Beyond Barriers: How being stuck on bedrest changes how I travel

It was the summer of 2004, and the first anniversary of my spinal cord injury was fast approaching. I was successfully, albeit slowly, adapting to my new life as a permanent wheelchair user. Wheelies and transfers no longer terrified me, nor did conducting either of these clumsy moves in public.

So, one hot summer afternoon, I rolled down to a local pub to join some university friends in the garden. On arrival, I clicked on my brakes and moved out of my wheelchair onto a wooden bench as smoothly as possible. This simple manoeuvre would prove to be almost as catastrophic as the car crash that had broken my back and left me paralysed 11 months earlier.

Unbeknownst to me, a splinter from the bench had pierced my skin and embedded itself deep in the tissue of my glute. The foreign body developed into an abscess, and my fever spiked a week later. I was rushed to hospital. When I woke up from a general anaesthetic, there was a gaping hole in my bum cheek, where the abscess had been removed, like an ice cream scoop.

For the wound to heal, I was not able to sit on it. My wheelchair was strictly out of bounds. The only position I would be permitted to maintain was lying on my stomach, relieving all pressure from the wound. For how long? The answer was unknown.

When a setback like this occurs, at first, you digest the prognosis with stoicism. In my case, I approached bedrest as if it was a marathon: steadily at first, calmly whiling away the days from my prone position at my parent’s home, watching television, reading adventure travel books, painting and taking phone calls with friends.

But after three months of being confined to my bed, the walls of my room began to close in. At six months, I was near my wit’s end, but I held on to hope that soon the wound would heal and I would be able to sit up, head out into the world again and resume my life. But the consultant plastic surgeon told me the wound hadn’t healed correctly. It had to be reopened. My sentence started again. In the end, it would take another three years before the world and I would be reunited.