Had I Lost Everything?

I was alive... but what was left for me?

Fiona Kinloch, Ally Grizzard, Rebecca Wright

Lifting my Yorkie pup Lilly into the passenger seat beside me, I tickled her chin.

‘Sweet girl,’ I smiled, clicking the seatbelt round her body.

It was January 2015 and I was taking 6-week-old Lilly for her jabs at the vet.

Driving down a country road, something in the distance caught my eye. A hay truck. Only, it seemed to be hurtling straight towards me...

With seconds to make a decision, I yanked the steering wheel to the right.

My body rattled around the car as it flipped.

I was hurtled 50ft out of the car, landing on my back in a field.

Panic-stricken, I tried to call for Lilly but no words came out.

I couldn’t move or feel anything. ‘Say something!’ a male voice said. ‘Help,’ I choked, then everything went black. Three days later, I woke up in hospital.

My mum Lisa, 44, and my boyfriend, Amos, 26, were by my bed.

I was hooked up to a ventilator and couldn't talk. A doctor explained I’d been airlifted to hospital.

I’d stopped breathing in the helicopter, had arrived with no pulse. Doctors had resuscitated me and rushed me to theatre.

My ruptured spleen was removed, stemming huge internal bleeding.

I’d fractured a bone in my neck and had collapsed lungs. Surgeons used rods and screws to reconstruct my spine, but there was nothing they could do to mend my severed spinal cord. ‘You’ll be paralyzed from the waist down, we don’t think you’ll walk again,’ the surgeon said.

As Mum stroked my hair and Amos held my hand, I cried my heart out.