This is my story, but it's also my family's story. I've just turned 40 and I'm starting to look back on my life. At the age of 21 I had, what a lot of people would say was a horrific accident which left me with a disability for the rest of my life. But I think we need to go a little bit further back than that. The other main character in this story is my wife and I met her about six to nine months earlier.

So it was Boxing Day 2004, I woke to the news that a tsunami had hit Thailand. I had just returned from travelling and I had been to a lot of the places affected.

Watching the devastating footage on the TV I just wanted to get out there and help. Turns out that in a disaster situation the last thing they need is an inexperienced unqualified unskilled 20 year old. So I looked for other ways that I could get into helping somewhere and I came across the VSO Global Exchange Programmme, a programme for people aged from 18 to 25 to help them get into volunteer work, so the next time there's a disaster they may be a little bit more useful.

When I got to the VSO meeting point I found out I was going to Kazakhstan. I didn't know anything about Kazakhstan but I wanted to get involved. Ironically looking back on it, that program was focusing on disability. The very last person to walk in the room, late! (It should have given me a bit of an inkling of how life would be with her in it). was the girl that I would end up spending the rest of my life with. Anyway, we went on the trip. The first rule was obviously no couples. We broke that one fairly quickly, we became a couple and it worked out in the end. We are still together with two kids.

After our trip to Kazakhstan I ended up living in South Wales driving to London every weekend to see Melita. Just before Christmas I was asked to join another Global Exchange team in Northern India.

I had been there a total of two weeks. I was supposed to be there for three months. I had Christmas and New Year there which was an amazing experience. On 4th January it all took a bit of a turn. It was in the morning and we were staying in an ashram, which was a bit like an orphanage. It provided schooling and various different things for local children up and down the mountainside. This morning the kids were out playing volleyball. I ran out to join in, the ball came to me and a little bit too keen, a little bit too eager, I hit it and it flew off the side of the mountain. I say off the side of the mountain, it was a tiered complex, so it went down to the roadside, bounced on the road then out of sight. I ran down the two or three tiers to the roadside, kind of without looking, I did see the ball as I was running towards the edge of the road. It was further down the slope stopped by trees and in my moronic 21 year old head I just thought yeah I can get that, so I jumped and I surfed down the shingle. I'm still convinced to this day that I looked damn cool doing it but no one saw. What I saw however was a cliff coming up. As I was leaning forwards to look for the ball I could see that there was a road cut out and I was heading straight for the edge. There was a bit of a shrub that I thought I could reach so as I lent forward to grab it, as I did, I saw a bit more over the edge and I could see the road below. Again I don't know why but I thought I could do it, so I went for it. I didn't try to get the bush, instead I pushed myself off and I jumped. Well, I slid for about 20 meters and dropped for about 25 meters. I landed at the bottom in a heap with the shingle and rocks falling down on top of me. I immediately knew something was wrong. No one could see me because I was at the bottom of the cliffs so I knew I had to walk across the road. I stood up and took three steps across the road. Each time my right leg took my weight it was excruciatingly painful. It felt like a pepper grinder inside my ankle, with sharp shards of bone roaming around.

I needed help. But I was quite a long way down so I started shouting. I was in quite a lot of pain so the words that came out weren't the most polite shall we say. My volunteer team leader came down. No, forget that, the first person to arrive was another volunteer that I'd only known for two weeks. Two weeks was long enough to know they were not the right person to help. I knew that once they realised the full extent of my injuries they would panic and I needed cool calm assertive direction. I sent them back up to get our team leader.

My team leader got to me soon after that, “Mike they don't speak a lot of English but they understand those words”. So I quickly altered my language, but still I was in a lot of pain. My team leader got everyone together and they got the local shaman. My team leader thought that I was putting it on a little bit. He was saying things along the lines of come on Mike you're making a big deal now. This is getting serious to which I replied I know, it hurts (possibly reverting back to slightly more colourful language). I've done something bad. He and the shaman tried to get my boot off and I tried to tell them no, I said no just get me to a hospital the boot is doing its job. It's keeping everything together. There was no blood, nothing came through the skin, but I could tell. They persisted and took the boot off which hurt a lot as soon as they did a lump the size of a tennis ball turned blue on the side of my ankle.

