we’ve done alright.
