Episode 15 | Patient Story | Guest: Rebecca, patient at LBSM
Please note: This episode contains an honest account of serious physical trauma, a long period of hospitalisation, and the emotional impact of life-changing injury, including difficult thoughts during recovery. We hope Rebecca's story is one that inspires and reassures - but please do take care if any of these topics are close to home.
There are patient stories, and then there are stories like Rebecca’s. Hers begins with a horse, a fall, a field in Spain, and hours alone on the ground unable to move. It passes through six months in a hospital bed, a year in a spinal corset, and two decades of navigating life with the weight of trauma she was never helped to put down. And it arrives, eventually, at a triathlon start line.
In this episode of the London Bridge Sports Medicine podcast, Dr Ajai Seth sits down with Rebecca to hear a story that is, in equal measure, about the remarkable resilience of the body and the quiet, persistent cost of leaving the mind to fend for itself.
The accident
Rebecca was 18 years old, an experienced rider who had grown up with horses and swum competitively for her county. She was preparing to go to university. One afternoon she took a horse out, it spooked, reared, and she fell. The horse went one way. She went the other.
She could not move. She lay where she had fallen – in pain, unable to sit up, unable to call for help – from midday until early evening. The horse found its own way home. Her family went looking.
“It was fear,” she says, describing those hours. “It was getting dark. I thought God knows, animals might come. So many things. It was absolutely fear.” Her father found her, felt the swelling on her back, and drove her to hospital. He was crying. So was she.
Six months in hospital
X-rays showed a fractured thoracic vertebra and significant fluid around the spinal cord. The cord itself had not been severed, but it had gone into shock – the nerves effectively switched off by the trauma. Rebecca could not feel her legs.
Each morning, medical staff would come and test sensation in her legs. Each morning, nothing. Tests, investigations, a constant parade of doctors and nurses. “I felt like an experiment,” she says. The care was good – she moved to a private hospital, the staff were warm and attentive – but the message delivered, day after day, was that she needed to understand the situation. She was 18. She understood.
There were dark periods. “You think: what’s the point of life? Who is going to bother to be near me? What am I going to do?” At some point – she is not precise about when – she made a decision. “One day I snapped out of it. I thought, you know what, there is so much life to be lived. And I think that was what saved me from my own thoughts.”
Around four months in, she felt something. A faint tingling in her legs. Tests confirmed the spinal fluid had reduced. Around five months in, she moved a leg.
“It was fantastic. I thought, oh my God, this is like a miracle. It was so much joy – not only from me, but from my whole family. It was something incredible.” She pauses. “I actually moved a leg. That was life-changing, basically.”
A year in a corset – and life after
Six months in hospital was followed by six months at home, in a rigid spinal corset from her neck to the base of her back. She could not stand without it. Her parents dressed her, walked with her, cared for her daily. When the corset was finally removed, she was terrified.
“I did not want to come out of it. I felt weak. It was part of me – something I thought would keep me straight.” The first summer back was tentative. At a water park with friends, she went down a slide and was seized by fear that she might damage her spine again. That fear – reasonable at the time, persistent for far longer than was warranted – would stay with her for years.
For two years after recovery, she largely stepped away from sport. No gym. No weights. No swimming. “I neglected the sporty life I had always led. It was always on the back of my mind – the fear to do a bad movement and perhaps break it again.” The doctor who discharged her had told her to be very careful: any impact could damage her back. Those words lodged.
Finding a way back through sport
In her mid-thirties, following another period of illness, Rebecca decided she needed discipline – a goal, a structure, a reason to push herself again. Friends were doing Ironman events. She started running marathons. And then, at 36, she signed up for her first Ironman triathlon.
It was not without conflict. The cycling leg brought back the fear most acutely – the possibility of crashing, of landing badly, of the injury repeating. Her parents, who had been with her through everything, were against it. The arguments were real. But the adrenaline, she found, was a powerful counterweight. “When you are in the race, you just go. You enjoy the speed, you enjoy passing other people. The adrenaline makes you forget your fears.”
Except in the moments of exhaustion. During the long hours of an Ironman – when the body is depleted and the mind is left alone with itself – she would sometimes hear the doctors’ voices again. Replay the hospital. Feel the fear. And then, she says, she would click. “I say to myself: it did not happen. It’s not happening. We’re going home. And then just another rush of adrenaline comes through.”
Seeing the spine for the first time
When Rebecca came to LBSM – more than two decades after the accident – Dr Seth arranged an MRI of her spine. She had not seen it since the original injury. Looking at it was difficult. But what she saw was not what she had imagined.
“It was nothing of what I expected. In fact, it was nice to see it.” The spine looked healthy. Discs clear. Spinal cord clear. The old fracture site visible but well healed. Dr Seth told her he would be pleased to have a spine like hers. “It gave me a completely different vision of my injury. It reassured me – you can have a normal life. You should embrace doing more things that you are not doing now, due to a feeling. I wish I had done it earlier.”
The mental health that was missing
Running through every part of Rebecca’s story is a thread that she returns to repeatedly: the absence of psychological support at the time of her injury, and the long shadow that absence has cast.
“Back then, mental health wasn’t as important as it is now. If I had a psychologist, someone who could guide me and organise my thoughts at the time, I could have organised my fears. I would have overcome this a long time ago.” For 19 years, she could not be near a horse. The guilt about her family – who had shared her love of horses and gave them up during all those years out of love and fear for her – has been a quiet, persistent weight.
Two years ago, staying near a stable in Belgium with her husband, she was finally able to approach a horse and touch it. Her parents have since bought a horse again. Recently she rode one in front of them. It took fifteen minutes of shouting and fear before they could relax enough to take photographs.
Sport has been, in her words, a form of self-healing. The hours alone in triathlons allowed her to replay and reprocess things in her own way. But she is honest that it was partial. “There is another aspect where you need professional help. I always thought that sport would heal all the pain. It did heal a part of it. But it’s recognising when you need the support.”
Rebecca’s message
“When anyone is going through uncertainty with any type of illness, they need to find a way to discipline their mind. Because it’s all in our mind. We are the ones creating the barriers. We are the ones creating the fear. Never let those thoughts win. Try to find a routine. Try to engage with others. And the sooner people react to that – and engage with their physios and with whatever tools they’re given – that is key to improvement.”
She is still working on it. Twenty-two years on, there are still exercises she avoids, still moments of fear before she lifts. But she knows the spine is strong. She knows, now, what was always true: the injury healed. What needed more time – and more help – was everything around it.
If you have been affected by any of the topics in this episode – whether that is a physical injury, fear avoidance, or the emotional impact of trauma – the LBSM team is here to help. Getting the right support, physical and psychological, as early as possible makes a meaningful difference.
Get in touch at lbsm.co.uk/booking
Listen to the full episode below ↓
