Injury

Good writers bring us up and down a repertoire of life events. At the very bottom are bloody stories of injury, such as the Good Friday when Melanie Reid fell from her horse.

The moment Melanie, the journalist with The Times, was pinned to the ground with a broken neck and fractured lower back, she knew it was catastrophic, fully aware that her life as she knew it had ended. She chronicled her nine years of daily life following her chestnut mare accident in The World I Fell Out Of.

Her legs froze. Her body numbed. Her arms felt stiff, and her feet were swollen. 

My, what could have been worse? Tiny drops of sweat during her challenge to use a pair of tweezers to lift coloured beads to place on pegs (after loss of motor function). Rivulets of tears after struggles to go through crash of blood pressure and heartbeat (after loss of autonomic nervous system). Pools of pee from leaking bags.

Melanie's description of her spinal injury and tetraplegic life moves every reader. So terrifying and haunting is her irrevocably damaged life that I felt nothing out of my injury. My previous knee injury from ski, my midfoot fracture last year, and that of my recent problem with posterior tibial tendon supporting the arch of my foot. Those are trivial. No story is sadder than the one told by Melanie Reid.