6th April 2009 – the day that changed my life

Bag was packed, bottles were full, tyres pumped, helmet on and I was off to get an extra hour or two’s training in with the Smith Drift before work. We met up and chatted away about the racing from the weekend, I had raced the Somerset RC spring crits and the Tom Hawkins RR so still had heavy legs but felt good as my form was improving and I’d moved up to third category.
 We took a rolling route through Ivybridge and over the moors then towards my office at Burrator Reservoir. JJ departed back home at Wotter and I carried on to do a few laps around the reservoir before work.

 2 hours training in the tank and it wasn’t even 8am, ideal I thought, “that just means I can cycle straight home after work!” Or so I thought. The days work passed as usual and weather worsened. Finally at 1630 I geared myself up for the short blast home which shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes, little did I know that it would take me 2 months to get back through the front door.
 My last memories of the journey home were turning off the roundabout at Yelverton and the horrendous rain as I pedalled along the start of the Tavistock road.  The next memories are of lying face up in the middle of the road soaking wet and shivering madly while green blobs moved around me in circles prodding and probing me. This was not an alien abduction; I’d been wiped off my bike. I still have no idea how it happened and to be honest I don’t really care, but I had collided head first at about 30mph into the back of a stationary trailer and vehicle which had pulled up by the side of the road.

 My bike had exploded on impact twisting my frame and leaving only a handful of useable parts, my helmet was flat as a pan cake and had the mesh imprint of the trailer embedded into it. I was rushed to hospital and although I don’t remember being able to see anything I can remember giving the paramedic my home address and phone number, I also remember having the most severe pain in my back that you can imagine, it was like an elephant standing on my back wearing a stiletto heel.

 I awoke in the emergency room with doctors and nurses cutting my clothes off and i started to gain a bit of consciousness / rational thought and began to realise that I was in a bad way, the doctors told me that I had broken my back severely shattering 5 vertebrae and had broken 8 of my ribs and that meant I had to remain strapped to the spinal board until the consultant could confirm my course of treatment. Luckily I had avoided any spinal cord damage by the narrowest of margins, finding out later that this was one of the worst breaks the consultant had seen without any cord damage.

 Due to my young age the consultant deemed that the best course of action was 2 months of bed rest remaining horizontal in bed and allowing the vertebrae to heal themselves rather than going through a very complex surgery which could leave me with long term back pain if it wasn’t aligned quite right. The only downside of this was that there was a possibility that after two months bed rest I may still stand up and find the breaks hadn’t healed properly and then require surgery after all.
 I agreed to the bed rest and looking back now I am so lucky that I had this option and such a wonderful consultant.
 I was taken to Moorgate ward in Derriford hospital where I spent the next two days in sheer agony, I was taking as much morphine as they would give me and finally after some sickness and adjustment the morphine started to fully control the pain and the next few weeks passed in a blur of weird dreams, getting used to the routine of crapping the bed and having someone wipe my ass. I remember friends visiting me and bringing me gifts such as Nuts magazine (thanks Jude), grapes, computers, dvd’s and a really lovely picture that Tom Cann had framed for me of me in the Tom Hawkins RR.

 It was in about my third or fourth week on the ward when things really started to get hard, I had stopped taking morphine and had reduced by intake of tramadol, another opiate based drug which later on was very hard to wean myself off of. This meant that the side effects were bad migraines that lasted all day and most of the night, I think I had five of these episodes and they really set me back leaving me hooked up to drips and back on high doses of morphine again.
 A good boost for me but maybe not for Tom Cann was his admission into the hospital after he was involved in a pile up at Ilton, leaving him battered and bruised with broken ribs, we talked about the Giro and cycling in general which was great and really help to break the monotony of day time TV. Another good boost was the arrival of the weirdest motivational CD I’ve ever listened to called the Ultimate Cyclist. This CD sort of send you into a trance while an Aussie implants your brain with motivational messages, I normally awoke feeling 100% better but slightly violated, ask JJ for a loan of this its very good!
 Being on a neurological ward was also a very weird place to be; now when I think about it I saw some of the weirdest shit happen. One particular highlight /lowlight was waking up in the middle of the night being straddled by what looked to be a Zombie, it was in fact a neurological patient who had escaped the nurses and had half her hair shaved off and a stapled scar running around her head like she had had a lobotomy! After that I always slept with my beds railings up and the panic button close by.