Eventually they organised a four-wheel drive to pick me up and take me to the local hospital to see what was wrong. Now that sounds simple enough, but remember we're up in the foothills of the Himalayas so that quick trip was eight hours and hindered slightly by the fact that there had been an earthquake recently and some of the roads were still being cleared. I remember sitting waiting for what seemed like hours for a digger to literally clear the path in front of us. Unfortunately it was a bit of an overcast day, Otherwise I could have had an air ambulance out there. That might have made things a little bit easier to stomach but now I was in the back of the 4 wheel drive with my leg flopping around on every bump. It was then I learnt I've got a different relationship with pain to most people. See when I'm in pain I laugh. I giggle and tell jokes. So we spent that eight hour journey down the mountainside coming up with all sorts of puns like I've had a cracking time and really smashed it this time. and that did pass the time but what it meant was that by the time we got to the hospital myself, my team leader and my local counterpart were hysterically laughing and they really didn't think that it was as serious as I had made out. We got to the hospital. which was a bit of an eye opener.

So if I can describe the first hospital that I went into. It felt like a church hall that kind of size. No Pillars or pews, obviously, with curtained off bays with just moveable curtain trolleys it felt like a bit of a field hospital. Blood splattered on the curtains, people moaning crying all behind these screens. I couldn't see any of the other patients but I could hear them. I was wheeled to one of the bays and onto a bed and the doctor came in. I'm gonna have to describe him as well. This guy must have been about five foot five. He was walking with a crutch. He was wearing trainers and jeans. I remember those baggy jeans and something like Nike Airs for trainers. He had a white coat on but that was splattered with blood big wide gold rim glasses again splattered with blood. Which didn't instill a lot of confidence in him or the hospital.

They took me for an x-ray. After the x-ray the surgeon's tone changed dramatically, my team leader, my counterpart and I were still laughing, still joking. I was still in a lot of pain. As I said, it seems like that's the way I deal with it. So he came in and immediately told us to stop laughing. This is very serious and could end up being a permanent disability. To which I burst out laughing, my team leader and counterpart were not, the gravity of the situation had sunk in immediately, they were not laughing.

The injury was so severe that it needed to be operated on immediately to restore the blood supply to my foot. For those who know the bones of the ankle there's a bone called the talus, in layman's terms it's a bit like a ball surrounded by two sockets one on the end of the leg, one on the foot. It's not got very much in the way of blood supply. Bones usually receive their blood supply through the muscle attachments, but this has no muscle attachments. I had managed to smash my talus into twelve pieces.

The surgeon explained that it was important to get me into surgery straight away to do something to try and fix this. I was in a strange country with no family around me. The only people that were with me I'd only known for two weeks. The main thing that I thought about the whole time was my asthma. From when I first fell I knew that if I panicked being up in the remote mountains the panic could bring on an asthma attack and that's what would get me.t=The injury hurt like hell but It wasn't going to kill me. All I could do was stay calm. Now the surgeon also felt that my asthma was a serious complication, so they didn't want to give me the usual anesthetic and send me to sleep. He wanted to keep me awake, so they could monitor my breathing. They decided to go for an epidural. Now at this point I didn't mind, I don't like needles, but in my back I wouldn't be able to see it. If it took the pain away, I was willing to do it.

They sat me up on the bed and went behind me with the needle. uUnfortunately I did see it and it was big. I felt the needle going to the base of my spine the first time and I felt it come out. I heard a tutting, it was quite clear He had missed his mark. He went in for the second try and out again quite clearly again, He had missed his mark for the second time, third time lucky!

