Episode 3 | Patient Story | Guest: Annie, patient at LBSM
This episode contains references to bereavement and serious trauma. Please take care if any of these topics are close to home.
Annie is a health advisor with a master’s in public health nutrition and a degree in sports nutrition. She loves food, she loves people, and she has a warmth and frankness about her that makes it easy to forget, at first, just how much she has been through.
She came to LBSM in her late twenties with hip pain – a familiar kind of ache she had been carrying since she was sixteen. The story behind it is not a familiar one.
The accident
Annie was sixteen, partway through her first year of college, returning from a skiing holiday in February. The car crash happened near London. Three people died. Two survived. Annie was one of them. Her father was not.
Her injuries were extensive: a fractured left acetabulum (the hip socket), a fractured neck at the C7 vertebra, a shoulder impingement, and a broken nose. She was admitted to hospital in London, transferred to St George’s in Tooting for specialist hip care, and remained there for approximately a month.
Memory from that period, she says, is fragmentary. “It’s hard to really separate what I was told happened to me or what I remember being told happened to me.” There are scattered impressions – not liking the hospital food despite normally loving it, random moments of clarity amid the blur. What does come through clearly is the quality of care she received. “They were amazing – really amazing,” she says of the team at St George’s. “I don’t remember anything that wasn’t.”
The surgery
Her leg was placed in traction at the first hospital to prevent the fracture from healing in the wrong position. At St George’s, the hip surgeon inserted plates and screws to stabilise the acetabulum. A cervical fracture at C7, initially thought to require a halo brace, was managed with a foam collar instead – because the enforced bedrest for her hip meant she could rest her neck at the same time.
She had two surgeries during that initial admission. Several years later, a third: one of the screws had been sitting fractionally close to the psoas tendon – the hip flexor that runs over the front of the hip joint – causing pain. Once removed, the symptoms resolved.
On the decision to operate: “It was more important for the surgery to be done. I was like, well, let’s just get me better. It’s not something you really have a choice about.” There is something quietly remarkable about that – a sixteen-year-old, in the middle of the worst experience of her life, choosing simply to trust the people around her.
Coming home
Leaving hospital meant two months on crutches, largely confined to bed, still in a neck brace, still on significant pain medication. She had missed the rest of her first year of college. She would have to start again in September – a year behind her friends, who were now moving into their second year while she was beginning her first.
And alongside all of that: grief. Her father had been in the same car. Her mother, who had been present throughout her hospitalisation, was navigating her own loss while trying to be there for her daughter. “Family was really, really important,” Annie says. “But my mum was going through trauma as well.”
The reckoning came slowly. “Everything hits for a day and then you sort of blank it out a little bit again. And then feel all right. And a bit chirpy. And then next week it might be a week of being like, oh god, this is actually happening to me and this is now my life.” It took, she estimates, around ten years before she could speak about it without becoming overwhelmed. “Now it’s more of a factual thing. But for many years I was angry and sad and didn’t really know when the emotion would come out at all.”
The support that made the difference
Annie tried multiple forms of therapy over the years following the accident – CBT, EMDR (the sound-based bilateral stimulation she describes as a beep moving between ears, helping to process stuck memories), and others. Not all of them worked. She kept looking until she found what did.
“I don’t know everything. Even at 16 I was like, I don’t know how to fix this. I can’t do this on my own.” That openness to help, she reflects, was probably one of the most important factors in how things turned out. It was not always easy – there were days she refused to get out of bed, didn’t want to speak to anyone, and needed her mother to coax her back out. But the willingness to try was consistently there.
“If I was to tell anybody anything – whether it’s accidents, grief, or just day-to-day general life – I would always say: it’s totally okay to ask for help. Because if I hadn’t, I definitely would be a different person today.”
Her friends, too, were a constant. A group she had known since infant school stayed close, even as she fell a year behind them at college and they moved on to university before she did. “I did feel some jealousy, some anger, some sadness. But they kept me up with everything they were doing.” The connections, it seems, held.
Living with the hip through her twenties
After the initial rehabilitation and physiotherapy, Annie’s hip largely faded into the background of her life. Not gone – never quite gone – but manageable. She always knew it was there: stairs could be creaky, long walks were trickier, running was simply not an option, and cold weather made itself known through a stiffness she could feel before she checked the temperature outside.
There were harder days too. “Mid to early 20s, there were definite points where it’s been super painful. Getting out of bed is hard to do when it feels so cold that you’ve got to get a hot water bottle on your hip to try and make it move a bit better.” But she accepted it. “I’m pretty lucky to be walking. I’m pretty lucky to be alive. I’ve got hips that are getting me around.”
The physiotherapy and strengthening work she had done in her teens and early adulthood had gradually dropped away – not through neglect exactly, but through life. University, friends, the ordinary momentum of being young. “I thought, well, I’m young, it’s fine.”
What brought her to clinic
By her late twenties, the hip had gradually worsened. Not dramatically – but enough. Approaching thirty, something shifted in how she wanted to think about her body and its future.
“I don’t want to be thinking there’s something that I could have done to make it stronger, to make it better as I go forward in my life. I’d quite like to start my 30s off with the best chance to keep my hip functioning.”
Dr Seth notes this is a pattern he sees regularly – patients presenting at the turn of a decade with a desire to address something they have been living around rather than with. It is, he says, a completely rational response to a new chapter.
A repeat scan of the hip showed the joint itself in good condition – good surfaces, good coverage, a testament to the quality of the original surgical repair. But it also showed what years of adapting around an injury inevitably produces: muscle weakness in certain areas, compensatory movement patterns, a body that had been quietly reorganising itself around a problem rather than addressing it directly.
“Trauma doesn’t just affect bones,” Dr Seth explains. “It affects the way muscles support the joints, the way your muscles react, the strength of the muscles.” A structured, adapted strength and conditioning programme – targeted at the specific deficits that had developed – was the recommendation.
What Annie would tell anyone going through something similar
“Take support where you can get it. Try things that you didn’t know existed or that you didn’t think were for you. Asking for help is totally okay.”
“If you’ve had a traumatic experience, it’s okay to feel rubbish. Give yourself lots of time to get used to the adaptations and the different emotions. That’s totally fine. But in the middle of it, whenever is okay – try and see just the tiny little positive things if you can. Notice certain things. Be grateful for certain things. Try to move through the emotion.”
It has been fourteen years since the crash. Annie is in her flat, approaching thirty with a sense of purpose rather than dread, and finally doing the work her hip has needed for a long time. She is, by any measure, exactly what Dr Seth calls her in the introduction to this episode: an amazingly positive person.
If you have been affected by anything in this episode – whether that is physical trauma, grief, or the emotional impact of serious injury – the LBSM team is here to help. Having the right support around you, physical and psychological, makes a significant difference at every stage of recovery.
Get in touch at lbsm.co.uk/booking
Listen to the full episode below ↓
