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The dogs burst into the room. Then a twitch in my leg — it was back in the game

In our inspirational series, pro rugby player ED JACKSON – who broke his neck diving into a swimming pool – describes a joyous reunion with his pets and the miracle moment he realised he might walk again

By Ed Jackson

IN SATURDAY’S Mail, Ed Jackson told how his life was shattered when an accident left him paralysed. He was told he would almost certainly never walk again. Today, in our second extract from his uplifting memoir, the former rugby forward describes the toughest fight of his life . . .

WE HAd friends round for lunch and I could hear their laughter from the kitchen as my fiancée Lois loaded me up with plates of food to take out to them. ‘Can you manage?’ she asked, kissing me lightly on the cheek.

‘Of course!’ I said, giving her one of my most winning smiles as I balanced the tray laden with food.

I turned from her and walked into the garden, blinking against the sudden brightness of the sunlight. Our friends turned to me expectantly and, sensing that the moment required a touch of showmanship, I did a little two-step dance before putting the tray of food on the table and . . .

I woke up with a light sheen of sweat over my body. For a moment, I thought I could still walk and was still that man who could carry a plate of food out to his friends. It took a few minutes to realise I was still in hospital. And that I wasn’t that man any more.

I had these dreams often in the weeks following my accident on April 8, 2017. On that Saturday, the first warm weekend of the year, I had dived into a friend’s swimming pool and hit my head on the bottom, splintering two vertebrae which had almost severed my spinal cord.

The doctors at Southmead Hospital in Bristol had told me I was unlikely ever to walk again, and at best might regain use of my arms so I could use a wheelchair.

Since then, there had been some progress. Seven days after the accident, I managed to wiggle two fingers on my right hand. Five days after that, I moved a toe on my right foot. Each day had brought a little more movement and sensation on my right side — yet this only accentuated the lack of movement on my left, which stubbornly refused to budge.

I told myself that any improvement was a blessing but my thoughts sometimes betrayed me.

One day, Lois was talking about returning to work part-time while I was in hospital, and before I knew it I was crying. Big, wet tears that no one could hide were streaming down my face.

‘Ed, what’s wrong?’ Lois asked, hurrying over.

I gasped in air, unable to answer, just wanting the simple dignity of being able to wipe the tears from my face. But no, I had to lie there, unable even to turn away.

‘It’s starting to feel like you’re not there for me,’ I said between sobs. ‘You’re busy planning what you’re going to do next and I’m just lying here.’

Her face crumpled. We never argued; we weren’t that type of couple and we soon apologised, Lois for not realising that I might be upset by her talk of the future; and me for thinking she wasn’t there for me.

Seventeen days after the accident, I left intensive care at Southmead. While I waited for a place at an NHS specialist spinal unit in Salisbury, I was transferred to the neurology ward at the Royal United Hospital in Bath.

There I started rehab with their head physiotherapist Pete Bishop, an ex-Army man. His military background resonated well with me as a professional rugby player and he set the bar high from the start.

‘I think we’ll have you up and about in no time,’ he said. I stared at him. ‘Really?’ This was the first time anyone involved in my care had said this.

First, Pete got me sitting up, which was not as simple as it sounds. Because I had been lying flat for three weeks, my body had forgotten how to regulate its blood pressure and there was a danger of me fainting, so my bed had to be raised by a few degrees for a couple of hours each time.

On the first day we reached 45 degrees. It might not sound much but it meant I wasn’t looking directly up Pete’s nose any more, the viewpoint I’d had of all my visitors up until then.

When I was able to sit up fully, it would also allow me to eat a meal with less chance of choking — and to begin my first proper physio sessions.

I had a new short-term goal to aim for. But anyone who passed my room in the next few days might have thought I was giving birth, not simply trying to remain upright.

‘Come on, ramp it up,’ Pete shouted as the sweat poured down me and I gritted my teeth.

He had me perched on the edge of the bed with both my hands at my sides as he knelt behind me and guided me with his arms underneath mine. It was at times like this that I realised how incapacitated I was. I couldn’t even stay sitting up by myself; my body threatened to tip me over in every direction.

I drew on all my reserves and focused on stabilising myself. And then, for three seconds, I was just a man sitting on the edge of his bed. It didn’t matter that it was a fleeting moment — it was my achievement and it felt wonderful.

In my sessions with Pete, I hung my hat on effort, just as I had always done in rugby. I’m not saying I was the best, but at every club I played at I made sure I was one of the fittest because it was something I had control over.

No matter how bad the task made me feel at the time, if it resulted in any sort of progress, then it was worth it. That’s the thing about motivation, it won’t often present itself to you, ready for you to grasp.

You can spend an hour doing something that will make a difference. Or you can spend it waiting for motivation to show its face. Either way, an hour will pass. Best use it wisely.

Pete was of the same mind and one morning he wheeled into my room one of those high-backed padded chairs you see in old

I realised this was just another test of endurance

people’s homes and placed in front of it a machine with two pedals and a monitor. It was a powerassisted bike, designed to get my legs moving.

Although my left leg was still a passenger, I had enough power in my right leg to start turning the pedal — and after an hour, I returned to bed feeling as if I’d actually achieved something.

That afternoon there was another morale boost when I heard an unfamiliar sound in the corridor. Not the usual squeaky trolley or the rubber-soled shoes of the nurses but sharp claws skittering along.

Moments later, Lois burst into the room with our boxer Molly and bulldog Barry panting loudly, their leads wrapping round her legs in their eagerness to get to me.

Animals don’t see you as any different. They don’t stare at your neck brace or try to hold back the tears. They just recognise the person they share a home with.

