Spinal column: let’s look on the bright side

Melanie Reid, an award winning journalist, writes about her visit to our third year Medical Sciences students, to talk about her experiences as a tetraplegic after a riding accident.

‘Good things have come out of what happened to me. But I’d take back my old life in a heartbeat’  

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to talk to third-year medical sciences students at Edinburgh University. Poor things were midway through a week of meeting people with various things wrong with them, a kind of crash course in all the things that don’t kill you – immediately, anyway – but can’t be cured.

I don’t know how much they got from me, but I certainly benefited from being around them. In my world, so rarely do I get to rub shoulders with loads of young, clever, beautiful people that it was almost intoxicating. En masse, they were so bright-eyed and attentive, so hungry to learn. I felt as if I was talking to rows of baby swallows, crowded on the telephone wires, preparing to set off to start their lives in a wider world they didn’t yet know.

Come back one day, please, I wanted to plead. Come back and bring those brains to bear on research that will fix spines and prevent strokes and cure all the filthy neurological illnesses that blight lives.

One girl, towards the end, asked me a simple but profound question: “Have any good things come out of what happened to you?” It stopped me. I had no immediate answer, because I am not someone who gilds any lilies or pretends I am happy to live in a chair with waste pipes coming out of my torso and hands that don’t work. I’m optimistic, yes, but I’m an optimistic realist.

The most positive personal thing, I told her, was that I now feel very loved. When you come so close to losing everything, and must continue in a diminished state, it liberates you and the people who care about you. You discover who really matters. Relationships are enriched. You listen properly. I find it much easier now to show affection and tell people I love them. And I find it works the other way, too: I get the love back, in spades, and I treasure it.

And I’d learnt about priorities, which seem an awfully simple thing, but very important, and I’d never had time to consider them properly. In normal lives we are all too busy – with work, study, play, catching up online; with the gospel of achieve, achieve, achieve – to treasure the most important things in our lives: home, health, peace, kindness. And because I’ve been there, done it and lost it all, I know it’s true.

Then I said that it was good I was able to communicate in the mainstream media – aha, the dreaded MSM! – about disability, and to raise both awareness of spinal injury and money for Spinal Research, the lead charity (I’ve just become a patron). Lots of people had told me that I helped them put their lives in perspective a bit. And then I shut up, because I get weary of the sound of my own voice and the solipsistic nature of my output.

After I had left the students, though, I pondered further on her question. Actually, when you count them up, quite a few good things have happened. They’re small things – compensations – not giant happinesses. Mostly they’re about how I’ve evolved as a person. I have become wiser, more tolerant and more patient. Without spending money on self-help books, I have discovered the art of mindfulness, which really means sitting still in a wood, looking at the delicacy of leaves and smelling the wet soil and not thinking about anything.

I’ve experienced multitudinous kindnesses from strangers and come to respect and appreciate NHS staff. I wrote a book for a friend that made him very happy.

On a lighter note, I’ve stopped driving 25,000 miles a year, which amounts to a huge carbon saving, and I’ve seen animal magic: a flock of waxwings up close strip a rowan tree of berries in 20 minutes. I’ve watched, from even closer, an owl catching mice outside my French windows, and I’ve seen, from 10ft, a sparrowhawk stalk round a car sheltering a terrified robin.But would I rather have continued in my old life than seen and done such good things? Would I exchange recognition and holy martyrdom for my rackety old life and a working body, dashing hither and thither, unseeing, unknowing, never stopping to smell the coffee? In a heartbeat, yes.