Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [74]
As the guys I was with began to help lift me, I was still moaning in pain. Eyes squeezed tight, writhing in this slow, contorted agony.
I could hear one of them say that my canopy had a big tear in it. That would explain why the chute had been so wild to handle.
But the rules are simple, and I knew them: if your canopy is uncontrollable, then you have to cut the chute away and release yourself from it. Then go back into free-fall and pull your reserve.
I hadn’t done that. I had thought that I could control it.
I’d been wrong.
I then remember being slumped in an old Land Rover, and driven frantically to the nearest hospital. I was carried inside and sat carefully down in a wheelchair.
Two nurses then wheeled me down a corridor, where a doctor did a rough assessment. Every time he tried to examine me, I winced in agony. I remember apologizing to the doctor, over and over.
Then I remember him wielding a long syringe and jamming it into me.
The pain went instantly, and, in a haze, I tried to stand up and walk. The nurses grabbed me and laid me back down.
I remember this Scottish doctor’s voice (which seemed strange as we were in the middle of southern Africa), saying to me that it would be some time before I would be doing any walking again. And after that I don’t remember much more.
When I woke up a man in a green beret with a big feather poking out of it was leaning over me. I must be hallucinating, I thought.
I blinked again but he didn’t go away.
Then this immaculate, clipped British accent addressed me.
‘How are you feeling, soldier?’
It was the colonel in charge of BMAT (British Military Advisory Team) in southern Africa. He was here to check on my progress.
‘We’ll be flying you back to the UK soon,’ he said, smiling. ‘Hang on in there, trooper.’
The colonel was exceptionally kind and I have never forgotten that. He went beyond the call of duty to look out for me and get me repatriated as soon as possible – after all, we were in a country not known for its hospital niceties.
The flight to the UK was a bit of a blur, spent sprawled across three seats in the back of a plane. I had been stretchered across the tarmac in the heat of the African sun, feeling desperate and alone.
I couldn’t stop crying whenever no one was looking.
Look at yourself, Bear. Look at yourself. Yep, you are screwed. And then I zonked out.
An ambulance met me at Heathrow, and eventually, at my parents’ insistence, I was driven home. I had nowhere else to go. Both my mum and dad looked exhausted from worry; and on top of my physical pain I also felt gut-wrenchingly guilty for causing such grief to them.
None of this was in the game plan for my life.
I had been hit hard, broadside and from left field, in a way I could never have imagined.
Things like this just didn’t happen to me. I was always the lucky kid.
But rogue balls from left field can often be the making of us.
CHAPTER 68
I was in and out of the hospital almost daily from then.
They X-rayed, poked and prodded me, and then they did it again for good measure.
T8, T10, and T12 vertebrae were fractured. It was as clear as day to see.
You can’t hide from an X-ray.
Those are the main vertebrae in the middle of my back. And they are the ones that are hardest to break.
‘Will I walk again properly?’ was all I kept asking the doctors.
Yet no one would give me an answer. And that not knowing was the worst.
The doctors decided it would actually be best not to operate immediately. They deduced (and they were right), that as I was young and fit, my best chance of any sort of recovery was to wait and see how the injury responded naturally.
The one thing they did all keep saying was that I was ‘above average lucky’.
I knew that I had come within a whisker of severing my spinal cord and never moving again.
I became affectionately known as the ‘miracle kid’.
Miracle or not, what I did know was that whenever I tried to move just a few inches to the left or right, I felt sick with the agony. I could hardly shift at all without excruciating