I cannot describe how much I had missed them. Just having Molly and Barry in the same room, slobbering all over me, lifted my spirits.

Between Lois, my family and my friends, I was rarely alone during the day and the silver lining of the accident was that I got to spend quality time with the people I loved, not just a hasty pint or a lunch shoehorned in between other meetings.

I also felt lucky to have Pete as a physiotherapist. If he had a catchphrase it would be ‘ramp it up’ and testing myself physically is what I have always enjoyed.

Rugby had taught me there is no progression unless you are pushed out of your comfort zone — and I realised that was all this situation was, another test of endurance. The stakes may have been higher but the rules hadn’t changed.

LYING in my hospital bed, I sometimes pretended there was nothing wrong with me. I would imagine I was just lazing in bed at home, waiting for an excuse to get up, or that I’d got home from a ten-kilometre run with Lois and we had crashed out for a midafternoon nap.

This game offered a bit of peace, a relief from my emotional struggle at the prospect of lasting limitations on my life.

The opposite to this was being stripped naked, hoisted into a chair and wheeled into a bathroom to be washed down by two nurses

I had only just met. I had never felt so disabled as I did in those moments — and in the bathroom mirror I could see that the thick strips of muscle around my neck had gone and my chest had shrunk, as had my legs.

Ten years of hard work were disappearing day by day. But although I wasn’t in control of my body, I was still in charge of my greatest resource at this time: my mind.

I knew I had to stop myself worrying about things I couldn’t affect or control, wasting energy wondering where I would be in a year’s time, or re-running the accident and what I could have done to stop myself diving into the pool.

Instead, I needed to use this energy positively and work harder on my rehab. Only try to control the controllable.

About a month after the accident, I felt some of the movement coming back in my left arm and was able to do small bench presses, lifting a broom handle 30cm above my head.

Pete would pop into my room between seeing patients, plonk the broom handle into my right hand and say ‘Give me 400 reps’. I would usually get competitive, so by the time he came back, 400 reps had often turned into 600.

I also persuaded some rugby player friends to take off the hollow metal footplate at the bottom of my bed. It was a few kilos heavier than the broom handle and a few times it slipped out of my hands and clonked me on the nose, resulting in a nosebleed, but I didn’t mind.

The idea of being able to do an actual bench press, however small, by myself — my own exercise regimen — was enough to give me a small spark of hope.

The next big development came when Pete was pressing down on my left leg one day, muttering his usual encouraging words, which sometimes sounded like incantations. Suddenly something fired in that leg, a twitch that told me it was back in the game.

At that moment, I knew there was a real chance that I might walk again — and soon afterwards a place became available for me at the spinal unit in Salisbury.

My move there towards the end of May coincided with the start of the holiday season for rugby players. Normally Lois and I would have been packing our bags for a trip away and, with my friends’ pictures from sunnier climes popping up on my Instagram feed, negative thoughts popped into my head one after another, dragging me down with them.

I coped with this spiral by ‘reframing’ — taking the inner monologue that can be our most vehement champion or harshest critic and turning critical or negative thoughts into positive ones.

‘I can’t believe that diving into a swimming pool left me with only 4mm of spinal cord’ became ‘at least I have 4mm of spinal cord left; that gives me the chance of a recovery’.

‘I feel bad that all my friends, family and Lois have to spend all their free time with me. I’m sure there are other places they would rather be’ became instead, ‘I’m lucky to have friends and family who want to visit me. I’m lucky to have Lois’.

Just how lucky I was became clear when I arrived in Salisbury. I imagined my fellow patients there would be stunt drivers, skydiving instructors, maybe the occasional matador. But their life changingincidents had come as curveballs in everyday lives: surgery that hadn’t gone as planned; a dodgy dismount from a stepladder; car and motorbike accidents.

One guy had soldiered on with a bulging disc and the whole thing had exploded when he’d picked up his toddler.

Some couldn’t breathe by themselves, so they had ventilators to pump air directly into their lungs; and I realised how fortunate I was not to have sustained a complete spinal cord injury.

There was still a chance the messages from my brain could reach the right places, and my physiotherapist Kim and I agreed on a goal: that when I was discharged I would be able to stand unaided and possibly walk.

Meanwhile, I learned how to use the toilet by myself. The first time

I had done that was when I was two years old, probably with more finesse, but luckily I wasn’t being marked for style.

Under Kim’s careful guidance I eventually saw signs of life sparking up in my left foot. It was reassuring to know the messages were making their way down my weaker side. Now the main barrier to walking was that my left leg still refused to lift off the ground.

One day, Kim fitted me with a ‘functional electrical stimulation’ (FES) machine, which monitored my movements with a pressure sensor under my feet.

When it was time for my left leg to lift up, it sent a pulse of electricity which contracted the muscles and raised the foot.

Holding on to the parallel bars in the hospital gym for support, I stepped forwards with my right leg. After a second’s pause, my left leg also lifted fractionally off the ground, just enough for me to move it forwards.

My step was out of time and my gait wasn’t very smooth but it didn’t matter — I was walking.

It was another huge moment. But my road to recovery wasn’t just about my physical state; it was about everyone around me returning to their lives as well.

Before the accident, Lois had been counting down the days to our wedding in the Tuscan countryside the following year.

As I will describe in tomorrow’s Mail, I was determined it should go ahead — and that I would walk down the aisle unassisted. But there were many obstacles to surmount before then, not least the question of whether Lois saw a future with me at all.

ADAPTED from Lucky: From tragedy to triumph One Step At A time, by ed Jackson, published by HQ on August 5 at £20. © ed Jackson 2021. to order a copy for £17.80 (offer valid until August 8, 2021; UK p&p free on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193.

The odd gait didn’t matter. I was walking!

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