Sat on the operating table waiting for the epidural to take its full effect, gave me a chance to look around the room. Again, I think I need to describe it for you. You see there was quite clearly renovation work going on. In the corner of the room, I remember quite distinctly that there were piles and rubble on one side and up on the ceiling two or three of the square polystyrene tiles were down. The surgeon started the procedure, the epidural had worked so I couldn't really feel anything on my leg, just a little bit of tugging as they would try to open up the gap between my ankle. At one point I couldn't understand them, but it's quite clear that they needed a bit more tension on it. So one was holding me under my arms from my head end, the other pulling on my foot. Still they couldn't get enough force, they turned around and looked in the corner of a room with the builders tools and they grabbed a great big dirty drill, plugged in the long cord and drilled a hole through my ankle bone. They left the drill bit sticking out on either side, one hand either side of my ankle and the anaesthetist up at my head holding under my shoulders. pulled and pulled until they got the space they needed.

I'm not sure how long the surgery was. It seemed like a long time and it was definitely long enough for the effects of the epidural to start to wear off. I was beginning to become uncomfortable, and I was losing the ability to keep my composure. If I'm perfectly honest, the state of the room and my situation were all starting to get too much.

Just at that point, that was it, surgery over. I was being wheeled out and I heard the surgeon say to my team leader. “Oh, I'm sorry even for me. That's a bad job. I don't think I've done well”. Great, just what I wanted to hear. Fortunately, the next morning the surgeon took some X-rays. He had a look at it and he retracted the earlier statement of the previous evening. He said he did quite a good job. He was proud of what he did. He managed to get all the little pieces back in the right spot. He had done all he could do for me. We needed to drive another 8 hours to Delhi to go to a hospital there. So whilst waiting for the transfer to Delhi and I say transfer loosely, it was a minivan by minivan I mean a mini van Suzuki sumo Swift that kind of thing, kitted out as a bit of an ambulance and remember I'm six foot five so it wasn't that comfortable. They were brewing a kettle the whole time, they love their chai. I have a vivid memory of boiling water on my arm periodically during that trip. Anyway before the transfer came. I had a little room to myself; It was an ensuite, but had no doors. It was very basic should we say, there's no frills, nothing fancy, we were still quite out in the sticks. My counterpart was actually from this village so his family came to visit. His mum and his two sisters bought me tiffins with home cooked food. My team leader was still there nipping in and out making phone calls. I'm sure there was a hive of activity and worry and concern and bricking it from their side. I was there for a couple of days. On the first day when my counterpart's family were all there. A porter or a nurse passed the door. I called them in as I needed to pee, “oh yeah no problem,” down went the sheets he pulled down my boxes, got my tackle out and popped it in a little pot “there you go” in front of everyone. Nooope; I pulled my shorts up and I got my team leader on one side, counterpart on the other side. Each had me under an arm and they helped me towards the opening for the ensuite. I got into the doorway and on one leg with a hand on the doorframe and a hand on the sink. I said I'm okay, leave me here. I swung myself in towards the toilet. The sink fell off the wall, water spraying up at the ceiling. It was honestly like something out of a Carry On film.

I'm getting tied up with this part of the story.. There is more to tell, there is a lot more to that story and it all culminates in me getting back to the UK. I think I arrived at the hospital at about nine o'clock in the morning on my dad's birthday, 7th January. I phoned him from the airport, just to make sure he'd be there when I got back and make sure there was a doctor with the biggest f****** needle they had. I just wanted to be knocked out for a week. I didn't want to feel anything anymore. I'd held it together too long. Now at this point I hung up and I broke down into tears. Only I hadn't hung up the phone. It is six o'clock in the morning or whatever time it was on the morning of my dad's birthday. He heard his 21 year old son breakdown. I will never forgive myself for that. However when he saw me next I was hopping out of the ambulance outside the hospital in London. I was hopping out of the wheelchair singing Happy Birthday. They didn't quite know what to think and when the doctors asked me what medication I was on because it was obviously working, I pointed at the doctor that had flown with me. “He gave me these lovely pills on the plane”. He was at the back of the room and as I looked over he was gesturing to me to shut up should we say, so we never knew what those pills were but they did the job. Anyway That's a bit of the background of how I got my disability.