 Two months was finally up and I was gradually being sat back upright so I could have my standing x ray to check my alignment, which turned out to be good and meant I could go home that very same day. Learning to walk again was unbelievable I had lost all of my muscle mass and was now under 59kg, I struggled to climb the stairs in the hospital and only just managed to walk down the ward without falling over. The boxes were ticked and I was packed off back home with a bag full of drugs and laxatives. Outside the hospital I was amazed how much all the trees had grown since going in, birds were singing, butterflies everywhere and people busily walking. My room on the ward faced a solid brick wall so this was a great change of scenery. I felt shell shocked and completely overwhelmed, I had just spent the last two months looking at a ceiling being pumped full of drugs and now I was back home sat on my bed like nothing had ever happened, no scars, no clear reason why all this had happened. I broke down and cried for hours, just so glad to be home!

 My Physio consisted of basic exercises involving a Swiss ball and stretches to try and elongate my muscles again. I also had heavy duty massage twice a week to try and get some flexibility back into my spine. Everything was such hard work, I could barely walk to the toilet and back without being wrecked, so I started to set myself goals, the first was to walk around my housing estate, the second was to walk to the hospital for physio, then the third was to climb a mountain in Ireland which I’d always wanted to climb since being a kid. I managed all of these without too much of a problem and started to think about getting back on the bike. First I span my legs for 10-20mins and did this a few times a week, I was still finding the pain in my back unbearable at times and the cycling position was the worst thing for it. I struggled to make my self a sandwich or make a cup of tea without having to lie down to rest my back so holding this position was agony.
 A trip to Turkey unlocked the problem of back pain, I swam every day in the sea for two weeks and since then I’ve never had the same pain as those first few months out of hospital. Those two weeks completely transformed my ability to work and to cycle. So when I got back I started to half heartedly cycle again on the turbo and once I had enough endurance I set off for my first cycle on the road making sure that I took the route past where my accident happened, I spat at the spot where I had laid six months previously to show the accident hadn’t affected me, but it really had, the desire to cycle had gone, I couldn’t think of anything worst than entering a race and being surrounded by wobbly fourth cats who couldn’t cycle in a straight line. I put my bike back in the shed and I only touched it a handful of times for the rest of the year.

 I kept myself fit through running, swimming and bits of gym work until eventually the anniversary of my accident came round and that’s when I realised that something had completely changed and I just wasn’t happy. My job had changed from being a ranger outside on beautiful Dartmoor to being stuck in a shitty office miles away from home in front of a computer, I wasn’t cycling, I wasn’t talking to my mates and I wasn’t enjoying life like I had promised myself I would in hospital.
 So I bought a mountain bike and I fixed up my road bike and started to train again, firstly with friends but they were already in the racing season and busy with races every weekend so began training by myself. I set a starting goal of cycling the North Coast of Ireland in a day which I did and since then I’ve just been chopping and changing between mountain biking and my road bike trying to keep a base of fitness. Now the 2010 racing season is winding down and friends are starting to think about their winter training  again, I’m getting more and more excited as I can make a fresh start, make my comeback with a bit of company for the 2011 season. So i’ve drawn up my training plan, set my goals and soon I want to be back on the road tearing it up as best I can, hopefully, realising the potential I had before my accident. I know the accident has increased my hunger for success and will drive me more than ever.

I’ll be using Rutrainingtoday to log my return to racing.

See you on the Road. Matt.