At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.
PART 2 — ELEVEN YEARS
People hear that I walked again and they hear a miracle. It was not one and I am very careful about how I say it now, because there are people reading this for whom it will not happen and I am not going to be another person selling them something.
My injury was incomplete. That is a clinical word and it means some signal was still getting through, and roughly a third of people with what I had get some function back and two thirds do not, and which group you are in is decided in about eleven seconds on a road and not by anything you do afterward.
I got some back. It took four surgeries and eleven years.
I walk with a stick. On a bad week I am in a chair and I have never once pretended otherwise or hidden it, because the pretending is a thing that took me until about thirty-four to stop doing.
I did engineering, badly at first. I worked for a mobility equipment company for nine years and spent most of it being furious about how things were designed by people who had never sat in them.
In 2011 I started Vantry Mobility with two other people and a loan.
We make seating systems and manual chairs. There are sixty-one of us now. It is not a fortune and I am not a person with a helicopter, but I own a company and I have been on a clinical advisory panel for that hospital trust since 2019.
That is why I was at Corwen General that Tuesday. Not sentiment. A meeting about a procurement framework.
And in thirty years I had thought about Rye Colvin perhaps four times a year.