Oh, so in the end I had my right leg amputated below the knee. This was my decision. I was told the only alternative was to have a fusion and this would result in very restricted mobility. Arthritis from day one and the constant possibility of breaking it if I step two heavily on the toe. So I went home and Googled cut leg off, eventually getting round to the word amputation and I found a website called extremity games. It was full of young people like me doing all the stupid stuff I was scared I would never be able to do again.

I decided that these people on this website were young, fit and they had a positive attitude. I was young, I was fit, this was my positive attitude. So I went for it and I can honestly say never really looked back. I had my treatment and recovery in London. I was in and out of hospital within five weeks. I don't claim that to be my accomplishment. I claim that to be solely in the hands of the nurses and therapists in the Queen Mary's Hospital they were fantastic. They didn’t slow me down, they had a schedule they wanted to work to but I wanted to go quicker and they let me. I think if they had made me take the 3 months that was recommended, I may have had some mental health issues.

Everyone around me was concerned that I hadn't, and wasn't dealing with the enormity of what I was going through. It wasn't that I was ignoring these concerns, I was just focused on getting back to my life. I told myself that at the first sign that I was struggling I would get help. Fortunately this never came about.

At one point they gave me a leg a little bit too soon (possibly due to my impatience), they gave it to me for half an hour. I kept that leg on all flipping afternoon. I wasn't getting rid of it. I was up, I was walking. Unfortunately when I took that leg off, blood poured out of the socket, I'd pushed my bone through the end of my stump. It was still a bit numb from surgery so I didn't really feel it. Anyway, that set me back a week or two, but then I was back on it and within five weeks I was up and I was out.

Sat at the dinner table at my now wife's house with her parents in London. My now father-in-law had a friend who had just bought a canal boat. We were talking about what to do with the accident insurance money They paid out and it was enough to buy a canal boat so that was it, the next chapter of our story was to be buying a canal boat and living in London

Before having my surgery and when the only option I was given was a three-year programme to fuse the ankle I'd looked around at what I could do in those three years, being that I would have been wheelchair bound. One thing I could do was forward myself by going to university. I hadn't done this yet. I left school with just my GCSE which weren't great. So, I thought this would be a good chance to get some qualifications under my belt in the area of youth work which is what I had been doing when I was volunteering. I enrolled in the George Williams YMCA College Cannington town studying informal and community education. We moved on to the canal boat. I was going to college, Melita was at university studying broadcast production. That was our life for a bit, we both had jobs. We worked in a video shop in Kensal Rise. I also worked helping a friend of ours who also lived on a canal boat to renovate his flat. I had a van and was driving across the country picking up building supplies from reclaimed flooring to radiators, all sorts of stuff. Those years went by quickly. I completed two years of my three-year course and got a foundation degree. I was also asked if I'd like to partake in any sports for the Paralympics. I remember going along to an open day to try out different sports. Well, I had actually had one of the biggest nights out of my life the night before and I was hanging, but I got accepted into pistol shooting and rowing. I opted for rowing because I thought it would help get me in shape. I've always been a bit scrawny. Anyway, I was rowing for six months out of Poplar in London and I decided it wasn't for me. It was taking up a lot of my time - six days a week, twice a day training, watching what I ate,, not drinking anything alcoholic. I had basically given my life up for this sport that I had never had an interest in before my accident and I had only just got my life back after my accident so I decided to focus on my life and enjoy myself, so that's what I did. I got my foundation degree. We enjoyed our lives in London, went to lots of parties and experienced London life. Then it came time to leave London. We'd made lots of friends and had lots of good times on the canal boat but we decided that we might want to start a family and after thinking where we could take the boat, Wales was an option, Midlands etc …but we decided on Guernsey.

