When I shared my journey to a Fibromyalgia diagnosis, I mentioned that accidents, injuries and operations have all been suggested as possible triggers for Fibromyalgia. That got me thinking about my own history because, quite frankly, I have had rather a lot of accidents.
When I was younger, I was regularly described as an “accident waiting to happen”, and looking back at some of the things that have happened to me, I can see why. Obviously, the consequences of some of these accidents were no laughing matter. I have broken bones, injured my back more than once and needed several hours of surgery on my hand. But the circumstances surrounding some of them are, looking back, quite amusing.
I have no way of knowing whether one particular accident contributed to me developing Fibromyalgia, whether several played a part, or whether none of them did. What I do know is that they are all part of my story.
Starting Young
My accident-prone tendencies started fairly early.
Sports Day didn’t go to plan
The first accident I clearly remember happened when I was about six. It was Sports Day at school, and for some reason I decided the sensible thing to do was run to school so I could get warmed up beforehand.
I got about a quarter of the way there before falling over and badly cutting my knee. Mum continued walking me to school, but when we arrived they took one look at my knee and suggested that perhaps a trip to the doctor would be a better idea than taking part in Sports Day.
One bus ride later, I was at the doctor’s having the cut closed with butterfly stitches. Thankfully, these were the little plaster-strip type rather than stitches involving needles. So that was my Sports Day over before it had even started.
Rather ironic really. I injured myself while warming up for an event that was supposed to involve running around without injuring myself.
Face first in the playground
The other school accident I remember happened a year or two later. There was a hill leading up into the playground and I was running up it with a friend behind me. I fell over, she fell on top of me, and I managed to cut my forehead, nose and chin.
Apparently nobody thought to take photographic evidence of how attractive I looked afterwards!
I am sure there were plenty of other ordinary childhood bumps, bruises and grazes. We spent a lot of time playing outside, so they came with the territory.
The time my coat tried to hang me
I was probably about nine or ten when I was playing in my next-door neighbour’s garden with some friends. We were climbing a tree and, as it wasn’t particularly tall, falling out of it probably wouldn’t have been a major accident.
Except I didn’t fall to the ground. I slipped and lost my footing, but my hood caught on a branch and the collar of my coat started pulling into my throat.
Looking back now, with the benefit of calm adult logic, I probably should have tried undoing the zip and sliding out of the coat. That was not the solution that occurred to a panicking nine or ten-year-old Susan. Instead, I rasped at my friends to go and get one of their parents.
Thankfully, I think it was their dad who came out very quickly and rescued me. Of all my childhood accidents, that was definitely one of the more frightening ones.
Causing a splash
We also had a pond in our garden, although “pond” makes it sound considerably grander than it was. It was actually an old bathtub sunk into the ground, surrounded by bricks and plants.
I can’t remember exactly how I ended up in it. I may have slipped, or I may have been pushed. Knowing childhood, either is entirely possible.
Falling into the water wasn’t particularly serious. The problem was that, on the way down, I caught the top of my ear on the brick surround and gashed it open. I remember there being quite a lot of blood and being mopped up afterwards.
Even now, if I run my finger across the flat section at the top of that ear, I can still feel the seam where it split open.
A seesaw drop
While on Guide camp one year, probably aged about eleven, I was on a seesaw with one of the other girls. After having fun, we needed to get off. At this point, I think the laws of gravity were forgotten.
When she was at the bottom, she got straight off. And I mean straight off, not got off and held her side to allow mine to gradually lower. This resulted in me crashing down and head-butting the handlebar, which gave me a nosebleed.
I distinctly remember that it was spaghetti bolognese for dinner that night. It is pretty much a universal rule of childhood that spaghetti is eaten by sucking up the strands. Well, with my nose packed, that wasn’t going to happen for me that evening, so I reluctantly resorted to cutting it up with a knife and fork.
My Accidents Hit the Big League
There were various little twisted ankles and similar incidents as I got older, but nothing especially memorable. Then, at eighteen, my accidents moved into a completely different league.
I was helping on a Brownie pack holiday and, on the first day, we were playing rounders. I hit the ball and started running towards first base when I must have caught a divot or uneven section of grass. I hurt my knee, but initially assumed I had just twisted it.
That assumption didn’t last very long. My knee swelled until it looked almost like a football. One of the other Brownie leaders was a doctor, and she took one look at it and said I needed to go to hospital.
