Thought for today:
" When I was an 11-year -old boy who'd just had an horrific traffic accident in which my small body had been wrapped around the drive shaft of a large wagon that had run over me, the doctors told my parents that I'd be dead by the morning. I heard these words as I drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness and like the film star Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader in the film 'Reach for the Sky,' I recall thinking, 'Oh no I won't, Buster!' I remember actually living this scene in the hospital, two years before the release of the Douglas Bader film, so know that it isn't a false memory.
Then when I didn't die and had been left with a spinal injury that left me with no feeling beneath my waistline, the doctors told me that I'd never walk again.When these words were spoken, my heart sank. There was an orderly called Gwen who cleaned the wards of the old Batley Hospital and she both heard the dire medical prognostication of the consultant surgeon doing his rounds and saw my inevitable tears at receiving the news. When the consultant had left, she puffed up my pillow and gave me a humbug and said, 'Don't believe them lad. What do they know about it? They don't know everything there is to know!'
" When I was an 11-year -old boy who'd just had an horrific traffic accident in which my small body had been wrapped around the drive shaft of a large wagon that had run over me, the doctors told my parents that I'd be dead by the morning. I heard these words as I drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness and like the film star Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader in the film 'Reach for the Sky,' I recall thinking, 'Oh no I won't, Buster!' I remember actually living this scene in the hospital, two years before the release of the Douglas Bader film, so know that it isn't a false memory.
Then when I didn't die and had been left with a spinal injury that left me with no feeling beneath my waistline, the doctors told me that I'd never walk again.When these words were spoken, my heart sank. There was an orderly called Gwen who cleaned the wards of the old Batley Hospital and she both heard the dire medical prognostication of the consultant surgeon doing his rounds and saw my inevitable tears at receiving the news. When the consultant had left, she puffed up my pillow and gave me a humbug and said, 'Don't believe them lad. What do they know about it? They don't know everything there is to know!'
From that moment when western medicine offered me no hope of ever walking again, I became a disciple of eastern practices and disciplines that did. At the moment when I did not want to hear and believe what the hospital consultant was telling me, I instead opened my ears to the hospital orderly, Gwen, and believed what she said instead.
Details of how I regained my walking mobility can be be found on my website http://www.fordefables.co.uk/ but suffice it to say that I did manage to walk again some three years later.
While there were many things that were responsible for me being here today in the state I now find myself, it was the soothing words of a Welsh hospital orderly called Gwen who was my inspiration. It was she who taught me 'To reach for the sky' and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that she also taught Douglas Bader and the rest of our brave pilots during the Second World War to do the same!" William Forde: April 17th, 2013.
