Artistic True-Life
I have overcome adversity and picked up a paint brush...
Rachel Smith-Ruffle, 48, from Manchester
Laying in bed, I was bored out of my mind.
But being bedbound, with a pressure sore from my wheelchair meaning that I couldn’t move, I wasn’t going anywhere soon.
‘This is awful,’ I cried to my husband Ian, 53, as I tried to keep myself busy.
As I lay in bed staring at four walls all day, I’d never felt so low.
Considering all I’d been through, that was really saying something.
23 years earlier, aged 23, I was living and working as a teacher on Reunion Island when I decided to go for a swim with a friend in the Indian Ocean.
Whilst in the water, I was hit by a freak wave, pushed into a sandbank and broke my neck.
Rushed to a small hospital on the island, doctors initially feared I may die.
But eventually, I was flown 27 hours back to the UK via air ambulance and transferred to a specialist spinal hospital in the south of England.
There, I remained in hospital for nearly a year before coming round to be told that I had been paralysed from the neck down and would never be able to walk again.
It was heartbreaking. But as the months passed, I didn’t wallow.
Instead, with the use of my wheelchair, I never let my disability stop me.
I had a busy career after gaining my teaching degree and qualifying as an interpreter, travelled, learnt to drive and even got married and became a mother to my daughter, now aged 14 – all from what I call my ‘rolling throne’.
I was so bored and bedbound
But by January 2018, years of using my wheelchair meant I’d developed a pressure sore.
It meant I was bedbound, unable to get around in my wheelchair until it healed.
The only place I was going was back and forth to the hospital. Even then, I was carried out on a stretcher and transported via ambulance.
But the sore didn’t seem to be getting any better.
For the first time, I felt defeated by my injury.
And as someone used to a busy, full life and with a young daughter at home, being stuck in bed was far from easy.
‘Why don’t you try something creative?’ Ian suggested one day, as my boredom got the better of me.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
By now, I was feeling very low – lower than I’d ever been, even after my accident.
Unable to get out of bed and do the things I always had done, I was desperate for anything to take my mind off of how I was feeling.
I didn’t think I had a creative bone in my body, but when Ian bought me a set of watercolours and paint brushes, I just gave it a go.
