Adapting to Life

Casey, 30, a lover of the outdoors and dedicated teacher, suffered a life-changing spinal cord injury following a mountain bike accident when out riding one day with her friends.

I remember everything from the day of my accident. It felt like any normal day. My boyfriend and I had planned to go for a bike ride with our friends, like we would always do. We went to this one section where there was a drop, which I had already done twice on my downhill bike, and it was completely fne. I approached it slightly faster than before and hit a different part of the drop which left me feeling like my bike was being pulled out of my arms. Next thing I knew I went completely over my handlebars. My feet were attached to the pedals and for the first time they didn’t unclip from the pedals like they normally would. I had all my protection gear on. A full-face helmet, knee pads and a back protector, but when I landed, I landed on my head and instantly felt an electric shock from my head to my toes. Straight away I lost feeling in my legs. My partner, Jay, is a mountain bike coach and has seen a lot of crashes and kept telling me I would be okay, but in that moment, I just knew that my life was never going to be the same. I remember looking up at Jay who had tears in his eyes and was trying his best to calm me down.

The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before. The pain was so unbearable, I kept thinking I was going to die if the paramedics didn’t get to me soon. When the paramedics turned up, I kept telling them that I was lying on a spike and that it was stabbing me in the back. Only now do I realise that it was my broken spine.

The doctors told me I had fractured my T8 vertebra by 50% and that it had crushed my spinal cord so badly I had a complete injury. They said I wouldn’t be able to feel or move anything below my waist and that there was very little chance of me ever walking again. Being told that I wouldn’t have use of my bowel and bladder, no sexual function, and that my life expectancy might be affected, was a lot for me to get my head around. Getting all that information in such a short amount of time was so difficult for me to process and understand when only just 12 hours ago I was out riding my bike with my friends. None of it felt real, I completely broke down when they told me this news.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE – The main causes for spinal cord injury are accidents in daily life:

50% road accidents

24% falls

17% other causes

6% sports

3% extreme sports

After a 7-hour surgery, I was in hospital for 2 weeks before being moved to The Spinal Treatment Centre in Salisbury, where I stayed for 3 months. Due to Covid-19, I had to isolate for 2 weeks on my own in my hospital room. Even the nurses wouldn’t come in very much. This was the lowest I have ever felt. I had just been given all this bad news and then was locked in a room alone to lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, not being able to move. I did a lot of video calls with my family, but those were very dark days. I kept telling my family I didn’t want to live like this, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to. I could never picture myself in a wheelchair. I went from being so active to now not being able to move. When I got home it was a real shock for everyone and I missed being around understanding people in the hospital. Our house was not adapted at all, so it was a lot for my family to deal with. I felt the hospital was more of a safe space, whereas when I got home, I was completely reliant on everyone.

Sports and the outdoors have given me a purpose with my injury. In the early days I just thought, who am I now? Who am I without being able to do yoga or ride my bike? I felt like I had lost my identity for a while but now have got it back, just in a different way. It has given me motivation and a reason to wake up in the morning.

I would love to have a family, because the doctors say that I should be able to have children and I really would like to at least try. If I can get my daily routine to be a bit quicker, I would have more time to get back to teaching children in schools which I would love to do. What is important to me is to make the outdoors more accessible for others. I teach adapted yoga which I really enjoy and now

have an adapted bike meaning I can go riding with my friends again. I want to help people with disabilities get back to the outdoors as that has really helped me. Another goal of mine is to have a fully adapted house.

It would mean everything for me. I have no movement or sensation below my belly button and that affects me in a massive way. I can’t tell when I need to go to the toilet so have accidents and I get so embarrassed. Just to even have the function back in my legs, I can’t even put into words what that would mean to me. I wouldn’t even mind if I couldn’t go on long walks or go exactly back to what I was doing, but if I could just stand up it would make everything so much easier. To be at the same eye-level as my partner and family would mean everything.