The Long Version

[denny]

I imagine anyone who wants to know will already know most of the details by now, but I figured the whole sorry tale deserved writing up at some point anyway...

So... 17th June 2003, I set off from work, as you do at 17:30 or thereabouts. I pack my laptop into its rucksack, get on my motorbike and set off out of the work car park. I got about 200 yards up the road.

The road is two-way, with the direction I'm going being an extra wide lane with marked parking bays along much of its length. One of the cars in these bays pulled sideways across the entire road just as I was coming up to it, close enough that he was almost inside my reaction distance, never mind my braking distance. Needless to say, I retaliated in the only way possible, by hitting it at 30mph. Which hurt.

Apparently I've probably written off the car as well as my bike, which is some small satisfaction. Reconstruction of events afterwards, including what I got from the police officer who interviewed the car driver, leads me to believe that he was waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic before executing a 3-point turn. When the long-awaited gap showed up, he just forgot to check in his wing mirror or over his shoulder before he nipped out into the road. The result being my motorbike parked in his rear wing, and me doing the incredible-bouncing-Denny act down the road.

His story, as with almost all cases where people pull out in front of bikes, is that I was going at six-billion miles per hour and I wasn't there when he looked. Which is, frankly, bollocks - my dad has checked and you can see the exit from my work car park from where this bloke was parked. There's no way I pulled away from a T-junction and 200 yards up the road in the time it takes to pronounce the comma in 'mirror, manoeuvre' (he didn't signal, natch). Bikes that move that fast do it on drag strips, and I'm not brave enough to ride one :)

I hit him just behind the driver's side rear wheel. It so happens I'd considered this type of accident in my more morbid moments in the past, as probably more than a few bikers have. I'd decided that the smart plan would be to jump up in the air to try and clear the car, leaving you with slightly less chance of being turned into pate than if you just sit on the bike seat until the bitter end. As I had probably less than a second of reaction time after I realised it was definitely going to be a crash, I think I might have got my arse about two inches off the seat before impact. I don't know if it helped or not really, there's no way to tell - but my main injuries are a few inches below my knee, so maybe it wasn't a terrible plan.

I went over the roof, and have no idea what my bike got up to from then onward... I imagine it rebounded after leaving a fairly good dent. I hit the road the other side and bounced sufficiently high that I had enough time to flail my arms around, realise I was airborne, remember some advice I once read about bikers breaking their arms because they stuck them out while in the air, and tuck up into a ball, before I touched down again. I rolled twice, then went up in the air for an encore - I guess I must have had some topspin or something. That landing was the last, and a few rolls later I was stationary.

I took a quick self-assessment and decided that I was too bruised and winded to even bother trying to stand up, but I didn't want to stay laying in the middle of the road either, just in case the roadblock behind me cleared up and I got run over to make my day complete. I started trying to roll out of the road, but it didn't seem to be working quite as expected, so I looked down at my legs to figure out what I was snagged on. The heel of my right foot was resting on top of the heel of my left foot. The toes however, were going in the opposite direction - my right foot was twisted slightly more than half way round.

I flipped my visor up for a second look, and it didn't change anything, so I calmly said "That's broken then" and used my hands on my upper leg to flip the foot around to on top of the one that was still pointing the right way. It was about now that I realised I was in shock :) and did my best to wriggle out of the road before it wore off, without leaving my recalcitrant right foot behind.

Once I got there, I figured my part in proceedings was done, and I'd wait for someone else to take the initiative. They manifested as a first-aider who was riding past on his pushbike and stopped to help me out.

"How are you feeling?"
"Well, that leg's broken. Can someone ring an ambulance please?"
"Okay... anything else?"
"Other than that I think it's just scuffs and bruises."
"Well, you're already in about the best position you could be to be honest, so I'm not going to move you. Don't take off your crash helmet."
"Yeah, I know. Thanks."

