Entry 2: Hello and Welcome

My first blog entry was written some time ago, during a spell when I had particularly felt a way of describing what it is to be tetraplegic/quadriplegic that could reach others. one of the biggest issues that I personally have come across since becoming paralysed is the major, life changing differences that now exist between my world and those of the able-bodied.

I hope in this blog to be able to express some of the challenges that I have faced and overcome, and to be able to provide encouragement and support to others out there who may be in my situation or something similar. I also would like people who are not disabled to read and find out what life is really like  in a chair; although even the most empathetic person can try to understand, I know myself that there is really no way anyone who is able bodied truly can appreciate what it is like. therefore, the more information they have, the better really.

First of all I'd like to give you some background information about who I am. Born and raised in Liverpool, I moved south when I gained a post in teaching children with special needs. I was raised with a brother who has profound autism and I had over the course of my life come into contact with both children and young adults with a wide range of disabilities both mental and physical. following several years of teaching, I decided to take a year out to go travelling. I had already spent six weeks in Australia, and I was determined to return there via South America. After travelling through Peru I went south into Chile. I went up to San Pedro de Atacama, and I saw geysers spraying water and sulphur, I swam in salted lakes and watched wild flamingos fly overhead.

I was on a day trip out visiting a salt pan where flamingos gathered, and a oasis in the driest desert on earth… Such greenery in the middle of emptiness. The day before this dry desert had actually received rain for the first time in years. So as a minibus driver took us at 80 km an hour along an unsealed road, it slid out of control and flipped over. I was knocked unconscious and when I came to I had been flung from the minibus, and my neck was resting on what must have been the windowpane. I could hear people crying all around me and I tried to get up to help them, to find out what was going on. But I couldn't. I couldn't move. My body wouldn't do what I told her to do. I started to feel pins and needles all over my body, and a strange man stood over me, telling me to stay calm and not to move. He covered me up so I wouldn't burn in the sun. He kept talking to me so that I wouldn't go to sleep. All I wanted was to get up, people were  crying and I wanted to see if they were okay. Eventually an ambulance arrived, and I was taken to hospital number one.

And that was the beginning of my new life.