There was one thing I needed to do before we left and that was making it official, asking Melita to marry me. Not that I'm that traditional. Neither is Melita nor her family, but I wanted to take Melita’s dad out and ask for his permission. I did this and obviously his answer was, I'm asking the wrong person and I should find out what his daughter thought, but he was happy with me. So that's it. I asked Melita to marry me. There's an article above from BuzzFeed that you can read about the engagement ring. It's a bit of a special one, but I'll let you read that in the other article. So we packed up our van and our dog and cat and we moved back to Guernsey to start our island life together.

The first house we moved into was a small house on a clos, perfect for the two of us and our dog and cat. Friends of ours lived in the same closm We had great fun going between our houses and enjoying life on the island. I got a job, ironically working to help people with disabilities find jobs and Melita found possibly one of the only jobs she could do with her skill set on the island, which is working for local TV news. We were ambitious and we decided to sell our perfect little house to buy one that was less than perfect, but slightly bigger. We spent a few years renovating this house and I actually managed to get it completed three days before the birth of our first son. Little Michael came along on the 14th of October and I finished the utility room on the 11th. Neither of us had well paying jobs and the issue of childcare started to weigh heavily. We decided that it was much cheaper to get a loan and buy a paper round. That way I could take the kids with me to work in the morning, deliver the papers then have the whole day with them. I was there for their first words, the first steps, everything.

After a few years of doing this I remember sitting in my friend's kitchen, the same friend who we had lived on the clos with years ago. He'd now moved to a house on the west coast. I remember saying to him. I wish I was like you. I wish I had a trade, look at you now you're doing so well. He had just started up his own business. He turned to me and said have you ever thought about gardening I laughed, but it turned out that his friend was selling a gardening business to move to Australia and had all the employees, all the gardening contracts. It was all set up, just needed someone to take it on. So we took the plunge again. At the same time as this there was a house four doors down from my friend on the west coast that needed renovating. Having done a good job on our first house, we thought we could do this. So we thought, in for a penny in for a pound, new business, new house. We went for it although the house was in such poor condition, we couldn't get a mortgage. So it was three years of private loans and not knowing whether or not we would be able to get a mortgage at the end of renovating this house. It all worked out in the end. We ended up with a gardening business that I could try and grow and the house finished within our price range which was far beyond anything we could have afforded if we had done it any other way. Things were good for about a year and then covid hit. The business took a hit and life was a bit of a struggle, but still it wasn't so bad.

My dad's been a massive inspiration to me. From how to live your life, how to bring up my kids, how to treat my wife, how to treat people around me, how to be a man. I won't go into it but he became unwell just as he retired. He had worked so hard his whole life to provide for me my mother and my sister and n later years for his retirement with my mother. He never got to enjoy this retirement. He was diagnosed two months after retiring and he was gone 18 months later. This came as a bit of a wake-up call for me. You hear of it time and time again that when people retire they don't get to enjoy their retirement, something happens, something gets in the way. I sat down with Melita, the kids were in bed, on Boxing Day I believe three years ago. We basically, after talking about it for a few hours, decided that we're gonna stick two fingers up at the world and enjoy our lives now with our children. By this point I'd spent four or five years running the business missing out on time with my kids coming home stressed and snapping at them for something that wasn't their fault. I just want to get back to that time when I spent every second of the day with them and enjoyed it. So we decided to get a sailboat and go off sailing. Now this was the beginning of that journey, of that chapter but it has taken a bit longer than we thought to get started.

It's been 3 years now since we decided to leave. We haven't left but we're close. We went and did a few courses. We took a holiday to Croatia where we hired a boat with a skipper and I got my day skipper qualification. We bought a boat, it was a 36ft Macwester, bilge. Keel ketch. We had a couple of good seasons on that boat sailing round the Channel Islands and then by some fluke we managed to get the boat we are on now. It's a long story and complicated and involves other people so I won't discuss it but we've managed to get this boat. She's a 43ft long Keel Blue Water ketch and we have spent the last year fitting her out, we're nearly done. Come the summer this year, June July by the latest we will be out there living Our Dream sailing the oceans following the wind wherever it takes us.