(For those who don't know, you never remove a motorcyclist's crash helmet after any kind of serious accident. The reason is that it's quite possible to break your neck without severing the spinal cord, but if you then try to pull a crash helmet off your head, the head goes up with it and the spinal cord snaps - turning what would have been a few months in a neck brace into permanent full body paralysis.)

A few minutes later, a new voice appeared to chat with me... a passing fireman with paramedic training.

"Hi there... how are you feeling?"
"Well, that leg's broken."
"The right one? Okay, anything else?"
"Nope, just bruises and stuff."
"Right... well, an ambulance has been called - just lay still and they'll be along pretty soon. Don't take off your crash helmet."
"Yeah, I know. Thanks."

About now the shock was really starting to wear off, so my conversational gambits dissolved into steadily chanting 'fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck' to myself. First aiders say helpful things like "You'll be alright" and stuff at times like this, which is infuriating, but better than being left alone to chant 'fuck' to yourself. I must track them down and say 'thanks' at some point.

A nurse wandered past on her way home from work, and came to see what was holding up the traffic.

"I'm a nurse - do you need my help? What's the situation?"
"Well, that leg's broken."

You may have spotted by now that I was enjoying this line and making maximum use of it... I think at the time I was probably quite pleased with how calmly I could announce it each time.

Anyway, the nurse verified that I already had people there keeping a competent eye on me and observed that she could hear the ambulance siren on its way to come andget me, so she asked me if I would mind if she left. I said that would be fine and she turned to leave, then turned back.

"Oh yes, don't remove your crash helmet."
"Yeah, I know. Thanks."

After she left, I listened to the ambulance forcing its way through the traffic to my position, and then there was a new person to talk to, the nice man from the ambulance.

"Okay, how are you feeling?"
"Well, that leg's broken. About there." *points at location of break*
"Right. Anything else?"
"No, I think that's it."
"No pain from breathing? Take a deep breath."
"No, that's fine."
"Okay then... want to take your crash helmet off?"
"I thought I'd get an expert opinion on whether my neck is still in one piece first."
"Good lad."

He prodded my neck around, then pronounced it intact and undid the helmet clip for me. I dragged the crash helmet off and someone stuck a jacket under my head for me to lay it on. Then he took my boot off and cut my jeans up past the knee so he could have a look at the leg. About now the girl from the ambulance team turned up.

"What's the situation?" she asked.
"Well, that leg's broken." I obviously replied.
"I'm not sure it is," says Mr Ambulance, "but we'll proceed on that assumption anyway."

I lifted the leg to demonstrate the attractive way that the bone tried to poke through the skin.

"Okay, okay! It's broken! Put it down!" yelped Mr Ambulance.

My diagnosis confirmed, I felt vindicated and went back to swearing under my breath instead. The ambulance team gave me some gas and air to breath around now which made things slightly less painful. Then they bunged me in the back of the amulance and we trekked the few miles to MK General Hospital. The roads in MK are usually pretty good, but they feel remarkably bumpy when your leg is in pieces.

I don't remember a vast amount of detail after we got into A+E, other than the bit where a policeman turned up to ask me a few questions, and a nurse very kindly told him to "Fuck off, he's in pain". Some of the nurses turned out to be quite cool :)

The policeman came back a few days later and was actually quite cool himself. Gave me a load of shit for wearing jeans on a high-powered bike, which was fair enough, but otherwise he confirmed most of my theory about what had happened, and told me unfortunately the other guy had an 'independent' witness who had given a statement saying I came "screaming up the road" going way too fast. 'Independent' in inverted commas because although they don't work or live in the same place, they do catch the same train home from London every day. I'll leave that one to my insurance company lawyers to deal with, but it does mean the Crown Prosecution Service is very unlikely to prosecute the car driver for Driving Without Due Care and Attention. Which is a shame.

