Grant You'll Never Walk

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-909245-70-9
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

When Andy Grant's eyes blinked open from a 10-day coma in February 2009 he was alone in a hospital bed in Birmingham. He had a broken sternum, two broken legs, a broken elbow and shrapnel lodged in both forearms. He had a severed femoral artery, while sustaining nerve damage to his hands and feet as well as facial injuries. He had been blown up during a routine foot patrol in Afghanistan. Within days of coming to his senses, a doctor told Andy that because of the blast he would no longer be able to have children. You'll Never Walk is his story. This is the tale of a Scouser who had to cope with losing his mum at the tender age of 12. The story of how a dream career in the Royal Marines descended into nightmare at the hands of the Taliban. The painstaking account of how he grew back six centimetres of shattered bone in his leg and learned to walk again. However, Andy wanted to run and push himself to the very edge of his limits and so he made a colossal decision. Against doctor's advice and pleas from his father, he chose to have his leg amputated. The operation was a success, although there was a minor twist. Where once Andy's treasured Liverpool FC tattoo had carried the message 'You'll Never Walk Alone', surgery to create a stump removed a key word from the slogan. The scars of his amputation had been decorated with an ominous new motto, which read 'You'll Never Walk...' Andy would walk again - he would do much more than that. Armed with a running blade he learned to run and play football, scaled mountains in South America and Italy and claimed two gold medals at Prince Harry's Invictus Games. Through public speaking he brought hope to people right across the country. In 2016, he set his sights on a 10k below- the-knee-amputee world-record and completed the run in an unprecedented 37 minutes 17 seconds. And, most preciously of all, after every obstacle placed in his path, Andy became a father to a little girl.

Born in Liverpool, Andy Grant joined the Royal Marines aged 17. Three years later in February 2009, he was blown up during a foot patrol in Sangin, Helmand Province. He is an ambassador for charities such as Help for Heroes and School of Hard Knocks. In September 2016, he was honoured with the Outstanding Achievement prize at the Pride of Liverpool Awards. Andy is the subject of the 2017 ITV documentary Paragon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grant, Andy

Leseproben

Prologue

IT FELT LIKE BEING IN ONE OF THOSE GRIM TV ADVERTS WHERE THE background noise has faded and the poor fella on the screen who’s just been given some awful news has turned a ghostly shade of white. From nowhere a sensation was sloshing up from the pit of my stomach, making me want to spew. I was boiling hot, freezing cold, dizzy with prickles dancing across my forehead. Then a figure came into focus on the other side of the bar and the suffocating sensations retreated. I’d been staring into space for ten seconds. Maybe more. But then the sounds and smells of our hotel restaurant began to flood back. Glasses clinked and the backing track of hushed conversation filled my ears. The smell of lager soaking into oak mingled with that of dry-roasted peanuts and cheese and onion crisps and cheap perfume. I fumbled in the pocket of my jeans, before drawing out a crumpled £10 note to hand to the barman. Gripping the two overpriced pints I’d just paid for, I mumbled ‘keep the change’ and slid one across the bar so it was ready and waiting for when my dad returned from his ciggie. He’d always preferred to stand at the bar, like fellas from a certain generation do. But since they’d taken the cage off my right leg I’d struggled to stand there with him. He shuffled in from the late November cold, rubbing his hands together, weaving between tables and stools. We toasted our pints and he turned to survey the room while I took a moment to digest what had been messing with my mind just then at the bar. What I really couldn’t bear to tell my dad was that somewhere between me ordering our bevvies and the barman placing them down onto the drainer tray, the full scale of what we were about to go through hit me harder than a wet footy on a rainy school yard. What I couldn’t find the courage to tell him was this: that while he was outside lunging the last of his ciggie, I realised that this would be the last time that he and I would share a pint together and I’d have both of my legs. The next morning they were going to cut one of them off and my life would never be the same. In the hotel bathroom later that night white toothpaste trickled down my chin as I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I was in a trance again with only the cool tingle of tiles chilling my left foot for company. ‘This will be the last time you brush your teeth on two feet,’ I told myself. The next morning they were going to pump anaesthetic into me until I drifted away. Then an old friend would amputate my right leg. How had it come to this? How long have you got?

A year earlier, in 2009, I’d been blown away, launched into the pitch-black sky and left for dead by an improvised explosive device while on a tour of duty with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan. The blast left me with 27 different injuries. Only the genius of my fellow Marines and medics, in the midst of all the blood, mud and tears, meant that my right leg was treated at the scene with a tourniquet to prevent me from bleeding out. When I returned to England, the doctors had a proposal for how to save the injured leg; by growing back six centimetres of missing bone. I was fitted with a special cage and each day I turned screws attached to its frame so that the missing tibia and fibula could remerge. I did it for fourteen months. The therapy worked. Sort of. I grew back the bone destroyed by the blast, but severe damage to the nerves meant that while I was able to learn to walk with crutches, then a walking stick and then on my own two feet, I could never be that young Marine again, playing football with my mates, running marathons in my spare time, standing at the bar with my dad and having a pint. At the rehabilitation centre in Surrey, amputees from the armed services were flourishing all around me while I shuffled along like an old fella. Some of them were playing footy with prosthetic legs and learning to ski with only one limb. I wanted that so badly it made me ache every minute of the day and so I decided, against advice from doctors and my dad’s pleas, to amputate the leg and open up a lifetime of fresh opportunities and challenges.

