15

Mark Ormrod (4)

‘How tall are you?’

The Sergeant asked

‘Six foot one’ I replied

‘Bollocks’ he retorted …

‘You are only as tall

As your rifle …’

‘The Great Leveller’ by Black Dog1

WHEN THE PHYSIO was at Birmingham, he watched Mark Ormrod come in, and worked carefully with the limbs the surgeons had left him with, and watched him be extubated. The physio recalled it for me very clearly, because this was Mark Ormrod, the unexpected survivor: the first, already something of a legend. He’d been among the group of physios who did the assessment of what Mark’s rehabilitation would look like, which involved asking Mark what he hoped to get out of the process. Mark had a list ready of the things he wanted to get back to, including running, and the physio remembered thinking what a pity: this patient will have to adjust his expectations of what his life will be from now on.

And then he paused. No, he won’t. Those of us who help him with rehabilitation will have to adjust our expectations of what we can deliver, for Mark and for everyone who comes back from the edge and gets all the way to Headley Court. Choose who you listen to, Mark would write later, and his physios chose to listen to him.

But Mark had made a tough choice. He’d been six foot one, fifteen stone of lean muscle, never fitter, and now, in his own words, he was a stumpy midget, rifle-tall, who couldn’t sit up in bed without help.2 That was what he learned first: sitting up in bed. Just that. Then, with days of preparation by his physio, getting from his bed into a wheelchair. He had finished his surgeries, but his three stumps were swollen and painful, and he had to try to shift himself on one arm without knocking them. Then sliding down a special board on to the chair. He used muscles to move himself along that he had never used before but that were all that were available to him, and it took an hour. So he and the physio practised over and over until he could do it quicker. One time, on a day when his physio wasn’t due, he decided he wanted to get into his chair. The chair was moved in close, and he began the shift. But he over-corrected his balance and started to slip. In the microseconds that passed as he started to fall, he realised that he couldn’t land on the floor because the damage to his stumps would mean unbearable pain and probably more surgery, so he grabbed the bars on the bedside and managed somehow to right himself and stay on the bed. Despair, pain and fear – proper fear, not proper in a soldier – but dread of such a small movement, not even a journey really. Waves of pain, sitting, crying but doing it again, until he got into the chair. And then the physio came and they practised some more, and soon Mark was bugging the nurses to let him go outside in the chair.

This meant letting his family see him get into his wheel-chair. It also meant going to the flat they were living in while he was in Birmingham and finding that the chair didn’t fit through any of the doorways, so the first time he visited he was trapped in the hallway, watching them make dinner for him, so pleased he was there at last, not noticing his anguish and then rushing over when they did. He spent the rest of the evening talking to them through the too-narrow door frames. By the time he next visited he had learned to use his gluteus muscles to extend his hips enough to shuffle along on his bottom, so with tremendous effort he could move around the flat out of his chair, on the floor and through the doorway. He managed to shuffle across the living-room carpet over to where the sofa was and sat leaning up against it on the floor, working out how to get up on to it. He was determined to get up there without help and to sleep there that night, and not back at the hospital. He got up on to it, but the effort it took to travel six feet across the room and lift his body weight up on to a sofa using his one good arm drained him completely. He remembers this being his lowest point since he begged a friend to finish him off in the bloody dust of Afghanistan.

Then his girlfriend sat down beside him and spoke of his achievements so far, how the physios were astounded at his progress, how they would have a life together, guiding Mark back up to a place from which he could move forward again. And then, a few days later, the prosthetics expert from Headley Court came to assess Mark’s stumps, followed quickly by a double amputee who briefed him on what it was like to have a state-of-the-art prosthetic fitted entirely for him, with microprocessors to control the hydraulics, and told him that the chances were he could live without a wheelchair in his life at all, just the legs. And Mark chose to believe him as he watched him walk out of his room on just the legs, walking well and firmly. Mark’s future: walking like that out of the room, six foot one again, walking out of all the rooms he wanted to, with no more sobbing on the floor or doorways he couldn’t get through.