Anyway, A+E shot me full of morphine, passed me through the X-ray department, then had my leg stuck in a temporary cast and headed me upstairs to Ward 11. Before they'd even finished pushing my bed into place, someone said "Oh ho, another biker", and all the curtains opposite me started twitching as the guy inside used his crutches to haul them out of the way before introducing himself as Steve, also with a broken leg thanks to a careless driver.

In fact, quite bizarrely we were both knocked off by Renault Clio drivers, which would be scary even without the information that duranorak added to it. Not long before this accident, there was a thing in the news about an old guy shooting his neighbour because of an argument about the height of the hedge between their gardens. As part of the news coverage of that, she found out that 78% of people involved in hedge disputes drive a Renault Clio. Really. I have no idea what this means, but the next time I see one I'm giving it a wide berth - they're obviously the car of choice for a deeply odd class of people.

The doctors in A+E had told me that I was at risk of various things, not least of which was the internal bleeding in my leg leading to something called 'compartment syndrome'. Apparently the muscles etc in your lower leg are enclosed in some kind of bag, and if there's too much swelling in there it all runs out of room, which can have quite nasty consequences (losing your leg, that kind of thing). However, they also told me I appeared to be very lucky, with very low swelling, and I might be okay to be operated on in the morning. The X-rays had shown the break to be significant enough to require fairly serious surgery, so this was a good thing.

Unfortunately, when they came to see me in the morning, and cut the cast for a second look, my leg was inflated to elephantine proportions, and the op was postponed until the swelling went down. With your leg swollen, they can't close it back up after surgery, so there's no point in them starting.

My leg was very swollen. Really lots. It took a week and a day before they could operate on me, which is a long time to lay in bed with a broken leg. I wasn't allowed to get out of bed at all. Fairly tedious stuff. I still didn't develop compartment syndrome though, which everyone seemed very pleased about.

There was a burst of excitement on the Thursday, when they decided to wheel me (bed and all) downstairs for a CT scan. This is something like MRI, it's a very high resolution 3D X-ray (MRI goes one better in that it can resolve tendons and muscle tissue as well as bone, but that wasn't required in this case). The only problem with this was that it required me to be taken out of the cast, otherwise the scan wouldn't achieve the desired accuracy. Having your leg taken out of a plaster cast (and then reinserted into it one scan later) 2 days after it was broken, is no fun at all. I heartily recommend you pass if you ever have the opportunity to be hurt that much. Unless that's your thing, of course :)

The day after that, they decided that the cast had suffered too much damage during the movement and was no longer supporting the break, so it had to be removed again, and I had to have a new plaster applied. That hurt even more than the day before, despite them being very careful about it.

On Wednesday 25th June, the consultant in charge of my case, Mr Wetherill, spent no less than six hours putting my leg back together. He seemed very happy with the outcome, as he managed to get my leg back to its original length (no small feat with the extent of the damage), and he also managed to re-align all the damage to the knee so that it shouldn't deteriorate too quickly as I get older. The downside to keeping the length of the leg is that it will probably take longer to heal, up to a year, but that seems like a fair deal to me.

Unfortunately, despite the successful outcome for what was left of my bones, there were complications from the operation. I developed compartment syndrome as an after-effect of the surgery, and so I had to taken back into the operating theatre in the middle of Wednesday night to have the pressure relieved before it became dangerous. This operation involved cutting open the bag previously mentioned, the one that the muscles live in, and then leaving it open for a few days so that further swelling didn't develop. So I spent the next few days with two big cuts in the back of my leg, oozing. Nice.

They scheduled the next operation for Saturday morning. This one was for them to clean out the inside of my leg again, and if it all looked good, to try and sew up the cuts that had been left open. In the end that operation got postponed to Sunday, for no particular reason that was explained to me. On Sunday, it all looked good, and they tried to sew the two cuts back up, but only one of them was fully co-operative about that. The other one didn't want to close - a known downfall of this kind of operation, the skin just gets used to being left 'gaping' and won't close up again. The solution is to close the hole with a skin-graft... and so I had another operation scheduled, this time for Wednesday.

