Andrew Marr - The World I Fell Out Of

How to pin down the moment when your body deserts you? When you are forcibly divorced from yourself? Wedged face-down, I can taste dry, gritty, late winter Perthshire soil, and I realise I can’t move anything but my right arm and my shoulders. My elbows flip-flop a little, like a seal. I reach down and touch my leg – the hand feels the leg, feels the texture of the riding breeches; the leg doesn’t feel the hand. Doesn’t feel it at all. I can’t quite believe it, but I know what has happened. It really has happened – the thing I’ve always tried to put to the back of my head. The thing I sometimes dwelt upon, ever since I read about how the Hollywood actor Christopher Reeve, a tall, well-built man, had toppled over his horse’s ears at a small jump and become paralysed from the neck down.

I manage to lift my shoulders a fraction, and turn my head. My left hand is lying out there, sprawled where I can see it. It responds a bit when I try to clench my fingers. This reassures me, oddly, and I put my face back down in the soil so I can think a bit. In a perfectly cold, logical part of my brain I’m utterly furious with myself. Arrogant enough to think it would never happen to me. But it has.

They have gathered round me by now, my friends, training-day organisers, the instructor. I can’t feel my legs, I tell them, please phone for an ambulance. The two nice elderly men from the St John Ambulance, first-aiders in attendance at the course, have arrived. I can hear the anxiety in their voices, their fractured breathing. They put an oxygen mask on me. ‘Lie still,’ everyone is saying bossily to me, like they’re rehearsing a training drill. ‘I am,’ I say grumpily. Then they start nagging me again: ‘Keep talking. Don’t fall asleep.’ But I am growing weary and want to close my eyes. ‘Please phone my husband. His number’s on my mobile, in the pick-up,’ I tell Helene, one of the organisers. Someone comes back. Says: ‘There’s an ambulance coming from Perth.’ I nestle wearily into the soil. I’m struggling to think straight, but I know I have to try and stay in control. ‘Phone for a helicopter too,’ I say. Strangely unembarrassed. I hear them, voices off, urgent, ordering a helicopter, giving directions. On stage meanwhile, my monologue is internal.

The brain was still functioning. I held lucid conversations with the paramedics from Perth, who had arrived and were preparing a neck brace. Then, still face down, I heard the helicopter, felt the shock waves of noise, an implacable clatter descending above us. At the time, I convinced myself there were two; could have sworn I heard someone say: ‘Here’s another helicopter.’ What a bloody waste, I remember thinking grumpily. Which was one way of expressing the whole catastrophe, although I didn’t see the irony until later. Later the Royal Navy air-sea rescue pilot who picked me up told me I was wrong; there was only one chopper. But that’s the tragi-comic essence of disaster: the everyday runs head-on into the bewildering.

They turned me, releasing me from the earth, slowly, carefully – I don’t know how many of them, I couldn’t feel their hands – onto a spinal board. I remember my vision spinning, the sky suddenly unbearably bright, but my head and neck were trussed with pads, so I could only look straight up, a small dinner plate of vision. My friend Katie was bending over me, telling me that I was going in a Sea King to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, where the main emergency specialities were. ‘Check out the winchman, he’s really dishy,’ she told me. ‘I’m coming with you.’ She always could be inappropriate, but I think she was trying to buoy me up. Of all the emotions, the pressing one in my head was annoyance: one, for causing all this fuss, and two, for not being able to sit up and enjoy my trip in a helicopter. Perhaps shock was setting in.

The inside of the chopper was furiously dark, crowded, vibrating and noisy. I felt sick and claustrophobic, strapped down. Panic started to rise. He was indeed dishy, the winchman, in the rare moments he crossed my limited field of vision. He’d taken off his helmet. Mostly it was his voice I hung onto. I told him that I couldn’t breathe and he leant over me, speaking softly but urgently to me above the noise: ‘Yes you can. Keep breathing for me, girl. We’ll be there in six and a half minutes. Do it for me.’ Pure Mills & Boon. It felt profoundly intimate, romantic – but also heart-splintering, because in that same instant, deep down, I knew with absolute certainty that never again would a man lean over me wanting to make love to me. Those paralysed thighs would never part. A brief wave of insight and intense loss washed over me. I can be that precise: in a few seconds, in that maelstrom of noise, my sexual identity died. Lust is only one letter removed from lost.

The crew of the Sea King from HMS Gannet , based at Prestwick, treated me as an emergency, aware that with a high spinal injury I could easily lose the power to breathe. The pilot requested a direct route and air traffic control temporarily cleared our path of commercial aircraft so that the helicopter could fly straight to the hospital. In those days, before the Southern General was rebuilt into a high-rise city, the helicopter pad was on the ground, just next to A&E. I remember being transferred to a trolley, remember trying to be polite and thank the RAF crew as they wheeled me away. Already, by then, there was the sense of detachment. This is just too bad; it can’t be happening to me, and I felt weary.

Things got a bit blurry after that. Time and cognitive slippage. Apart from everything else, it’s very hard to discern what’s happening when all you can see is a very small patch of ceiling. There was a warm, pretty female doctor in A&E who bent down to my ear and told me: ‘You’re going into resus now – it’s going to be very noisy, lots happening, but don’t worry,’ and I clung to her words and her humanity. She had blue eyes and blonde curls. A feeling of almost unbearable loneliness was settling upon me with the knowledge that I was absolutely on my own in this. Only in my brain was there sanctuary.

Snippets only thereafter, those dreadful hours, as shock and morphine kicked in. I was struggling with the unfairness of it; I couldn’t believe what had actually happened. Good Friday, it was; how inappropriate was that; and I’d taken the day off work to take part in the cross-country instruction. At some point my poor husband appeared at my bedside, his handsome, ever-optimistic face crushed with shock. Already, I think, he knew more than I did. At one point I remember being slid into an MRI scanner, immobile, staring at the plastic tube wall just a couple of inches above my face. White noise, claustrophobia: the very stillness made my ears boil. I was utterly passive; all will was gone; I no longer had a body. Is this what it feels like, I thought, losing everything?

It was in the scanner, though, that I had an epiphany. So weird was this experience, so unimaginable was it, at the cutting edge of catastrophe, immured like a mummy in a high-tech tube, that I suddenly thought – I’ve got to tell people about this, I’ve got to write about it. It’s just so interesting . Who knew? On reflection, that point of deliberate detachment from myself was hugely important. It was self-preservation: a way of ensuring I kept control of my emotions. Steel shutters were clanging down in my head: I dared not even think about my son, just emerging from his teenage years, or of my sorry future. But I could safely bear witness and carry on writing in my head. A correspondent from a hidden war.

Another fragment of memory. A consultant came to talk to us. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, the director of the spinal unit. He placed one fist on top of the other, upwards, in a tower, like the playground game one-potato-two-potatoes, little fingers of one hand resting on the clenched thumb of the other. ‘Horses, eh?’ he said. ‘Used to keep them myself. Dangerous things.’ He seemed almost cheerful, as if I was more satisfying than a road accident. ‘You have fractured your spine at T12,’ he said, ‘but that’s not so important. You have broken your neck at C6; the two vertebrae have gone like this’ – he angled his fists, bending the tower in half, ‘and compressed the spinal cord on one side and stretched it on the other. That’s where the damage is.’