Matterhorned: the home phase of my recovery

The next phase: Recovering at home

After 12 weeks in hospital, I was mentally ready to be back at home.

Living in a small shared ward in a 3m by 3m box segregated by curtains, I slowly realised that my life had become something resembling a nightmare: frustrating predictable; almost completely reliant on other people and not physical enough.

The contraption that would allow me to regrow 6 centimetres of tibia

The setbacks plaguing my recovery:

The doctors had suspected something was going on when my skin hadn’t healed properly when some minor stitches were taken out – and in fact, got worse. The skin wasn’t getting good blood supply to it (already in a low perfusion area such as the shin) and now had started showing signs of infection and decay, rather than positive signs of healing that it should’ve been demonstrating.

This was worrying to the medical team looking after me, so I was referred to a plastic surgeon (one who deals with skin) and a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon (one who deals with bones) to check out the wound sight. Both took a look at the leg and decided another look would be required in a week’s time to assess it again. The week came around and both saw it again, deciding on the spot that the pin would have to come out and either be replaced with another pin or an external frame dependant out what was happening with the bone fragments.

A few days later, I went in for my fourth operation under general anaesthetic and woke up with a large external metal frame fitted to the injured leg. This allowed the surgeons to remove six centimetres of Tibia. The frame would be replaced with a ‘Taylor Spatial frame’ (a kind of external fixator to allow broken bones to rejoin) after a fifth operation under general anaesthetic – something I recognised from friends in the military who had been blown up by IEDs whilst serving overseas.

The change of narrative

My narrative had changed beyond my control.  It was now: ‘Chris had a bad injury whilst on a mountain recently and is currently recovering in hospital’, which was not helping me feel like I was moving forward.

I didn’t need forlorn people visiting me with grapes - I needed tasks to get my teeth into, to feel like I had ownership over my time. Suddenly, I had many free hours of time on my hand and no immediate sources of inspiration.

I knew I had a fantastic team of doctors and nurses looking after me and was lucky to have them, however, was yearning to feel less like a victim and more in control of my day-to-day life again.

Becoming a vampire

When you’re closely managing your mood, you become a vampire living off people’s positive energy.

This sadly makes you have to become more selective of who you talk to or hangout with as you’re absorbing their positivity to keep you going.

But it’s not something you can share with other people very easily, as they assume that you’re being rude or dealing with the injury badly. So, you keep it to yourself and find excuses as to why you can’t always talk to them and reschedule when you’re feeling in a much better mood.

In my darkest hours, I had to resist the urge to tell people directly that I needed their warmth instead of them bringing their own dark times. I still felt emotionally numb after the accident and not my usual upbeat self.

Thankfully, my closest friends were able to become my collective social intelligence when my own started to abandon me. I’d write my thoughts down into an article and send them to a select group who had spare capacity to soften my words up and add the eloquence to make them feel less raw. In my history of visiting friends in hospital, this was never something I’d been asked to do yet resolved to offer it in the future.

Finding new ways to increase my self-esteem

The trouble with being reliant on others all the time, is that it undermines your self-confidence and makes you feel too much like a victim.

I had to get realistic with my new life where I couldn’t t do the things that made me happy. When life became too much of a challenge, I’d remedy it with a nice trail run, an hour-long Brazilian Jiu Jitsu session or a sea swim. Now with the leg frame fitted and needing to be kept as clean as possible – these weren’t options available to me for at least another 12 months.

Despite a ruptured ACL in my mid-twenties, I’d never broken a bone before – let alone spent anytime more than a few days on crutches.  This kind of immobility was a new kind of challenge for me to face, to stay emotionally strong and mentally active when it felt like the injury had become my master.

Viewing habits changed

Now feeling somewhat devoid of a morale reserve, I found that my media consumption habits changed almost overnight. I no longer had appetite for watching sad programmes but only wanted to watch something positive. I had to seek people’s recommendations for documentaries to watch that would inspire or make me think.

Stairs became a nemesis

Recovering from antibiotics at home presented a new kind of problem; getting upstairs now required more dynamic strength than I had currently had readily available.

With my body still fighting the bone infection trying to bring down the infection markers to a permissible level, the IV (later oral) antibiotics would leave me feeling exhausted each day. Getting up a set of stairs would take all my focus and power to get up – sometimes leaving me out of breath.

Swearing at the wheelchair

On a blustery Saturday morning in December almost 3 months after the accident, my girlfriend and I set me the goal of getting to my favourite London café. A task requiring me to self-propel 400m along uneven pavement on my wheelchair and then crossing the road on crutches – made worse by inconsistently gusty wind and rain to quickly chill me. Having something to focus on gave me passion I gripped it with both hands and refused to let it go.

Negotiating the uneven London streets became a new challenge, and one that I didn’t want to let get the better of me. Despite it rising and dropping for a few metres and involved using the crutches to cross a road – I put all my energy and focus into it – which at times, manifested in me focusing my frustration on the very things that helping me regain my independence; the wheelchair.

One of the front wheels had become bent and meant that steering was hugely more difficult. However, it would allow me to focus my frustration and personalise the pain I was going through into something which I could seemingly control (by repairing the wheel at some point).