Tuesday night I couldn't get to sleep. I finally passed out for about half an hour around 6am, then got woken up to wash and have my sheets changed ready for surgery. At 9am they were running me through the pre-op checklist, with two porters standing by ready to take me down to the operating theatre, when the ward phone rang. Then someone shouted "Denny's not first down any more, Mrs [someone] is". I think my face probably reflected a little disappointment at this news, but that's life. I was still next on the list, which would be in roughly two hours.

Two hours came and went. So did four. So did six. Someone came and spoke to the guy in the bed next to me, who had been third on the list, and told him that Mr Wetherill had run out of operating time for today, and that he might be able to be shifted onto someone else's list if he was willing. No-one came to talk to me for another hour or so. When they did, they told me the first case had run six hours instead of the expected two. As my dad pointed out, the day of my first operation, I must have caused this to happen to other people, so I can't really complain. I was very disappointed on Wednesday afternoon though. Downright miserable in fact.

They told me that the surgery may perhaps possibly be re-scheduled for the next day, but it was too soon to say. The implication was that this was pretty unlikely and I should settle down for another couple of days waiting. After having a good sulk for a while, I decided to try and practise standing up, with the help of the physiotherapy team. I badgered them into it by going on about how miserable I felt, and eventually they took pity on me and said okay.

The reason I wanted to practise standing up was pretty simple. Steve, who I mentioned earlier, had been laid up for five days after his accident. When he first tried to stand up the day after that, he almost passed out. Apparently your body acclimatises to being laid down all the time and your blood pressure gets so low that when you stand up, there's not enough blood in your head any more - and over you go. You don't want to faint with a freshly repaired broken leg, so they try and re-acclimatise you to being upright before they'll let you leave the hospital.

Bear in mind that Steve's fainting fit was after five days, and I'd now been in bed for two weeks and a day, I was starting to worry about how badly I was going to be affected by this problem. I figured a bit of effort now might save me some trauma in a week's time, whenever they finally got around to fixing my leg up and started letting me try walking with crutches.

As it turned out, I was fine - no dizziness at all (although I'll leave you to imagine how pleasant it feels standing up for the first time in a fortnight when the back of your leg is still cut open under the bandages - things settled into new positions in a very disquieting fashion). The physio team seemed quite pleased, and said that I could stay in the chair next to my bed in the day instead of having to be laid up all the time. You have no idea how happy this three foot displacement in my position made me, after a fortnight of the exact same view.

Actually, to be pedantic it wasn't the exact same view - around the third day I swapped positions with Steve, because there was a phone socket near his bed and I wanted to get online. It was only after we'd moved the beds around that I tried hooking up to it and found out that the socket was dead. Oh well. Nonetheless, I'd been in bed for a solid fortnight, and although those who know me will be surprised to hear it, I really wanted to get up for a bit.

So, Wednesday night I demanded a sleeping tablet, which they gave me, and I then totally failed to sleep at all, again. That made about half an hour's sleep in 48 hours, which isn't really the way I like to do things. At 7am they came and washed me and changed my sheets just in case I was going to go to be operated on that morning (no-one had let us know yet, so the nurses were playing it safe). Eventually one of my consultant's team turned up and broke the bad news - the op had been postponed until Saturday now. I said okay, and figured I'd practise the whole 'being upright' thing some more in the meantime - not ideal, but such is life. The tea trolley came around not long after I made this decision, so I asked for some tea for the first time since I got here and started sitting myself up.

Just as the tea was put on my table, the doctor from earlier re-appeared around the edge of my curtains...

"Just out of interest... did you eat or drink anything yet?"
"Not yet..."
"Don't eat or drink anything yet."

...and he was gone again. I left the tea alone and waited.

About fifteen minutes later, he popped up again...