And so there I was, just shy of two years later, perched on the corner of my double bed at our IBIS Hotel in Plymouth, preparing to swing around and carry out that most simple and familiar of tasks. To draw back the covers and climb into bed. Only on that particular night, it would be the last time I’d do so with both of my legs. The next morning I was all kinds of emotions – nerves, fear, excitement, dread, worry. We drove through the Plymouth streets and everything blurred out of focus. All I could concentrate on was fine details – a platinum-grey door lock, the time in fuzzy red digits wavering on the dashboard clock, tiny flecks of dirt spattered across the windscreen. My dad was talking to me and I was responding half-arsed, the words tripping off my tongue. All I could think about was that operating table. Was I making a catastrophic mistake? No one had forced me to amputate the leg. They had told me to put up with it and be thankful I could walk; be grateful that I had two legs. They wanted me to plod along through life, nervous about the next flight of stairs. But I was desperate for more, and so it was my decision to lose the limb; a leg that for 22 years had carried me through life until that horrendous day on the other side of the planet when everything changed.

I was reading Hello magazine. Well, I was looking at the pictures. The surgery waiting room was quiet and I was double-wrapped by arse-less gowns – hospital dresses which only cover the front of your body to allow them easy access when they come to carve you open. They give you two of these, so when you’re sat there looking over magazines next to a dozen fellow patients, your bits aren’t on display. After the blast, I’d had 30 different operations at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Silhouetted figures would slide into my room throughout the night to take my blood. I’d wake up to their hushed tones and feel their needles penetrating my skin and then I’d drift away again. And yet there I was in Plymouth – feeling sharp and healthy save for a mild, familiar throb in my right leg. The previous night I’d sunk a few pints with my dad and darted off for an early one, and then the following morning I’d strolled in through the front door of the surgery with a Nike bag over my shoulder. I looked around at the rest of the people sharing the waiting room, some carrying off their double-wrapped arseless-gowns better than others and wondered what they were there for. The Doc, the man who was about to amputate my right leg, specialised in anything from your belly down – gall bladder, circumcisions, hernias – you name it. Most of my fellow patients were probably there for the snip, I thought. And they probably thought the same about me.

‘Andy, do you want to follow?’ called out a voice. I floated across the rubbery floor towards a doorway that would transport me to my fate. Side-by-side, my dad and I edged down the narrow corridor. These are my final steps, I thought. My heart hammered at my rib cage. At a crossroads in the hallway the guy who had been escorting us told my dad to leave. He would have to go and wait in the hospital café along with all the other tortured souls, trapped in a cruel limbo. I looked him square in the face and gave him a hug, squeezing him tight. I told him that I loved him.

‘See you in a few hours, yeah?’ I said. He gave me a rueful nod and drifted off in the direction we’d come.

‘Fuck me – this is real,’ I thought to myself. Inside the anaesthetist’s lair, with its dim lights and grim grey padded walls, they laid me down to gaze at the ceiling. There were five people shifting around in there and one of them was trying to ease my nerves, but hearing his words was hard. They placed a thin blanket over me and wedged a cannula into my hand. Then the Doc appeared, grinning gently, his slender black eyebrows arched upwards towards a tightly cropped clump of jet-black hair. I’d met the Doc long before the explosion in Afghanistan. He’d seen it all. He was active during the Iran-Iraq conflict which raged throughout the 1980s, and then the First Gulf War between coalition armies and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When the miserable conflicts in Yugoslavia broke out, the Doc was on the scene with his broad smile, soothing approach and unrivalled surgical skills to try and stem the flow of horror. When they sent me to Umm Qasr in Iraq he was heading out to Basra, and we met at a training camp in Portsmouth. So when I decided to have my leg amputated after the explosion in Afghanistan, he was the first person I called.

‘I thought I might be hearing from you, Scouse…’ he laughed down the phone. The Doc, real name Anthony Lambert, had fellowships and masters and diplomas and knowledge coming out of his arse – but more important than that as far as I was concerned, he was my good mate. A man I’d grown to love and respect.

‘Do you want to see your leg for one last time?’ he asked, gripping the bottom of the blanket. My eyes filled with tears almost instantly and a lump the size of a tennis ball lodged in my throat. The Doc drew back the sheet and I saw my foot appear at the bottom of the bed. The flesh was tender and swollen, and my toes were rigid and frozen. ‘I cannot wait to get rid of you,’ I thought. I felt nerves throb through me. I felt guilty for my dad and everything I’d put him through. I thought about...