At hospital, they used a needle to drain a considerable amount of fluid from my knee before putting my leg in plaster. I am not good with needles, so that part wasn’t particularly enjoyable.
I ended up with my leg immobilised from high up right down towards my foot and was sent back to the Brownie holiday for the night. This is where things became slightly ridiculous.
I have heard it is supposed to be lucky, but we were sitting around the campfire, me with my leg propped up, when a bird flying above decided I would make a perfectly acceptable toilet. Believe me, I didn’t feel particularly lucky at that moment.
The Brownies were sleeping downstairs in the main hall, while the adults were in a room reached by a tiny spiral staircase. So first they had to work out how to get Susan, complete with crutches and an enormous plaster cast, up a spiral staircase.
Once they achieved that, everybody attempted to sleep. I didn’t realise until later that every time I turned over in bed, my plaster cast clunked loudly against the floor. I slept quite happily. The other adults apparently did not.
Then at some point during the night I woke up needing the toilet, which meant the whole process of getting me down that staircase had to happen again. I loved those people dearly, although I seem to remember somebody later joking that they had considered dropping me down the stairs.
As you can imagine, I wasn’t really an awful lot of help anymore, so my pack holiday that year ended with a ride home the next day. Well, not home. My parents were on holiday, so I spent the first night at a friend’s house before deciding I would brave my own company.
A few days later, I had another X-ray closer to home and discovered the injury was more complicated than we had initially realised. I had always been fairly active and did a lot of dancing, so my leg muscles were strong. Rather than the injury simply pulling or straining something, a section of bone had actually been pulled away.
I needed an operation to repair it and ended up with two screws in my knee.
So much for a simple game of rounders.
The Car Crash I Wasn’t Supposed to Be In
My next major accident happened for a reason that was completely typical of me.
It was the week after Princess Diana died in 1997. I had been working at a different branch from usual and was driving home when I suddenly wondered whether the office where I normally worked had lowered its flag as a mark of respect.
There was absolutely no reason I needed to know this, but curiosity got the better of me, so I made a small detour to drive past and look. The flag had indeed been lowered, so with that mystery solved, I continued on my journey.
Not much further along, I stopped at some traffic lights. I heard the squeal of tyres behind me and a small van crashed into the back of my car.
The impact was considerable enough to write the car off. The mechanism that held my seat in position broke, leaving it sliding around, and the car had been pushed forwards badly enough that the wheels were no longer sitting properly in the arches.
There was, however, one remarkably convenient thing about where it happened. I was directly outside a fire station.
The firefighters came out to help and actually needed a crowbar to open my car door and get me out. They checked me over and offered to get me to hospital, but my parents were away and I was worrying about what to do next. Because my normal office was just across the road, I thought I could go there and find a colleague who would take me.
Except there was nobody there who could.
So, while still in shock and increasingly sore, I made the not particularly sensible decision to walk to hospital.
With hindsight, I should obviously have accepted the firefighters’ help in the first place. Or at the very least walked back across the road and admitted that my wonderful plan hadn’t worked.
Thankfully, there were no broken bones, but I had extensive bruising and muscle pain, particularly around my back. I ended up being off work for roughly six weeks.
And all because I had wondered whether somebody had lowered a flag.
Run Over by a Wheelbarrow
Around the following year, the bishop in our area was retiring and there was a large event to mark it. Among the stalls and activities were various races, including one where vicars sat in wheelbarrows while teams from their churches pushed them along the track in relay.
Naturally, I joined our parish team.
I wasn’t one of the strongest people doing the main pushing. I did my little section, then handed over to somebody faster before running slightly ahead and encouraging everyone on.
Another team somehow came off course. Whether it was the wheelbarrow itself or the vicar’s feet hanging over the front, I have no idea. What I do know is that something suddenly slammed into the back of me and knocked me straight to the ground.
That one was genuinely frightening. The pain in my back was so severe that, for a while, I wondered whether I had actually broken it.
I ended up in an ambulance and was checked over at hospital. Once again, I was fortunate. Thankfully, I hadn’t damaged my spine. From memory, it was something like sprained ligaments around my back.
But really, how many people can say they have been run over by a vicar in a wheelbarrow?
Knocked Down While Standing Still
Somewhere around the same period came another accident that takes a certain amount of explaining. I managed to get knocked down by a car while standing still.