"You didn't eat or drink anything yet?"
"No."
"Don't eat or drink anything yet. I'm on the phone..."

...and he was gone. I waited.

A bit later he re-appears again...

"You're going to theatre."
"Today?"
"Now."
"Brilliant."

...and I did.

That night I was a bit groggy, but a lot more together than after any of the other operations. I slept much better, about six hours sleep, and in the morning I felt pretty good. A team of consultants wandered past early in the morning and told me the skin graft had gone very smoothly, and they had high hopes for its success. They also told me it would be 10 to 14 days before they would remove the dressings and check for sure whether it had taken.

Four days later, my main consultant came around to talk to me and announced that they would strip the dressings off the next day and see if it was going okay. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing, but at least I was going to find out 5 days after the graft instead of 10 or more.

The next day the nurses removed the dressings, which didn't hurt as much as I expected it to. The skin graft looked hideous - there's no pleasant way to describe the mess that is currently the side of my leg. I'm told it will improve with time, but probably never blend in. However, they reckoned the skin graft had been around 90% successful - and they count anything more than 80% as good enough. The small bits that haven't taken can just heal up the way a normal graze would.

The main incision from the original operation had healed nicely, and while my dressings were off anyway, they removed the staples that were holding it closed. This is done with a staple-remover. Which makes sense, but for some reason hadn't occurred to me until they actually did it. Weird sensation.

The incision they closed during the third operation also looked like it was healing very well, and they said those stitches should come out in a few days when they next inspect the skin graft. One of the nurses asked me if I always have such a good healing rate... I had to laugh - I've been notorious for the exact opposite in the past. I imagine the enforced bedrest and the intravenous antibiotics helped though.

So, after they redressed all that mess, I got to sit in bed for another four days, then they came back to reassess the skin graft again. It hadn't got much prettier, but they upgraded their estimation of the take-up to 95% now, so it had really gone pretty well I suppose, despite what it looked like. I told the main consultant about some dodgy 'clunk' noises my bones were making when I moved my leg in certain directions, and he looked a bit pissed off, as though I'd done it on purpose. He came back later and announced that he'd decided that I should have a cast on the leg to help support it until the bones started to fuse back together, at which point the metalwork he'd inserted would be sufficient to continue the job.

The skin graft wasn't healed enough to put a cast over, so I got to lay there for another couple of days before they came to check on it again. This time they must have decided it was good enough, although they didn't bother telling me so, because the next day I got wheeled down to the plaster room to have a cast put on. I was a bit pissed off about not being told what was going on, but they didn't really seem too worried about what I thought. I'd even asked to speak to Mr Wetherill again before the cast went on, as I wanted to know if it was absolutely essential, but he didn't materialise, which I thought was pretty poor.

The plaster room staff also completely failed to listen to me pointing out that there were two exposed stitches on my leg that were supposed to be removed before it was plastered... one of them is now driving me mental by rubbing against the inside of the cast. Oh well.

Once the cast was on, I was wheeled back upstairs and immediately asked a nurse if I could see the physiotherapists, the whole point of the cast being that it would immobilise the break/repair well enough for me to get up and about and out of hospital. The physio team turned up, and I asked them if I could start using the crutches to move about now... they went off to talk to the doctor, and came back to tell me no, I had to stay in bed for another two weeks yet. This news did not fill me with joy... in fact, it filled me with depression and severe irritation in a rapidly swinging see-saw of moods. I thought I was nearly out of the poxy place, and now I had to wait another two weeks??

Fortunately I realised what had gone wrong before I went completely spare. The physio nurse is an oriental girl, with a fairly low standard of English, and has a habit of referring to any type of patient mobility as 'walking', regardless of whether it's unsupported, with crutches, a zimmer frame, or any other method of getting about. I'm betting she rang the doctor and asked if I could try walking, and he obviously said 'no' as my leg isn't going to be weight-bearing for some months yet. I saw the doctor that night and asked him myself if I could start getting about on crutches and he said 'yes, of course'. I told him to put a note to that effect in my file.

