‘I THOUGHT, WHOSE BLOOD IS THAT?’

High-flyer REBECCA FOGG suffered a horrific injury in a freak accident at home. She tells Anna Moore how that trauma reshaped her life

As Rebecca Fogg stood in the bathroom of her Brooklyn apartment, finally ready for bed at 3am after working late, she had plenty of reason to feel her life was on track. Three weeks earlier she’d been made vice president at American Express. This graduate of Harvard Business School was a high-flyer, moving up in the superfast city she loved.

Yet questions were beginning to form. Fogg was 39 and single; her friends were married, having babies and moving to the suburbs. ‘I was at this transition point where New York wasn’t what it had been, and I didn’t know what was next.’

What came next was a freak accident that blew Fogg’s life to pieces. When she turned on the tap, nothing happened. To check she had water she flushed the toilet – a pressure appliance, like many in New York apartment blocks. But she was unaware that the water pressure had become low and the air pressure high. This turned her toilet into a porcelain bomb: suddenly it exploded, denting the ten-foot-high ceiling and blowing the tiles off the wall. Dazed and disoriented, Fogg saw blood splatters and thought, ‘Whose is that?’ Then she saw a gaping wound on her right forearm. It was a partial amputation, known in America as a ‘spaghetti wrist’ and in the UK as a ‘full-house’ because multiple tendons, her main artery and main nerve were severed. Before pain or panic, Fogg remembers one last clear thought. ‘I felt a kind of reckoning,’ she says, ‘that the life I’d been living was over, and this was the next life, however long it lasted.’

It happened in 2006. Fogg is now 56 and living that ‘next life’ in London. We meet in the London Library, where she wrote her new book, Beautiful Trauma, the story of her accident and recovery. No misery memoir, it mixes the personal with the medical: Fogg set out to understand all she could about the anatomy of the hand, the nature of her injury and how we heal from trauma. It’s a fascinating account of the human ability to survive.

That survival instinct kicked in within seconds. Fogg’s severed artery was spraying blood. ‘It was like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ she says. Her parents, who helped in the aftermath, had to throw out the rug and the bedspread. They found blood everywhere – in her shoes, at the back of the wardrobe – yet at the time, she felt no pain.

Knowing no one would rescue her – New Yorkers are used to loud noises – she made the decision to call 911 before stemming the blood, packing her wrist in wet tea towels. Needing someone to let the emergency services into the lobby, she kicked on a neighbour’s door. Only when the paramedics arrived did the fear kick in – ‘That was a terror I’ve never experienced before or since,’ Fogg recalls – and only when she reached the hospital did she feel the pain.

In her book she describes the chemical reactions that, within milliseconds of the explosion, transformed her from a ‘groggy corporate climber’ to a ‘hypervigilant animal hellbent on survival’. Natural opioids flowed into her spinal cord, adrenaline flooded her bloodstream, her heart pumped faster to prime her for action and her cerebral cortex – the outer layer of the brain – jumped in with lightning decision-making.

Fogg needed an operation of about three-and-a-half hours, as surgeons attempted to repair her tendons and nerves (like ‘overcooked pasta wrapped in wet toilet paper’ according to her consultant). Then came months of occupational therapy, without which her hand would forever be ‘a block of wood’. Early on, Fogg contacted an acquaintance who had also survived a life-threatening hand injury. He urged her to learn all she could about the hand’s anatomy so that she understood the healing process and appreciated every milestone.

She was signed off work, with no idea if her hand would regain its function or feeling,

staying first with her sister, then her mum, then at home, helped by a rota of friends. Understanding her anatomy helped on many levels. ‘You’re feeling incapacitated. But I could still learn and that was a sense of progress,’ she says. ‘It helped me understand the severity of the injury, and it showed me why the doctors couldn’t promise anything.’

There was also awe in knowing how much her cells would be seeking to regenerate and her severed nerve ends would be grasping for a new connection. ‘It’s spectacular how hard your body is working to keep you alive all the time,’ she says. ‘Whatever you do, you’ve got nature on your team.’

Help from people around her was also key. ‘My dear friend Jen has so much going on in her life but she called me every single night,’ she says. ‘Family and friends were really important but so were colleagues, neighbours and strangers.’ The tiniest gesture – holding a door open at the right moment – could make such a difference. She gives the example of her neighbours in her apartment block on the night of the accident.

‘One packed a bag for me, someone put a shawl over me,’ she says. Then one man spoke to her, using his name and hers, and gently rested his hand on her head. ‘I was like this balloon drifting away, and he pulled me back. It was like saying, “You still belong to us”. When you receive that kind of compassion, it means so much.’

At many points her recovery didn’t feel like ‘progress’. There was a huge amount of sleeping and weeping. ‘One big takeaway is that “coping” feels like falling apart,’ she says. ‘You rarely feel you have everything in hand.’ However, as movement slowly returned to her fingers and she found ways to adapt to everyday tasks, Fogg realised there had been gains. She’d changed.

‘I’d gone through life with a very strong self-protective armour,’ she says. ‘There was a freedom in having a layer ripped away.’ Life, she writes in her book, is a ‘crapshoot’ (a game of dice). She didn’t smoke or do drugs and always buckled her seatbelt, but her hand was blown half off by an exploding toilet. ‘You can’t protect yourself from being human,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean I don’t worry but I work less to control things. I’d gotten through something when at some points I didn’t know how I would. It changed how I wanted to spend my life.’

Fogg returned to her job after five months, but it no longer held any attraction. She took writing classes, volunteered at the hospital that saved her then transferred to London to work in healthcare research and innovation. In 2018, she began her book. ‘I decided this was one thing I’d genuinely regret on my deathbed if I didn’t do it.’

Now she is living in Southeast London and learning to play the fiddle. Her hand looks normal but for a pale, thin scar across her forearm. It can manage almost everything it did before, although there are gaps in spatial awareness. She has bitten on her fingers instead of a sandwich, and once grabbed a stranger’s knee on the Tube for balance, thinking it was her own. (Only when the woman jumped and glared did Fogg realise her mistake.)

‘When I’m falling asleep, it can be a little stingy, a little buzzy,’ she says. ‘I never mind it.’ That pain reminds her of what she has been through – and gained. It reminds her that we are built to survive.

Beautiful Trauma by Rebecca Fogg will be published on 6 April (Granta, £14.99)*

SHE’D ALWAYS BUCKLED HER SEATBELT, BUT HER HAND WAS BLOWN HALF OFF …BY AN EXPLODING TOILET