Once, maybe twice during this time the police visited me. They asked me questions, and I mouthed some answers.

Take me through what happened. Were you on the phone whilst riding your bike? What condition was the bicycle in? Had you had anything to drink? What were you wearing?

Wait. Could this have been my fault? My parents were telling me I needed a lawyer. Okay. Am I guilty? I guess I’ll get a lawyer then. It all happened so fast. What does a lawyer even look like? Don’t guilty people need lawyers? I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re telling me I don’t just tell the truth and it all goes away? I didn’t do this. Did I do this?

After a few more weeks of the same days and the same routines I achieved my goal; the ventilator was turned off for a full 24 hours. I could breathe again. Sort of; I still had the tracheostomy, and so I was breathing through my neck hole still- it was advised to keep it in until I got to Sheffield as we didn’t want to rock the boat and invite something else to go wrong.

34 days after I rolled into ITU in a coma, the glorious day came that I moved on from intensive care. I say glorious, but in reality, a nurse came by and said that I was moving to the high dependency unit and we need to get my things together. Now that I didn’t need the ventilator, I didn’t need to be in intensive care; I would wait in high dependency until a bed at the spinal unit was available. There was no warning, no time or opportunity to say goodbye to the people who had looked after me, who had kept me alive. I was being transported. Washing machine on tour. I wonder if the bricks will taste different where we’re going. The extent of how jarring it was just made me realise how attached I had become to the staff that had not just looked after me, but shared in my distresses, my fears and doubts. They had watched me struggle, but had also watched me progress. They had spent every waking and sleeping minutes with me, 12 hours at a time, the last 44 days; they didn’t feel like jailers, they felt like security. I felt secure.

Nothing made me realise that more than moving on; I had learnt to rely on and put my trust in the staff in ITU. They knew my preferences, they were starting to learn how to brush my teeth properly, and I had developed relationships with them that meant their singular company for 12 hours wasn’t just tolerable; it was wholesome. Hopefully they feel the same way. Now I would have to start again: strange how moving forwards feels like going back.

Anyway, back to HDU. It turns out that HDU is a lot like ITU, but instead of one-to-one nursing it was two-to-one. I was still really well looked after and was getting stronger everyday; I stopped requiring any additional help to breathe; I could merrily breathe through my neck hole all day and all night. I could talk for much longer; I could have whole conversations. What a time to be alive. By this point I was in a holding pattern; I had achieved what I had needed to at the hospital I was in and I had outgrown what it could offer me. I was just waiting for a bed to be available at the spinal unit, a place that I was told could cater for my very specific needs and help return some semblance of life to me.

One Tuesday on HDU it was time for my physiotherapy. We were restricted by time and resources and the fact I was stuck in bed, but we tried to get as much neuro-physio done in that hour as possible; one thing I was determined to not be limited by was my effort. Sometimes Samuel L Jackson was in my ear, and that’s a voice that’s hard to say no to.

“What are you going to do, just lay down and die?”

No Samuel, not today. Put the bricks away. Okay, so when you lie down for a long time your blood pressure control goes south. Literally. Especially with a spinal-cord injury. Your body forgets that when you go upright the blood vessels in your legs and abdomen have to constrict to ensure enough blood keeps moving up to your brain, and the muscles in your legs and abdomen do a good job of helping this process. Well my muscles were on a permanent holiday and were most definitely not coming back to work and the blood vessels had been chilling out for the last four weeks and weren’t particularly quick to get back to grafting either. I found this out the hard way. My physio manoeuvred me and sat me up on the edge of the bed, stabilising my flaccid torso from behind. I was still very tired and very weak, the whole process feeling like an out of body experience; I was being moved around and I couldn’t feel it but everything looked the same; my legs appeared to still be attached, as were my arms, but apparently a man was holding my back to prevent me from rearranging my teeth on the floor but I couldn’t feel him at all. My neck was so weak my head felt like a bowling ball, my complete lack of balance made it hard not to panic and instinctively I wanted to reach out a hand to steady myself. Worse than that, the blood was draining out of my head. Have you ever stood up too fast and felt that lightheaded feeling? The lightheadedness came on fast and wasn’t letting up; it kept going and my ears were ringing and pinpricks of light were jumping in my eyes and the corners of my vision were drawing in and I was trying to speak and-

“Ed are you okay?”

I was lying back down in bed. Concerned faces were looking down at me. I must have come close to passing out. If weakness is a state of mind then that’s the state my mind was in. The washing machine got some fresh bricks and ran on spin for a good few nights after that.

I had one final visit from speech and language therapy; one final test. I had to eat a biscuit.

I’m not saying that I had biscuits thrown at me as some sort of alternative therapy, although at that time eating biscuits was nowhere close to the most extreme thing I would have done to try and escape my injury. But apparently biscuits are at the top of the “hard to eat” hierarchy; if you can eat biscuit, you can eat anything. I underwent the biscuit eating ceremony and several swallows later I survived unscathed; I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted! I was a man who’d been sustained on (very nutritious) brown sludge through a tube for six weeks with the occasional Twister as respite; I had been dreaming of my taste bud emancipation for a long time.

I had my birthday in HDU. I’m not going to tell you where it ranks on the all-time list but it’s definitively out of the top 10. I must have received more cards than I ever had before or since. I think it gave me a degree of approachability and everyone else an opportunity to communicate, to tell me how they felt. In that respect it was beautiful. I had been craving a burger for weeks, and so that was the first proper meal that I had after my injury. I dived in at the deep end. I deserved it. We had to cut it up into tiny pieces so I could eat; much like everything else, my swallowing muscles were so weak even the basics had to be relearned. I managed maybe a quarter of it before I was full; my stomach was in no way used to or ready for normality yet. I guess I wasn’t either. I wish I could tell you it was a triumph but all I remember is disappointment and growing embarrassment as bits of food were inevitably dropped on me. Eating lying down is hard. My girlfriend got me a cake that was part ice cream, so it would be easy for me to swallow. We read cards and pinned them to a board. She told me she still loved me. We cried. It is what it is.

The following day I paid for that burger with some nasty abdominal cramping, but I would do it all over again if I could; sometimes you just have to look life in the face and say fuck you.

A few days after that I found out that there was a bed for me at Sheffield and I would be moving on again. I hadn’t had time to get settled and so there was less upheaval on the ward and in my heart; most of my stuff was still in plastic bags. I don’t remember being afraid; I just remember being hopeful that I could salvage myself in this new place.

On one of my final evenings my nurse in the day came back in the evening. We had discovered our mutual love for board games and he had offered to come back and bring a game to play with me after his shift had finished. If you’re reading this, I didn’t forget. It was very kind of you.