An Aberdeen student has rebuilt her leg, her life and managed to complete her degree after a horror motorbike crash very nearly killed her just 18 months ago.
Isabel Hall, 22, originally from Suffolk but who has called Aberdeen home since she moved here to study in 2020, was struck by a car when she marginally overshot a junction on her way to Cruden Bay.
“I was about two feet over the line of the junction and my friends were beside me telling me to move or get off the bike and I'm trying to pull the bike backwards and I just couldn't do it. Almost immediately I was hit by a Saab at 50mph - two tons of metal, side-on T-boned at the junction, and I was shot about ten feet from the site of impact.
“People came running out of their vehicles and told me to sit down saying my leg was broken. I asked how they knew it was broken and they told me my femur was hanging out.
“I sat down and after a while I felt strange, like I didn't need to breathe anymore. I felt like I could go forever without taking a breath. And that's when I thought – ah, I don’t need to breathe anymore because my systems are shutting down. That means there's something really wrong here.”
Isabel was suffocating because she had broken eight ribs in the collision and they had shredded her lung which was collapsing from the inside out and filling up with blood.
She woke up in hospital three days later having been in a coma on a life support machine.
In addition to the broken ribs and lung, Isabel had shattered her femur, broken her tibia and fibula, and done irreparable damage to her quadricep, among many other complications.
She was told she was lucky to be alive but also that there was a good chance she was going to lose her leg.
However, a surgeon – Mr Stevenson at Woodend Hospital – said he thought he could save her leg.
A planned five-hour surgery turned into 11 and Isabel lost 50% of her blood volume.
“He said that as he opened me up, he realized that my femur had not just broken in half and come out of my leg but split lengthways up towards my hip socket and my knee had shattered like a jigsaw puzzle. So, as he was dismantling my leg, shards of bone were coming out and because I had stood on the leg as well, I ripped like a quarter of my quad and it was irreparable damage.”
Isabel survived and her leg was saved but a few days after the operation, worse was to come when she suffered a stroke.
“It was as a result of my multiple brain haemorrhages just from impact and brain swelling. It was one of the most intense, painful experiences of my life. I felt as if someone poured acid into my eyes, it had pooled in the centre of my brain and it was shooting down and stabbing me in the neck. I was just crying and screaming in the ward.
“When they told me I’d had a stroke I was in complete denial about it. I refused to accept it had happened. I think after you go through so much, you just can't take any more.”
While surviving the accident and surgery was no mean feat, the months of recovery proved to be the most challenging for Isabel who stayed with her partner and his parents while she recuperated. She says she spent days doing nothing, lacking motivation and worrying about the impact on her mental health.
“All I could really do was get up, sit around and be injured. There's only so much TV you can watch. There's only so many board games you can do. People really tried to engage me or get me to try to go outside but I just had no interest whatsoever.
“I was struggling to breathe for a lot of the time. I couldn't move around. I had no feeling or motion in my leg. For the first two months of recovery, I couldn't even get my toes to move at all. It was just limp, dead weight that caused me immense amount of pain. So I just chose to sit and wait for it to be over. I would sit and stare at the wall or at a TV that wasn’t switched on for hours. I thought I was losing my mind.”
While Isabel says there was no moment of grand realisation during her recovery, she admits that the first time her quadricep showed signs of life since the accident was inspirational.
“About two months in I was finally able to move my leg. I just managed to get my quad to twitch a tiny amount and that was all I needed. That was the proof that I was getting the movement back and that my leg was going to work again. I thought if I could get it to move a little bit, I could build on that. Once I had the ability to take things into my own hands and start training, that's when life really changed for me.”
Isabel says she then became “obsessed” with physio and as she got stronger, she eventually progressed to Results Gym in Aberdeen where owner Lewis Thomson played a key role in helping her regain her fitness.
“It’s one of the few gyms in Aberdeen that's disabled accessible as it's entirely flat. Lewis said he’d even be willing to move the equipment if it meant I could get my wheelchair in there. In the end, I turned up on crutches just to do simple mobilisation exercises. Everyone was really lovely and helped move things for me so I could hobble around.
Whilst appreciating all the doctors did to save her life and save her leg, Isabel says she used the bleak prognosis she was given by limb specialists and neurologists as a motivation tool.
“I think a huge part of my recovery is my stubborn nature. I enjoyed proving the doctors wrong. I was told that I would never achieve normal function in my leg again but I decided that I wanted what was best for me. After everything I'd been through, after all the pain and reconstructive surgeries and drug withdrawal effects from all the opioids they had me on, I decided that I owed it to myself to ensure I get another chance to succeed. I wasn't going to let someone who had seen me for all of maybe ten minutes during a consultation take that away from me.
“They see you as a statistic. They don't see the progress you've made. They don't see how much you've improved and how quickly. They don't see your dedication or how much you're willing to sink into recovery.
“I think what you believe and what you want for yourself really should come first. Because if you really apply yourself, you will shock yourself and what you can achieve.”
Today, Isabel says she is stronger than she was before her accident and despite being minus a quarter of her quadricep has even managed to complete a mile run, when she was told that wouldn’t be possible.
As well as her physical rehabilitation, Isabel – who was in the last year of her Neuroscience degree at the University of Aberdeen – had to dig deep to manage her studies while waiting for her brain to repair itself from the stroke. Amazingly, she managed to return to the University at the start of term in September, less than five months after the accident.
“I turned up with a broken femur on crutches, barely able to walk between classes, but I made it.
“For me, my academic ability always meant a great deal to me. So to not know what my future career might look like - if I'd even be able to go back to university on time, if I'd be able to complete my degree or do my studies, it felt like my life was falling apart.
“So I did the only thing I could. I just did my best. I decided if I'm going to be in pain every day anyway, I may as well do something productive with it.
“There were many times where I would sit in a lecture, watch a lecture, write a lecture, and then I couldn’t even tell you what the title of the lecture was.”
The pressure of studying combined with the effects on her short-term memory brought on by the head trauma she’d experienced, meant Isabel eventually deferred for a few months to give herself breathing space but in November, almost exactly a year and a half to the day since her accident, she will walk – unaided across the stage to collect her degree in the University of Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Hall.
“I got a 2:1 and I was really shocked. I didn't believe that I'd be able to get that kind of great grade. After the brain damage and the stroke and the rehab, it was incredible.
“Every step of recovery feels like I'm getting a piece of my life back that I thought was dead forever. Because literally and figuratively, a piece of myself died that day. In a lot of ways, I'm not the same person I was before the accident. A lot of things have changed. My perspective has had a huge shift. But to prove to myself that I'm still as capable as I was before and to really not take no for an answer… I think once you've really done something that feels impossible, you'll never really doubt yourself again.”
Isabel is keen to tell her story to encourage anyone else who may find themselves in a similar situation not to give up.
“There is hope that you can have a normal life after something like this. Don't give up. It can feel awful. It can feel impossible. It can feel like there will never be a next step for you. But I promise it will get better.”