The next day I got the physios to recheck my file and hooray, I was allowed to move under my own steam at last. One month and one day after the accident, I finally got to move out of the room I'd been in for all that time without someone pushing me in a wheelchair. I was quite happy about that.

I was even happier when they escorted me to a staircase and told me how to get up and down it, then watched me to do it flawlessly. The reason this made me happy was that once I'd done it, they said I could go home.

Rah.

There was a delay of about four hours while nurses sorted out some letters to my GP, and a variety pack of painkillers for me to take home, but it all got done in the end, and suddenly I was a free man. My dad gave me a lift home, and I hopped up the stairs (as so recently trained) and settled onto my own bed with a big smile on my face.

And I'm still here now, two days later :)

So, now I'm out of hospital, I can concentrate on actually healing up, learning to walk with crutches, and start trying to figure out what I'm going to do for the next year or so. For the next 3 to 6 months I can't put any weight on my right leg at all, and it won't be properly healed for 6 to 12 months. Like I said earlier, due to the way things have been done, it'll probably be the big numbers, not the small ones... so there's a lot of practical stuff to be sorted out in my life now. But at least I'm alive. I've contemplated the alternatives a few times when I've been laying awake at nights, and this could have worked out a lot worse.

Oh yeah, a nurse in A+E asked me a good question on that first night...

"So was this your last motorbike ride?"
"No."
"Good for you mate."

The answer was reflexive to be honest, an answer I'd worked out years ago, before the situation ever actually occured... but I think it's probably right. I've had 8 years of bloody good times on motorbikes, I'm not going to let someone else's mistake scare me into dropping all that pleasure from my life.

Ride safe, ride free.
Denny

Comments

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

good to see you're out. i know i won't be the only one wanting to come visit but if you can fit me in i'd like to come see you. i have this saturday nite free and maybe some time after that. let me know if your up for it. get my number from duranorak and send me yours if u want.

*hugs*

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd already sent you my number... duranorak gave me yours and I sent you a picture message, I think. Will try again...

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

didn't get anything, will keep an eye out on phone. kissycat1000 gave me the number but i lost the piece of paper. silly me.
its good to see u have a fairly positive attitude on stuff and this won't stop u getting back on the bike.

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

I am never, ever, ever, going near a Renault Clio again. Ever.

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

good move, i'm the same. i've been constantly looking out for them since i found this out. i've spotted at least one being driven badly recently.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I know - 78%?!? That's just frightening.

[knirirr.livejournal.com]

They sound very dodgy. However, the music used for the (otherwise crap) advertisement is the title track from Jimmy Smith's album "The Organ Grinders Swing". This is the only good point about that car.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Welcome out to the real world again, glad they finally got you sorted out.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

So glad to chat to you earlier. Sounds like a lot of pain and anguish, with more to come. Best of luck. And I will come and visit at some point *contemplative look*

So.. shall we try to meet up again, say.. first weekend in July 2004..?? ;D

Hrmmm

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

May have to get riding myself by then, to keep an eye on him ;)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

..And of course you'd be MORE than welcome to come along to any such ride that's going on :)

He does kind of make you want to protect him in a not very appropriate way doesn't he? *grin*

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

*grin* Might have to be a bit later than that - I'm scheduled to go "at least a year" before the bone is fully healed, and it needs to be fully healed before I get on a bike again. Then I have to remember how to ride the thing properly, and get over any nerves that I imagine I might have at first...

By the way, don't think I did this to get out of meeting up with you lot in Oxford... I was looking forward to that, honest I was! :)

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

oh u haven't got out of that, the pub have said we can go back anytime. they were told about u so we'll do it again when you're back on the bike, we can wait.

[stuartl.livejournal.com]

So... 17th July 2003, I set off from work, as you do at 17:30 or thereabouts.

July? Or June?