I wasn’t crossing the road. I wasn’t even standing in the road. I was on the paved forecourt outside a fast-food restaurant, looking through the window.
At the time I had a moped, and under the licence rules then I was able to ride one before I had passed my car test. That turned out to be rather fortunate because I still had my crash helmet on. I was also wearing steel toe-capped shoes for work.
A woman drove her car towards the building and somehow came far enough forwards to hit me. I think she may simply have misjudged how far the bonnet stuck out in front of her.
I was pushed towards the window and given quite a jolt, although thankfully I didn’t go through it. My feet also came frighteningly close to the wheels.
Considering I was wearing both a crash helmet and steel toe caps while being knocked down on a pavement, I couldn’t really have been dressed much better for an accident I had absolutely no reason to expect.
Again, nothing was broken, but the good old back muscles took their fair share of it. From memory, it was a week or more before I could walk comfortably again.
The Barbecue That Ended in Surgery
Things then settled down for quite a long time. I may even have started thinking I had grown out of being an accident waiting to happen.
Then came my hand.
I was at a friend’s house for a barbecue celebrating a special birthday. I had two glass bottles in my hand and was walking across some paving towards a few steps when I somehow tripped.
Falling happens incredibly quickly. At no point during those few seconds did my brain come up with the extremely useful instruction, “Susan, throw the glass bottles away.”
Instead, I instinctively put my hand out to stop myself falling while still holding one of them. The glass cut deeply into my hand.
I didn’t look at the injury myself, and I am very glad I didn’t. Other people who were there did, and apparently you could see structures inside my hand that you really don’t want to be able to see.
I went to hospital by ambulance. This happened on a Saturday, and I was eventually discharged around midnight but told to return at about six the following morning for surgery.
So I went back at six. And waited.
I hadn’t eaten since the previous day because I was waiting for an operation. I was nervous, emotional and completely out of control of what was happening. My bladder was every bit as nervous as the rest of me, and I could probably have completed a sponsored walk to and fro from the bathroom. I am somebody who prefers to have at least some idea what is going on, so waiting all day knowing I was going to surgery but not knowing when wasn’t particularly easy.
Eventually I went down at around three in the afternoon. They had expected the operation to take about two hours, but once the surgeons started they discovered more damage than expected. I had partially severed nerves and tendons affecting two of my fingers, and the operation lasted approximately four hours.
I was fortunate that they managed to repair it. I was also fortunate to get into theatre that day at all. Another patient ended up being sent home to return the next day, and I could very easily have been the one whose surgery was postponed.
An Accident Waiting to Happen
When I look back at these stories together, it isn’t difficult to see why people used to call me an accident waiting to happen.
I have fallen over, been fallen on, nearly hung myself from a tree, fallen into a pond, crashed down on a seesaw, broken my leg playing rounders, been rear-ended at traffic lights, run over by a wheelbarrow, knocked down while standing on a pavement and sliced open my hand with a glass bottle.
And those are just the incidents memorable enough to make the list.
There is also a certain irony to one thing I remember from school. Long before I broke my leg and discovered the reality of spending weeks on crutches, complete with horrible blisters on my palms, I used to see other children with a plaster cast on an arm or leg and think it looked quite cool.
My brain was apparently skipping over the rather important fact that to acquire the exciting plaster cast, you first had to break something.
I can confirm that there is nothing particularly cool about that part.
Did Any of These Accidents Play a Part in My Fibromyalgia?
This is the question I can’t answer.
The NHS lists serious injuries, such as a car accident, and major operations among the possible triggers for Fibromyalgia. At the same time, the exact cause of Fibromyalgia is still unknown, and some people develop it without any obvious trigger at all.
As well as all the accidents I have talked about here, I have also had operations that weren’t connected to accidents, such as having my tonsils removed. So there have been plenty of occasions over the years when my body has experienced some form of physical stress.
Was it breaking my leg at eighteen? The car crash? Repeated injuries to my back? The hand surgery? A combination of several things over the years? Or were none of them directly connected to my Fibromyalgia at all?
I simply don’t know, and realistically I don’t think I ever will.
What I do know is that all these accidents form part of the story of the body I had before Fibromyalgia and everything it had already been through. Looking back now, I can laugh about quite a few of them, particularly because some of the circumstances were so bizarre.
I am also very aware of how fortunate I was. Several of these accidents could quite easily have been far more serious.