Imagine your friend survives a catastrophic accident. What do you do? This is what I learned
Wwhat is the best way to support a friend who has suffered a life-shattering, traumatic accident? I had no idea when my friend Martha was in a catastrophic car accident 20 years ago, breaking 26 bones, suffering a stroke, and sustaining severe internal injuries. It was unclear whether she would survive, or if she did, how drastically her life would be limited by her injuries.
None of her friends knew how to deal with the situation. For the first few weeks, we just struggled. When I visited her a few days after she left intensive care, I was shocked to see that she looked completely normal, a smiling woman, except that she was lying horizontally and could not move. That afternoon, I had done most things wrong. In a panic, I launched into a long story about a friend of a friend who had broken her spine and eventually recovered – but I didn’t get to the happy ending because a nurse interrupted me to tell me to stop talking about depressing things. Martha was thirsty, but her arms didn’t work, so I held a glass with a straw to her mouth and ended up spilling water over her.
Another friend bought her beautiful pink silk pyjamas, refusing to accept that the severity of the crash meant she would be wearing nothing but hospital gowns for the next year. Another sent a large ball of yarn and chunky knitting needles, hoping the activity would get her hands working again and thought she might like to learn to knit (she didn’t).
Others had it better. In the first few weeks, two friends took turns sleeping on the floor next to her hospital bed, so that when she woke up in the night feeling terrified, she had someone to talk to. People made hanging mobiles of pictures to hang from the ceiling of her room and brought her food that tasted better than hospital food. One very kind person sent her a postcard every day to say she was in the hospital—a period that lasted almost two years.
As friends, we were hovering on the edge of the crisis and trying to radiate cheerfulness. Martha Lane Fox was fortunate that her parents, her boyfriend, her brother, her aunts, all did the hard work of figuring out how best to give her the right medical care. She is clear that she only survived the initial accident and the many complications that followed because of this really vital support from her family, and, crucially, because she had money from starting an internet business, Lastminute.com, and was able to pay the inevitable costs that come with a slow, difficult recovery – additional private nursing, extra physiotherapy, someone to help with all the unexpected paperwork that comes with life being turned upside down.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the crash, a group of us climbed Britain’s highest mountain peaks to raise money for various charities, including Day one traumaan organisation dedicated to building support networks for people who have suffered similar catastrophic accidents but have fewer resources and fewer people to call on for help. We climbed Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa) in sunshine in May and Scafell Pike a few weeks later in much slipperier, mistier conditions – a major challenge for someone who has had 47 operations to put his body back together. This Sunday we hope reach the summit of Ben Nevis.
Day One Trauma was inspired by Peter Giannoudis, an orthopaedic trauma surgeon, who realised through his work at Leeds General Hospital that medical advances meant more people were surviving previously unsurvivable injuries, but their wider, non-clinical needs were not being met by the NHS. The charity, which launched nationally in 2021, provides practical, financial, legal and emotional support to patients and their families, offering a patchwork of different services to help people rebuild their lives.
The charity understands the support people need after catastrophic accidents. It has an emergency fund for families with limited resources to help cover the costs incurred during their relative’s hospital stay, and offers family therapy to help people come to terms with how their lives can be unimaginably changed. It also has peer support volunteers – people who have experienced similar trauma and who have a greater understanding of the long-term impact catastrophic injuries can have; these people can offer empathy rather than sympathy, and can discuss the implications of various complex clinical procedures.
We did our best. Sometimes the visits were oddly cheerful. Martha says she was so out of sorts at first from the morphine and other painkillers that she had only a vague sense of how badly she was hurt. Most of us were in our early 30s; we alternated our encounters with her over drinks in a bar, or hanging out in a series of high-dependency hospital rooms as she lay flat on her back with a scary metal cage protruding from her flesh—the pelvic fixator that held her broken bones in place. Sometimes it was harder to stay cheerful; conversation (to the hum of a gently undulating anti-bedsore mattress) jumped between discussing a wedding she couldn’t attend and her worry that she might die from an operation scheduled for the next day.
Lucy Nickson, CEO of Day One Trauma Support, told me that visitors shouldn’t worry too much about not knowing what to say. “Little things matter. It could be helping with mascara or arranging for a beloved pet to be groomed. It’s about being present and listening, rather than looking too far ahead and promising they’ll recover.” Two decades later, Martha says she appreciates anything that wards off loneliness and isolation, even hilariously inappropriate pajamas.