Ciara Greene
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ciara Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi Shankar, thanks for having me.
Sure. It was about three years ago and it was a rainy November night and it was dark and it was starting to rain and it was just a kind of cold, miserable night. And I was leaving work to go to my piano lesson and I was in a rush. So, you know, I rushed down the stairs and I got down to my bike and I realised I'd forgotten my helmet.
So I rushed back upstairs and all the way back up through this very large building and got my helmet, went back down. So then I was running late for my lessons.
I was cycling through Donnybrook, which is a kind of a busy road. And on that road, there's a lot of buses, there's a lot of cars, there's a lot of cyclists. And what there isn't on that part of the road is a bicycle lane. The bicycle lane had stopped earlier. So in fact, as I was cycling along, I was weaving around traffic and in around buses. So I was cycling on wet roads. It's going too fast.
And you can probably see where this is going because I skidded on the bike and I skidded right in front of a bus, which fortunately didn't hit me. But it was one of those e-bikes and electric bikes that has, you know, the electric power in it, which means it's very heavy and the down tube is really heavy. So as I fell, my leg got caught in the down tube. and snapped my leg in half.
It's like if you could imagine a little small bunch of twigs and then you snap those twigs. They don't snap cleanly. They snap with shards. And I had this very strange experience where I, you know, I've heard of this happening before, but I'd never experienced it where I didn't feel the pain straight away. I was lying on the ground and, you know, you get that moment of shock.
And I was lying on the ground and I tried to stand up and I couldn't stand up. And I didn't know why I couldn't stand up. And then I looked down and my shoe had come off somewhere. I don't know where it had gone. My shoe had come off, but my leg was dangling like a kind of like a stuffed sock. The bus driver came rushing out and he was like, are you okay?
And I was like, well, no, I think I broke my leg, but it still didn't hurt. And then it was only a little while later that the pain started to come in. The bus driver called 999. So we called the emergency services, but it took nearly an hour for the ambulance to get there because it was a very busy, wet evening. So they was snarled up in traffic.
This incredibly sharp, overwhelming, almost electric pain. And I suppose it's because it's nerve pain, essentially. It's the shards of the bone sawing against the nerve. I've never had the experience before where I would actually scream with pain, but not intend to. It was completely involuntary. I'd feel like screams were being drawn out of me against my will.
Just incredibly agonising, like electrifyingly sharp, overwhelming, blinding pain. You know in a hospital where they ask you, you know, how's the pain on a scale of 1 to 10? My previous 10 was now a 6 on the broken leg scale of 1 to 10.
I'm allergic to one of the most common anesthetic. So they said, we'll try ketamine. I'd never had ketamine before. And I'm sure if you're taking this for recreational purposes, that maybe it's a good time. If you're starting out in a happy state and you're comfortable and relaxed with friends, but if you're starting out in a state of fear and pain, It was terrifying.
It was a really, really terrifying experience. It felt like it lasted about a thousand years. It was... I, you know, had this incredibly vivid hallucinations and I, you know, came to believe at one point that, like, I had... I had ceased to exist, that I no longer existed. And I could feel not pain, but pressure, which obviously in retrospect was pressure on my leg as I tried to set it.
But it felt to me like I was being compressed through, I felt like I was a train being compressed through a train tunnel. And it was this really, really surreal and very frightening experience. And I've had a lot of
flashbacks to that experience since and then after all that it didn't work they tried to set my leg and they put it in plaster but it didn't work so then they said actually after all that we need to do surgery anyway I'm assuming there must have been a very lengthy period of rehab after this much work on your leg Ciara Yeah, so I mean, I couldn't walk at all for several months.
I was on crutches then afterwards for six months and there was very extensive physiotherapy and rehab and so on. It's three years later now and I do still have pain in my leg. You know, it's much, much better and I don't limp anymore. Mostly I can walk fine. But I used to dance and I used to do things that I can't do anymore. So, you know, it has had a lot of knock-on consequences in my life.
More than I think, I think previously I would have used the expression, you know, somebody breaking a leg. Oh, you might break a leg. And you think it's, you know, unpleasant, but not a huge deal. But it was quite life-altering in a lot of ways.
Yeah, so definitely the memories have stayed with me. I'll find myself kind of repeatedly thinking about parts of it. In terms of getting back on a bike, well, of course, I couldn't for a long time because physically I was totally unable to. I was in a wheelchair for a while and then I had you know, crutches for a long time.
And, you know, but then maybe six, seven months after the accident, I did get back on the bike. I just said, right, I'll do a short cycle from my house down to my parents' house, which is not, you know, maybe a few miles. It's not very far. And I did it and I was proud that I did it, but my heart was going... I just going like the clappers the whole time.
And I found that I couldn't release my, I had this death grip on the handlebars and I couldn't release my hands from the handlebars enough to turn right. So of course we drive in Ireland on the left-hand side of the road. So turning left is easy enough. You just stay on the side you are. Turning right involves crossing over the road. You have to indicate.
So I did it to prove to myself that I could do it. But it was such an anxiety provoking experience that I couldn't. I feel there is a thing with a lot of activities like cycling where you need to have a sort of illusion of invulnerability in order to do it. And that illusion was completely shattered. But I knew how vulnerable I was. And there was no getting around that.
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