Broken Dreams by Bill Dodd Read Free Book Online

my feet then I would be okay. One of my mates helped me to sit up, butwhen he let go of my head I felt a burning pain in the back of my neck. Oh boy, I felt sick with pain. So my mates laid me on the ground again. By this time my cousin, Wayne Dodd, had arrived. He rang the ambulance. Half an hour later I was on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, heading towards Mitchell Hospital. When I arrived, the talk seemed to centre on a “spinal unit” ... I had never heard of a spinal unit until that moment: To tell the truth, had I known that my neck was broken I would have been getting ready to die. In the bush I once saw a horse roll over backwards and hit its head on a rail. Its neck was broken and it died. After more discussion, it was decided that I would be transported by ambulance to the Princess Alexandra Hospital, in Brisbane.
    24th September 1983, I screwed up for the last time.

6
    During that 600 kilometre trip to Brisbane in the ambulance I was feeling really sick. I found it was getting harder to breathe—my breathing was getting shorter and quicker. By the time the ambulance reached Toowoomba I had blacked out. We finally arrived at the hospital in Brisbane about two o’clock in the morning.
    When I dived into the river I had knocked myself out and had swallowed a lot of water. The doctor in Brisbane worked on me for over an hour, getting the water out of my lungs and clearing the muck off my chest.
    Later that morning my mother received a phone call that told her she could lose her son. I was unconscious and in a bad way. Luckily for me, it was my fitness that helped to pull me through this little crisis. I was unconscious for three days. When I awoke, I was unsure about what had happened to me and where I was. I saw my mother and my sister Robyn standing there beside my bed. I took one look at them and without even saying“Hello” I asked: “Who won the America’s Cup?”—“Australia,” Robyn replied.—“You little beauty,” I said. Even today, I can’t understand how I could ask such a stupid question, as I have no interest in boat racing and the America’s Cup was no exception. Maybe I had muddled it up with football! It was my eighteenth birthday, but I felt too sick to care. That day I became old enough to drink in a pub, and I didn’t even feel I could be bothered to go for a beer. Something had to be wrong.
    Meanwhile, Peter and my five sisters back in Mitchell were going through hell, waiting by the phone, answering it with caution, praying for good news, not bad. They were so relieved when I pulled through.
    A few days later I was feeling a bit better, and I was moved out of the intensive care ward. As I had picked up an infection called golden staph, I was moved to an isolation ward. Then a few weeks later I was moved again, into the S7 ward. Here I found I was being hand-fed by a nurse. Two days later I found out the reason why.
    Two doctors approached me, Dr Hill and Dr Davies. They had the task of informing me that I had a broken neck. Dr Hill also told me that I would never walk again. I would be confined to a wheelchair, not for a few months, not for a year, but for the rest of my life. Those words rang in my ears for a long time. In all my eighteen years I had never known tears to feel as cold as those that ran down my face. At that moment my reaction to what Dr Hill had told me was “Oh no! I’m better off dead.” At that time I didn’t realise that I would be able to do the things I can do today. Sometimes we tend to think things are really worse than they are.
    Deep down inside my heart, I knew that what Dr Hill had told me was correct, but for the moment I could not accept the idea of being in a wheelchair. I had to get used to the idea of trading my beloved horse Four X for that wheelchair.
    When I broke my neck I lost all feeling and movement in my arms, chest and legs. These parts of my body were numb.