Lynne Barrett-Lee - Never Say Die

For Mike Davies, however, the feeling wasn’t mutual. No doctor wants to find himself too close to a patient. Detachment and clear-headed thinking are too important for emotional involvement ever to be a good thing, particularly where serious injury is concerned. But standing before him was one of his fellow rugby club stalwarts. A man with a pretty fifteen-year-old only daughter who’d suffered the most appalling catastrophe, and whose future ( all their futures) had, bar some improbable miracle, been utterly turned upside down.

It seemed a member of staff did know this particular family. He just wished it didn’t have to be him.

Even so, the task at hand was to be honest and realistic with these two distressed people and, as delivering bad news was best not done standing, he invited my parents to go into the sister’s office and sit down. He began with the best part—that my life wasn’t in immediate danger—but said that the injury to my spine would probably take a few days to declare its intentions, as it were. His assessment of my prospects was not encouraging, sadly; they would need to prepare themselves for the real possibility that I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. He would also need to operate to stabilise my back, to avoid a progressive deformity. If, as he expected, I would have to spend many months in hospital, a stable back would make rehabilitation easier. The only glimmer of light he could offer that day was that should the unexpected happen and there be an improvement in function, we would see it in the next forty-eight hours.

For my parents, this would be the hardest two days of their lives.

For me, however, things were almost too surreal to register. I would come to terms, in some ways, in the days that were to follow, but mostly my youth and optimism would win out. It would be another three weeks before reality bit and the stuffing would be knocked out of me.

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