Aaaaaanyway

It's fantastic to hear that you're healing well and although you've got a horrible year coming up health wise I'm ecstatic that you've come out this well. And great news about riding again too.

I'm guessing that your leg shattered on the handlebars as you went over? :(

Are you going to take this to civil court? Do you have any witnesses that'll stand up for you in court? In a civil court you don't have the "beyond reasonable doubt" thing, just a 51% chance like thing. Anything you get can go into a fund which you can use for something constructive (private healthcare if appropriate, getting an FJR etc).

Seriously, I'm really happy that you've been kicked out of hospital and are on the road to recovery, when you're a bit more mobile we'll have to have a social and actually meet :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

June it was, corrected now thanks...

Handlebars is my guess too, judging by the size/shape/position of the dent in my leg...

I've got lawyers on the case, currently they're assembling all the info from me, and they've sent him a fairly aggressive letter that I deeply enjoyed reading my copy of. Hopefully I'll get some dosh to burn on sex/drugs/rock'n'roll/BUPA, whatever seems best at the time...

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

Ended up linked to this from the facebook picture you commented on..

Hopefully I'll get some dosh to burn on sex/drugs/rock'n'roll/BUPA

Heh. Good party? :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that worked out fairly well.

I'd still rather have the leg working, but the party was definitely a good one :)

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

True.

How does the trade off re working leg vs Own House compare?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Flat rather than house, and I'll only own 20% of it. I'd take the working leg over owning the whole thing, anyway.

Offhand I can't think of any material possession that's worth more than my health.

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

When put like that, point.

[sinders.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you've been through a hell of a lot hon... don't overdo it too soon, okay?

Oh, and I'm beginning to get the right training to become an RGN... please don't do this again until I qualify (roughly three years) :P

[flannelcat.livejournal.com]

Good to have you back with us, mate. Let's hope the recovery time is less that we expect and you can get back on soonest.

Huge hugs going out to you,
Dom

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Okay, you hadn't told me about the whole cast changing business. Well I kind of guessed there were going to have been even more horrible bits, but sort of wasn't thinking about them. So *hug* although *hug* anyway.

If you need anything that I can do or want talking crap at, do just say, and in the meantime I will go break some Clio fanbelts for you. (Kidding!)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Good to see you back again. Glad you've survived with sense of humour intact, and recovery on the way.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to let someone else's mistake scare me into dropping all that pleasure from my life.

Good for you!

[lzz.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you're out and will hopefully see you soon! Are you still planning to make it to Cambridge for John's party? Might be able to pick you up in car.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I am planning to get to that if at all possible... a lift would be brilliant.

[aiwendel.livejournal.com]

V glad you're back and sparkling.
hope all the little things sort em selves out soon, and the twat who drove his car into you learns a lesson.
*0ffers hugs*
and fast healing wishes :)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[androktone.livejournal.com]

ooh, yowch! I'm glad you're better.

We live quite close to MK (luton) so if you need anything drop me an email :) (androktone@livejournal.com)

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Glad you're out, and thanks for such an entertaining read :)

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

Just don't go stir-crazy while healing, hmm?

Great you do so well on crutches. I'm not bad with the wheelchair, but I could not cope with crutches at all.

Hope to meet you sometime (maybe in Cambridge). Or you could join the MK broken-legged-biker-gang. Do you know Frag? He's riding again.

Wow, what a story!

[eviltwinemma.livejournal.com]

It's really good to see you're around again and are not completely down in the dumps! *Many Hugs*

[velvetfox.livejournal.com]

I imagine anyone who wants to know will already know most of the details by now

'Cept me. Thanks for posting it.

Take care
S

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

Here via libellum. I feel obliged to apologise on behalf of Clio drivers. Hope you don't mind me commenting, I broke my leg (in far less dramatic circumstances) round about the same time and I remember hearing about your accident as we have a few friends in common. I hope you're making a good recovery. :-)