The first time I came into contact with AJM Healthcare, I was lying on my back in an East London hospital. It was fortunate I was even able to take their call. I’d largely lost the use of my hands, and if the phone hadn’t been left resting on my chest, I wouldn’t have been able to answer.
Also, I wasn’t feeling great. In the early stages of coming to terms with the fact I was paralysed, I had just been informed that the doctors wanted to drill a hole directly into my guts, inserting a plastic tube to drain away my urine, effectively making my penis redundant. It was proving quite a lot to take in.
Nonetheless, I answered.
The person on the other end said they were calling from my local wheelchair service. I sort of registered this was important. By this point, I’d started to get my head around the fact I was never going to walk again. Wheelchairs were going to be a big part of my life. But given I wasn’t going to be discharged for at least six months, I figured the local wheelchair service could wait until I was a bit more up for the conversation. I apologised, probably somewhat incoherently, and said I wasn’t able to talk right then. I assumed they would understand it wasn’t a good time, and call back later.
I assumed wrong.
A month or so went by. My mum was down from Merseyside, staying in my old flat in Walthamstow, while I remained in hospital. (I never saw that flat again. The stairs made it just another inaccessible location for me, my former home part of a cut-off world.) She checked the post and found a letter from AJM Healthcare’s Waltham Forest wheelchair service. It explained that because I had failed to engage when they called, I had been removed from the waiting list for wheelchairs.
Just to spell that out: I was in hospital, paralysed. I could not leave hospital until I had a wheelchair. The local wheelchair service notified me that I wouldn’t be getting a wheelchair by writing to my home address, which I could not reach, because I was in a hospital. Without a wheelchair.
So began my involvement with Britain’s wheelchair services.
The rock climbing accident that left me paralysed from the collarbones down happened in June 2023. It took a lot away from me. Continence (both kinds), sexual function, the ability to wash, dress and feed myself, and basically anything that requires the proper use of hands (I’m writing this using voice dictation). And yes, most obviously, it also took away my ability to walk.
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But it also gave me some new things. Like a sudden introduction to being dependent on bureaucratic entities, to whom you are just another annoying statistic, clogging up the phone lines.
Before the accident, I was a very fit and healthy 36-year-old man, in gainful employment as a university lecturer. I owned my own home, drove my own car, and was happily cruising along in a world that made life easy for me.
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